Charlotte Mostaed, who hails from Procter & Gamble, Pom Wonderful and Health-Ade Kombucha, plans to emphasize Catalina Crunch’s macros on its packaging and lean on influencers who already love the brand.
As the new Chief Marketing Officer of Catalina Crunch, Charlotte Mostaed is ready to make the consumer packaged goods brand a household name.
Across its portfolio of cereal and snack mixes, Catalina Crunch has about 5% household penetration, or roughly 6 million to 7 million U.S. households, Mostaed said. Within the past 18 months, Catalina Crunch cereal has gained 1.7 million households, according to the brand.
What’s more, Catalina Crunch has had consistent double-digit sales growth the past few years, Mostaed said. She attributes much of that growth to wider distribution, as its snacks are now in 30,000 retail doors, including grocery stores, mass merchants and club stores.
“That’s very exciting for a marketer because the more people can find you, the better your marketing scales,” she said.
Catalina Crunch Needs to Showcase Its Value Proposition
Catalina’s “better-for-you” products have a lot going for them with their high-protein, high-fiber and low-sugar content. But the brand still needs to work to break its products out of niche circles and increase its sales velocities, she said. She plans to do this by driving household penetration and trial.
One tactic is updating its packaging and marketing message to better emphasize its value proposition, she said.
“We’re seeing that in the cereal aisle, there are more and more opportunities for us to win over consumers and win them to the brand by highlighting our best-in-class macros,” Mostaed said. “People just aren’t aware, and brands do a great job of talking about their ingredients, and we could enhance our approach even better.”
Currently, its repeat purchases are solid, at a 47% repeat rate, Mostaed said.
“We know that we have a tight cohort: 20% of our brand buyers are making up a predominant majority of our volume because they’ve fallen in love with our products,” she said.
That loyalty is great, but common for CPG brands, she said.
“We need to win with our loyalists and continually delight them and bring in new trialists to introduce them to the brand in order to achieve our goals,” Mostaed said.
New Marketing Initiatives for Catalina Crunch
The brand plans to have a large awareness campaign in the new year, when consumers are reconsidering their eating habits. This will tell its larger brand story, coupled with performance marketing on other channels, such as Pinterest and Reddit, where it can get deeper and more surgical, she said.
Another tactic it plans to use is enlisting celebrities and influencers to better deliver its message. Consumers don’t want to be sold to, she said. So it’s important that the influencers Catalina Crunch uses already know and like its brand. Once it finds these influencers, the brand will send them products prelaunch to gather their feedback and buy-in, she said.
“That kind of authenticity, the consumers can sniff it out nowadays because influencer marketing is so ubiquitous,” she said. “It’s not something that brands do behind the scenes anymore. It’s out in front and consumers expect full disclosure.”
While marketing is more fragmented than it was 15 years ago, when brands stuck to one tagline, the fragmentation allows brands to tailor their messaging and value proposition to different audiences, she said.
“Nowadays, you go after multiple benefit spaces with multiple cohorts to be able to reach them with the message that’s going to resonate most,” she said. “The GLP-1 user might be looking for something different than the macro-maxing mom.”
With influencers, Catalina Crunch can better tap into those subgroups with the right message, such as emphasizing protein per serving, gluten-free ingredients or satiety, she said.
How Catalina Crunch Will Measure Success
Measuring the success of these programs is challenging when the brand’s products are sold in stores and online.
“It’s not a one-for-one of, ‘I run this piece of media and the next day I see a velocity increase,’” she said. “That attribution window is quite longer than anyone realizes, and it’s about frequency and consistency of marketing.”
Mostaed will look for such indicators as site visits, click-through rates, brand lift studies and search volume on Google to get a sense of whether consumer interest in the brand tracks with its advertising, she said.
“What I want to see over time is that on a three-month basis, I’ve got a correlation between velocities and marketing spend,” she said. “And that when we do something and when we heavy up and have a 360 approach to marketing, I’m seeing increasing velocities on the shelf.”
Mostaed’s Background From CPG Powerhouses
Mostaed boasts marketing titles from Procter & Gamble and Pom Wonderful. Most recently, she served as Chief Marketing Officer at Health-Ade Kombucha, which Generous Brands acquired for $500 million during her five-year stint.
Some of the lessons she’s taken from these roles include how to maximize a marketing budget, how to measure for success and how to have a process so ideas are captured in one place and communicated consistently, she said.
Now in Catalina Crunch’s top marketing seat, Mostaed is using her experience to test and learn what will work at this brand today.
“The marketing landscape is completely shifting under our feet at all times,” Mostaed said. “The way that you go viral on TikTok now is probably not the way you went viral on TikTok three or four years ago. We are going to be testing and learning our way into how we can unlock new paths of growth for the brand. So it takes a really robust measurement infrastructure as well as an engaged way of tracking your media and conversion.”
Overall, Mostaed knows marketing is one of the biggest buckets of discretionary spend at any company, and she is eager to report back on its effectiveness.
“That’s a big responsibility I don’t take lightly, is spending the company’s money to reach new consumers and prove that’s a worthwhile endeavor,” she said.
