P2PI LIVE: General Mills Evolves Digitally

Looking back a few years, KC Glaser said that coupons and promotions used to be an afterthought with General Mills' brands and their key stakeholders. “They'd come to us after they divvied out all their consumer dollars and say, ‘Hey, we should probably have some sort of coupons or promotions. What would you recommend that we do with X amount of dollars?” said Glaser, senior manager of loyalty & rewards at General Mills, during a Wednesday keynote at P2PI LIVE in Chicago. “Now we sit in a different place within the organization.”

Presenting alongside Bryan Leach, founder and CEO of rewards platform Ibotta, Glaser explained the evolution and reorganization that General Mills underwent in the last two years.

Glaser detailed how the CPG company started thinking about marketing in three different ways:

• Purpose marketing: Brand purpose and brand mission, but also a more general mission and purpose for the consumer.
• Performance marketing: Incenting the right person at the right time.
• Commerce marketing: Pulling the right levers to win with our retail partners.

One challenge General Mills has faced is the decline of print coupons. “The re-org gave us license to have some important conversations internally,” Glaser said. “And there are a lot of reasons why we are choosing to shift to digital.”

A second challenge the company faced was an inability to leverage promotions at one specific (and major) retailer. “I don't know if you've heard of Walmart. It's kind of an important one,” Glaser joked. “It has long been a retailer that we haven't been able to effectively impact from a promotions perspective.”

Enter Ibotta – and its consumer cash-back rewards app. “The big innovation was that [the app] was pay per sale, rather than pay per click or pay per print,” Leach said. “We call it performance marketing because you truly are only paying when the advertising works.”

Ibotta now has evolved beyond solely the app. “The last five years we've built out a network with multiple publishers that distribute our content, so you can reach 10 times as many people as you could with just the Ibotta application,” Leach said. “Most notably, we recently announced the launch of the first-ever item-level rewards program at Walmart, where we are the exclusive provider of that content.”

Today, Ibotta plays a significant role in General Mills’ overall promotions mix.

“There's a ton of reasons to shift to digital,” Glaser said. “Consumers are expecting digital-first experiences. … They're data-rich, and they allow us to learn, optimize and be more effective with the dollars that we have.

“And ultimately it's about incenting that right person to take the right action at the right time. And if we can learn what their behavior is, and if we can get a little predictive, if we can help nudge them in the right direction, and learn what they're doing after the fact, that's a really big deal.

“We now have the ability to influence at the digital shelf, which is a really big deal,” Glaser continued. “And it impacts our search rankings on Walmart.com. … And guess what? General Mills, pre-pandemic, about 3% of our sales were online, and within six months, it jumped to 13%, and it's not going to slow down anytime soon.”