General Mills Mines Relevance

By Robert Wheatley

When marketers work to identify a higher purpose and thereby imbue their brand with greater meaning, a whole new world of opportunity unfolds to develop that ever-elusive relationship with consumers. The challenge: finding the sweet spot of relevance to the lifestyle concerns and passions of your best customers. Here’s an example of great thinking at work from our friends at General Mills.

My three and six-year old daughters like books. Every night the ritual at bedside involves two or three titles told with great flourish by my wife, Kristen or me. We routinely replenish the bookrack with new titles, given their daily appetite for stories. Equally we feel this is a good thing as parents to do and remain hopeful the devotion to reading will create a life-long interest in books.

Please note the importance of the children’s welfare to parents and doing things actively to support their development!!

Cheerios. Yes its cereal, and also finger food for the very young. Both daughters eat it dry as a snack. So Cheerios is in the consideration set for our kids. The goal of General Mills is to sell me more Cheerios, more often and over a longer period of time. Sure Cheerios can re-fresh their proposition with flavor and form line extensions. But this happens quite a lot in food land so while we take note of it, this is not working to dial up our general attitude towards the brand.

But wait!!!

Cheerios launches a contest to search out and identify new potential authors for children’s titles via a literacy program called “Spoonfuls of Stories.” Further the brand distributes 35 million paperback editions of selected books inside cereal boxes. Enter the parallel cause related layer – Cheerios to date has also donated $3 million to a nonprofit called First Book that provides books to low-income families.

Cheerios now intersects with my behavior as a parent to read to my kids on a daily basis. This act is important to me. The brand’s behavior aligns with mine in an area quite separate from diet but resting squarely in the zone of relevance. Now we have something powerful that ties the brand relationship together.

This is precisely what we mean by “higher purpose.” Engagement and the opportunity for a relationship must begin with the consumer granting permission. And this access is an outcome of brands that enable and support the keen aspirations of their users. This takes the brand relationship past commerce and into dialogue. Telling me about the natural ingredients in a cereal is one thing, but helping me with a key-parenting goal is entirely another. This is the intent of our own proprietary Trailblazer planning model – to uncover insights that help brands rise above “selling” and into mattering.

Bravo Cheerios….