Kellogg Thinks Outside the Bowl at Meijer

Cereal is the focus of Kellogg Co., but the manufacturer was seeing sales decline as more consumers turned to other foods to start their day.“There was this unconscious migration happening in the cereal category," Kyle Ingram, group account director at The Integer Group, told the Institute. "People were eating less cereal, but they weren’t necessarily aware of it. They just had more options in the morning.”Kellogg enlisted the agency to fight that trend by making breakfast more exciting and encouraging consumers to consider cereal for other occasions such as afternoon or nighttime snacking."Nobody hates cereal, but sometimes people need to be reminded that cereal is an option and there are cool things you can do with it," Kellogg director of shopper marketing and multicultural commercialization Analia Benedetti told the Institute.The partners developed the "Stir It Up" versatility platform and reached out to Midwestern mass merchant Meijer for its first execution.“We have a really strong relationship with Meijer," Benedetti says. "We understand their shoppers. We saw an opportunity to remind our shoppers that we are there and that there are ways to enjoy cereal outside the bowl."The partners first activated the platform on April 17, offering Meijer shoppers who bought three participating Kellogg SKUs $3 off a fresh berry purchase. The incentive targeted two of Meijer's primary shopper groups: busy moms who flirt with heath and health-conscious shoppers who like local produce. The program coincided with the beginning of the Midwest's berry season to ensure shoppers had plenty of fruit choices. Meijer was so impressed with the program, they let Kellogg do something they'd never done before: put cereal in the highly trafficked front-of-store produce section.“The concept seems really simple, but it was the first time we did something like this," Meijer marketing director Renee Appert told the Institute. "Normally you’d have to trek to another area of store. They built us a really innovative [pallet] display that held the cereal and the fresh produce on top. Customers had really clean messaging and the solution.”Along with the account-specific pallet displays in the produce department, the incentive also got billing on endcap displays and in-line headers. Display ads on cooking-focused websites such as mrfood.com and foodnetwork.com supported. The program was deemed a massive success.“The week that we partnered with fruit directly was one of our best weeks ever in terms of sales, conversion, ROI, everything,” Ingram says.The campaign not only increased market share for Kellogg at Meijer, but was a great week for breakfast and berries overall, Appert said. The partners plan to run another version this fall with bananas instead of berries and Meijer has been using the promotion as an example of best practices when planning vendor programs for 2017, Appert says.“Kellogg’s is one of our best and most collaborative partners," she says. "We continually push each other to make each other stronger, to make each other more impactful to our customers.”Kellogg returned to Meijer on May 8 with a "Fresh Ideas for Breakfast" promotion that encouraged shoppers to blend cereal with fruit and yogurt to create a parfait. The two-week omnichannel campaign centered on in-store sampling of the recipe with supporting activity spanning endcap displays, geotargeted banner ads, a brand showcase within meijer.com, email blasts, Facebook updates and digital ads on newspaper websites. The displays used imagery of the snack in a mason jar against a blackboard background meant to give it a farmer's market vibe that Kellogg thought would resonate with Meijer customers.“It’s really trendy," Benedetti says. "It’s not hipster, but Millennial. We knew it was a winner.”While the brand is still running market mix analysis, Benedetti said that all the short-term key performance indicators were "very strong."Kellogg also is bringing the "Fresh Ideas for Breakfast" program to another region by partnering with Publix. The Florida-based supermarket operator is more conservative when it comes to co-op activity, so its version of the program was focused on digital activation and a feature in the retailer's June 18 coupon book that delivered offers for:A free quart of Dannon Co.'s yogurt with purchase of two Kellogg's Special K SKUs$2 off fresh fruit with purchase of two SKUs of Kellogg's Corn Flakes or Frosted Mini-WheatsA free six-pack of Dannon's Danimals smoothies with purchase of four boxes of Kellogg's Apple Jacks, Corn Pops or Fruit Loops$1 off a half-gallon of store-brand ice cream with purchase of two boxes of Kellogg's Pop-TartsAppert said Meijer is eager to receive similarly ambitious programs from its other brand partners."To establish the best partnership with a retailer, a vendor needs to think outside the box and bring what they’re best at, typically the product and their connection with consumers, and extend it to a total retail solution," she says. “Push our limitations. That’s what Kellogg did here. We’ve never done anything like this, but we decided to try it and it was a huge success.”

Kellogg Thinks Outside the Bowl at Meijer

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