Global chief marketer Mark Baynes on the give-and-take between Kellogg and its consumers.

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes has been around for more than 100 years, but come breakfast time that crunchy, milky bowl of grainy goodness still talks to a lot of people. Keeping that conversation crackling is critical to the brand’s continuing relevance in homes around the world, says Mark Baynes, Kellogg’s global chief marketing officer.

Founded in Michigan by Will Keith Kellogg as the Battle Creek Toasted Flake Company, the enterprise now known as Kellogg Company made its name on every kind of toasted or puffed grain. One might be forgiven for thinking that a company in such a business would have long ago lost its place at the table, given the many changes in consumer tastes and behavior over more than a century’s time. Not so, says Mark. "Our latest study suggests that 77 percent of consumers are still eating breakfast in the house," he says. "There is still a massive opportunity for in-home breakfast," he continues, adding: "Cereal will always be at the core."

That’s not to say that people are necessarily sitting down with a bowl of snap, crackle and pop; they might be darting around with a Special K breakfast sandwich, Protein Shake or Nutri-Grain bar. Their sunrise ritual may be vastly different than it was in 1906, but people are indeed still eating what Kellogg makes.Mark knows this because he’s seen it with his own eyes, often in faraway places.

He recalls sitting down with a family in Soweto, South Africa, where a small, wood-burning stove was the only source of heat. Breakfast was a bowl of mealie maize, a thin porridge mixed with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. "It just makes you think about things differently," says Mark. In India, that means re-thinking the size of the cereal bowls; in China, it’s appreciating the size of the pantry. In most places, it’s about feeling the tension between what mothers and children think breakfast ought to be. Now more than ever, getting after such insights is like having a conversation. The insights, says Mark, are the fuel for ideas, innovation, and continued growth for Kellogg. continue …

Big Data’s big insights are hiding in plain sight.

Featuring Donald Evans of The Cheesecake Factory, Tariq Shaukat of Caesars Entertainment, Susan Grossman of MasterCard, Peter Fader of Wharton School and Craig Elston of The Integer Group.

Has Big Data changed your view of marketing?

Donald Evans: At The Cheesecake Factory, data has not driven our decision-making process. It’s best to think of it as the seasoning on top of the dish versus the actual ingredients that go into the dish. It’s liberating to have that ability to use Big Data, but not to rely on it. Checking data has become part of my morning routine, like reading the newspaper. I look at data from our restaurants and our social media data. This helps me get my day going and see whether there are any outliers that would change my view of what I’m going to do that day.

However, I rely on instinct and creativity more than on data. I don’t listen to all the noise of too much information. I can be selective and, because my bosses are not relying on marketing data to make decisions, I can use it where I think it is most beneficial to tell the story I want to tell, validate something we’re doing, or determine that we’re not doing something right. continue …

Conceptual understanding and clarity of vision rise to the top of the shopper-marketing mix. By Dan Flint. The Hub Top 20 survey is eagerly anticipated each year as both agencies and brand marketers vie for recognition for excellence in shopper marketing. This year — the sixth time the survey has been fielded — witnessed the same kind of intensity as in the past. There’s nothing quite like an industry ranking to focus attention! The contest is exciting and fun, no doubt about that.

However, amid the competitive undercurrent the survey stokes, its original purpose must remain front and center. When Hoyt & Company designed the survey in 2008, the intent was simply to begin to establish best practices in shopper marketing and evaluate industry progress toward certain standards. The evaluative criteria were based on a series of earlier industry-wide surveys that got at the skills, capabilities and practices necessary to excel at shopper marketing. The thinking was that this would help crystallize shopper marketing as a new, emerging discipline and move it forward. continue …

Big Data and marketing insights: The true gravity of the situation. By Sharon Love. We walk down streets and our feet stick to the ground. The Earth revolves around the sun in nice, predictable loops. We drop a piece of peanut-butter toast and it splats unceremoniously on the kitchen floor. And no scientist anywhere can tell us exactly why.

