Kraft’s Mission: 1-to-1 Marketing at Scale

Posted on by Patty Odell

An unprecedented shift is underway in marketing, all driven by a new consumer—specifically the Millennial consumer. The landscape is shifting fast due to how this group engages in retail and their adoption of digital and technology.

Deanie Elsner

“Millennials are unlike any consumer that has come before them,” Deanie Elsner, former CMO Kraft Foods, said yesterday at the ANA 2015 BAASH in Chicago. “They shop differently. They consume media differently. If you are not a brand they put on their body, you are not for them.”

Shopping trips are down for this group. Millennials are not paying attention. They have two-to-four devices open at the same time and marketers spending at the same level are getting less sales for dollars spent.

“If you’re spending in store where they are not shopping, your ROIs are going down,” she said.

For example, marketers launching new products have seen the path to purchase completely disrupted. This consumer is influenced differently.

Kraft attacks the problem with data, big data that it mines, cuts, overlays, adds to. It combines that data with spot-on content that it sends out through programmatic media buys. Its mission is one-to-one marketing at scale.

“Consumers left a trail of data that enabled us to get smarter,” she said. “You can now see real consumers, real behavior that can be incredibly effective. You have new cohorts, new media vehicles—Twitter, Facebook Amazon—and new retail channels. If you are not engaged in some way in e-commerce you are in big trouble with this (Millennial) consumer.”

Kraft terms this strategy, the “agile and addressable approach,” which gets the right message to the right person at the right time to drive the purchase. It is moving from broad based, demographically defined individuals, to reaching people 1-to-1 on scale.

“It is possible when you deliver messages in broad based, demographically defined media, a large portion of that audience doesn’t have any value for your brand,” she said. “We have to change the way we think. What you have in front of you is the explosion of data and enabling technology to deliver individual messages at scale.”

The three pillars of the agile and addressable approach are: Data, infrastructure and content.

1. Data Is a portal to real behaviors that drive break-thru insights. The portal of information where you get to see, engage and understand real consumer behaviors that gets you to competitive advantage insights.

“We haven’t gotten to see this before because in the past we used focus groups and surveys,” Elsner said. “Now you can see behaviors in real time. You can understand what happens when you put a message out. Kraft has an unprecedented data machine and we took the infrastructure and that data and used it as the engine of everything we did.”

Kraft has a real depth of first-party data to it overlays to make it all the richer. It talks to about 100 million consumers each day and—just through its recipes content—collects 34,000 different consumer attributes. The brand serves up 6.6 billion impressions every year, and collects data on every one of those impressions. Kraft also built social listening labs to look for trends and to react to consumers in real-time, on their terms.

“That is incredibly valuable,” she said.

2. Infrastructure Kraft built an infrastructure to harness the data and to mine and cut the data. It then buys programmatic media to get the messages out.

3. CONTENT In this world going forward content is key. It must be relevant, flexible and efficient. If you don’t reinvent the way you put content out you will find it becomes very inefficient. There are lots of ways to do this. Kraft’s content is share worthy because of the recipe world. At Kraftrecipes.com, consumers submit 30,000 recipes that are combined with 27,000 professional, culinary recipes. One billion of those recipes are viewed every year. Kraft also has the No. 1 Spanish language recipe site, she said.

“If what you’re saying is not of value they won’t hear you,” Elsner said.

Kraft Bunny CakeAs an example, let’s take the famed Bunny Cake—popular at Easter. The cake requires four different Kraft brands to prepare. Last year, instead of waiting for people to come to the site to search for the Bunny Cake, Kraft looked to see who had an interest in cakes and liked to celebrate Easter. It then used that data to programatically deliver recipes to that group. Sales on the four brands necessary to make the cake soared 24% just in that month.

“We saw a four times increase on ROI,” she said. “It’s about the individual delivery of a message at scale.”

In another example, Elsner thought the idea for the Oscar Mayer’s promotion, “Say it with Bacon,” “was stupid.” A luxury bacon box set—crisp bacon slices lying neatly on velvet—launched for Father’s day. It was the brand’s first foray into e-commerce. The result was a 50% rise in social conversation around Oscar Mayer bacon and a “notable rise in sales,” she said. “Here’s the gig. They knew their consumer and they did it and the numbers were incredibly positive.”

She said the places to look for innovation in 1-to-1 marketing at scale are in financial services and the insurance industries and cited American Express and Allstate, as well as retailers Macy’s, Nordstrom, Zappos and CPG brand Kimberly-Clark as some of the top innovators.

“These are the places to look at navigating this new space,” she said. “It is the new world of marketing and you have to check in. If you look at better ways to find insights, you get to improve your ROI because that level of precision enables you to win every time.”

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