Starcom Helps Kraft Heinz Adjust Strategy

Minneapolis — With the exponential rise of virtual storefronts, shoppers today have many choices on where to spend their dollars and what to spend them on. Further underscoring the highly competitive nature of today’s consumer package goods marketplace, Catalina reported that the top 100 CPG brands suffered a slight decline in sales over the past year despite growth in every major category in which the brands compete.“The brands that we think of as great names, the big brands that we all know and love, those brands are all challenged to [ask], ‘As people have more choices … how do you compete?’” said Lisa Bradner, Starcom’s senior vice president and head of commerce and shopper strategy, during the Shopper Marketing Conference & Expo in October. “How do you start to figure out what your story should be when there’s this proliferation of choice, of options and of retail outlets?”Kevin Green of The Kraft Heinz Co. joined Bradner to share how the partners have used digital engagement and data while rethinking their retail partnerships to drive innovation. “We understand at Kraft Heinz the balance between maintaining and growing brand relevancy has to happen by balancing both content and context,” Green said.Kraft Heinz has worked on enhancing its overall content strategy over the past several years. The manufacturer has accumulated 27,000 Kraft recipes and another 20,000 recipes consumers provided, resulting in 1 billion annual interactions. “And we know we’re on to something because 75% of our site visitors are the primary grocery shoppers for the household, and we know that they use our content while they are in-store to engage and enhance their overall experience,” Green added.However, Kraft Heinz’s content strategy isn’t just about distributing content it thinks is good. “It’s actually leveraging data,” Green said. “It’s leveraging real time to understand and inform and tell us what is the right content. … This is where we look through all different types of media channels to understand what our consumers are searching, what ingredients are they cooking with, how are they cooking [and] where are they cooking.”In order to inform their content, Kraft Heinz uses Google data, Webtrends and a proprietary tool dubbed “Looking Glass” that monitors conversations within social media. Leading up to Valentine’s Day, for example, the retailer gathered through its in-house tool that Philadelphia-cream-cheese-stuffed cupcakes were going to be a hit. Knowing this, the manufacturer distributed an email blast and spotlighted “Heart Surprise-Inside Cupcakes” in advance of the holiday.A good example of how the manufacturer has worked to reimagine its retail partnerships is its recent partnership with Albertsons and Pinterest for the “Pin That Twist” campaign, which leveraged the manufacturer’s national “Twist That Dish” campaign. Kraft Heinz asked fans of the retailer’s Facebook pages what they were cooking, what ingredients they were using and which of their favorite dishes would they like to see a twist on. The information gathered was used to create unique recipes that were spotlighted via promotional pins on Pinterest. “As consumers and shoppers were looking at this on Pinterest, they would click on the pin and it would take them right to the Albertsons’ local banner website … to a specific page that allowed them to see the recipe and a special offer,” Green said.Albertsons approached Kraft Heinz for another partnership surrounding an in-store event at a Jewel-Osco in Joliet, Illinois, with NASCAR driver Brian Scott in the summer of 2015. Approached one week before the event, Kraft Heinz knew they needed to use social media to get the word out. The manufacturer also knew that Scott had a substantial Twitter following and targeting one specific store or geography “wasn’t going to create the engagement that anyone really desired.”As a solution, Kraft Heinz worked with Periscope to stream the entire in-store event and shared it with Scott’s followers. “Yet another way to create engagement, connect with our shoppers and have the opportunity to engage our brand with their experience while in store,” Green said.

Starcom Helps Kraft Heinz Adjust Strategy

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