Of course you will be told, "It’s gravity!" You will be shown the experimentally validated equations that describe exactly how things behave under the influence of this mysterious force. You will be provided mountains of data on how gravity affects objects near and far, large and small, visible and invisible. But the actual mechanism behind gravity is a matter of conjecture, which is a nice way of saying that scientists really don’t know what makes gravity work. It’s an apt analogy, perhaps, for the situation in which we find ourselves these days, here in the Era of Big Data. continue …

Shoppers are less in awe and more in control of digital tools. By Seth Diamond and Jennifer Romano. The digital shopping marketplace is stabilizing. In our four years studying and publishing an in-depth digital shopper-marketing study, we have seen the acceleration of digital shopper-marketing tools grow to a point where nearly 70 percent of consumer packaged-goods shoppers said that digital tools have influenced their shopping behavior. In the latest report — DSM 4.0 — digital tools remain just as impactful, but shoppers are now engaging with tools on their own terms.

What this means is that a digital tool may need to evolve to better serve shoppers, while shopper marketers may also need to do a better job of understanding the role of digital shopping tools. Are shoppers using the tool to save time, save money or generate ideas? It also means shoppers are no longer using digital tools in isolation of one another. A shopper-marketing promotion strategy must deliver against a multi-device, multi-channel, path-to-purchase. How is a shopper using a smartphone in-store and a tablet at home? continue …

Three shopper "mindstates" are driving the future of retail. By Eric Daniel. The global world of retail is in a state of revolution. What once was a simple choice among stores is now infinitely splintered. Shopping is anywhere and everywhere. While retailers and brands are scrambling to understand how the shopping behavior of digitally empowered consumers is changing, we first need to understand what people want from their shopping experiences.

In its Joy of Shopping study, Fitch surveyed 7,250 shoppers in seven markets — China, India, Brazil, Russia, USA, UK and UAE — across age, income and region. The survey, the first quantitative global study of shopper mindstates, explored today’s shoppers from a number of critical angles: the degree of involvement in shopping a category; levels of satisfaction with their current shopping experiences; perceived channel preferences across store, website, app, social media; and the gaps between their current and ideal experiences within a category. continue …

Execution-driven insight is the true measure of good branding. By Beth Ann Kaminkow. Our industry is funny in that certain words and concepts become the latest obsession. It’s almost like the way fast-fashion fads become the must-have look of the moment. Insights is one of those hyper-used words. We are data-mining for them; deep diving for them; anthropologically exploring for them; crowd-sourcing for them; quantitatively polling for them; neurologically testing for them; swarming for them; social listening for them; and the list goes on.

That’s not all bad, but the fact is that insight without execution is nothing more than a good dream. Execution is what turns insight into reality … and the dirty little secret is that not all great insights lead to great execution. Truth be told, an insight is only as good as the execution it drives. Unfortunately, it sounds a lot less sexy to value execution more than insight — isn’t that putting more significance on the tactical versus the strategic? The answer is that one without the other limits the possibility and potential of both. Insight that delivers move-the-needle execution, or execution-driven insight, is the unit of analysis of good branding. continue …

Feelings, beliefs and personal identity drive shopper behavior and choices. By Ed Chao. Alarge, new grocery store opened recently in the historical New England town where I live. The new store is spacious, clean, and pretty much offers everything I would ever need at a decent price. On a rational basis, there is no reason why I shouldn’t shop there. However, I can’t seem to bring myself to switch. Somehow, I just find myself continuing to shop at my old, cramped, and arguably more expensive store, where finding the fresh tagliatelle that I love on any given day is, at best, a 50:50 proposition. There are definitely some complex factors subconsciously driving my behavior.

Consider, as well, your decision whether to go to an old, familiar restaurant for dinner, or the new place around the corner. This is a classic battle between our human need for predictability and our desire for adventure. It is also a tension between two very different emotional pleasures — feeling relaxed or feeling energized. Most consumer decisions are results of complex tugs and pulls from a number of different forces. We don’t make purely rational decisions. Emotions are powerful drivers of our behaviors and choices that precede, and often overwhelm, rational deliberation. But they’re not the only drivers. continue …

Big Data should put brands in the middle of the customer’s life. By Spencer L. Hapoienu. Big Data and Google Glasses are the "big" new things. Big Data has some risks. Like Google Glasses, it will allow you to see things you’ve never seen before while you walk into lampposts as you check the weather. Big Data is sexy and exciting for all of the new discoveries to come and for all of the new opportunities it will reveal. From a marketing perspective, it might be worth it to walk before we run (into lampposts) by starting with small data and the right questions.

