Kellogg’s unlocks new consumption occasions for breakfast cereal
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Kellogg’s breakfast cereals have long held a consistent place in a consumer’s day: it’s the tasty, nutritious, convenient food quickly eaten in the morning before everyone rushes to work and school.
That consumption occasion disappeared during the pandemic. The brand had to find new avenues for growth.
Sanjib Bose, CMO of Kellogg’s Southeast Asia, knew they could not find insights by looking in the rearview mirror. They needed to understand consumer behavior in real time.
[aip_quote author=”Sanjib Bose, Chief Marketing Officer, Kellogg’s Southeast Asia”]We cannot take a reactive approach, we need to proactively predict what consumers are going to look for and lead the conversation.[/aip_quote]
Understanding shifting behavior in real time
The team already knew people were cooking at home. It’s a trend that’s been growing for two years.
But this wasn’t enough for them to decide where to play. What were consumers cooking, and why? In Southeast Asia, this differed from market to market. The team needed to understand these drivers, and get a detailed view of popular recipes.
Kellogg’s turned to Ai Palette to run a trendspotting project across four countries: Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
[aip_quote author=”Sanjib Bose, Chief Marketing Officer, Kellogg’s Southeast Asia”]We wanted to get better at this, go beyond just search and social listening.[/aip_quote]
Conducting consumer insight research in a multi-language region
In Southeast Asia, we don’t have one language, and consumers do not always use English to share online,” Sanjib explains.
Using Ai Palette to conduct market research, they were able to conduct the analysis in the languages consumers used day to day: Bahasa Melayu, Thai, Tagalog and English.
The project crunched 485 million data points across search, social media, recipe sites and forums to understand what consumers wanted from their home cooking.
In a pandemic, health had increased in priority, but taste remained important. A day where everyone worked and studied from home demanded recipes that were easy to prepare. But consumers were also looking for new and innovative recipes that gave them joy.
The project also identified the top 50 trending recipes in each country, prioritizing those that incorporated cereal.
“We discovered that consumers themselves have become innovative and have used cereal as an ingredient in creating new recipes for taste, crunch and ease of use,” Sanjib says. “This helped us zero in on meal occasions and recipes that we never thought would be our food connections.”
Repositioning cereal for new consumption occasions
With these new occasions unlocked, Kellogg’s was able to position their food in a novel way. They developed recipes intended for meal times and snacks that incorporated cereal, and launched a campaign that has been running for the last year on the brand’s social media channels.
“We saw a 2x increase in search, showing higher intent for the brand, and the campaign has driven incremental growth through higher product adoption,” says Sanjib.
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