John Wanamaker asked the first profound marketing question: Believing that 50 percent of his advertising was wasted, he wondered which half didn’t work. Has anyone ever answered that question? The problem is that maybe Wanamaker didn’t define what he meant by "work."Loyalty programs are driven by collecting data about customer purchases and behavior. Therefore, you would think it should be relatively straightforward to know whether a loyalty program is working. You would think it should be evident which characteristics make a program a success. The problem is that often the program goals are not clearly stated or defined, and therefore trying to measure success is vague. continue …

Keying into shopper motivations unlocks growth for PepsiCo and its customers. By Jeff Swearingen and Tracey Doucette. The future of traditional consumer packaged goods will be framed by the overpowering desire of consumers to get exactly what they want, when they want it, and the increasing ability of industry to provide just that. At PepsiCo, we call this demand-driven granular growth.

Demand-driven granular growth is composed of four steps: 1) Understanding the motivation of demand, both at the consumer and shopper level; 2) Understanding how the motivation of demand manifests itself in shopper trip missions; 3) Understanding the shopper triggers that will unlock the demand along the path-to-purchase; and 4) Developing granular, targeted programming that "trips the triggers" and fully realizes the potential for conversion. Let’s examine each of these four steps. continue …

Four fundamental behaviors open doors to shopper engagement. By Liz Crawford. In the world of store-back marketing, purchase barriers rule strategy. Store-back marketing puts the shopper’s in-store decision at the center of the campaign’s big idea. This requires a barriers-to-purchase approach: The message must overcome shopper barriers as they stand in the aisle. And there’s the rub: Today, they aren’t always standing in the aisle.

The store-back approach began to fray when Google introduced the "Zero Moment of Truth," or ZMOT. Google demonstrated that shoppers were engaged in shopping and decision-making before they entered the store, claiming that, "88 percent of US consumers now engage in the Zero Moment of Truth prior to making their final decision." Just as Google was coining ZMOT, a tidal wave of digital shopping tools began to flood the market. These included couponing sites like retailmenot.com, as well as price comparison tools like slifter.com and milo.com. Social shopping tools also popped up, like shopcade.com and pikaba.com. continue …

Social media provide an unvarnished view of shopper behavior. By Brad Lawless and Mary Tarczynski. Shopper marketers spend their days studying and researching a product, understanding its core demographic appeal and brand positioning. Focus groups (both online and off) allow brands and retailers to moderate discussions with shoppers around specific topics. Aggregated store-level and loyalty-card databases offer historical views into purchasing trends.

However, reports generated from large research data sets tell us at best what, not why, shoppers bought, while other methods suffer from observational bias. We constantly seek better ways to understand the shopper’s mindset as she plans for and executes her weekly shopping trip. How does she compile her list? How does she learn about new products or pricing specials for her favorite products? Once she arrives at the store, how does she find her way around to gather items in her basket? continue …

Why are some better at shopper marketing than others? The big debate over Big Data doesn’t center on whether "data" is singular or plural. Nor does it rage over matters of privacy. No, as you’ll read in these pages, the big tension within Big Data resides in two small words: what versus why. Big Data, the argument goes, excels at telling you what people do, but trips over why they do it. If insight is the goal, then why things are as they are certainly matters. As big debates go, this really isn’t much of one, since few seem to disagree about the importance of why.

That’s not to say that Big Data isn’t hugely useful. It is. Just ask The Cheesecake Factory, Caesars Entertainment, MasterCard and others who use Big Data and use it well. It’s within this emerging world of Big Data that we present our own very own data-driven insights into what constitutes excellence in shopper marketing — and why. Each year for the past six, the main focus of The Hub Top 20 has been on what, or more precisely, who — as in, who’s #1 on the list?

That’s easy: Among brands this year it’s Procter & Gamble, and among agencies it’s CatapultRPM. Our congratulations to them both, and to the 19 other brands and 19 other agencies who made The Hub Top 20. The bigger question is why. For that answer, please turn to the big and colorful table on page 8. It shows how the best-of-the-best performed on 13 critical criteria and illuminates why they ranked as they did. This may not be Big Data exactly, but we hope it is a big help to those pursuing excellence in shopper marketing.
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How do shoppers feel while shopping leading retailers? An executive summary of a Hub reader survey. Emotion permeates every aspect of the brand experience, but perhaps never as much as when consumers morph into shoppers. To get a sense of the shopper’s prevalent emotional state, we asked our readers to tell us how they feel while navigating their way through 24 top retailers. The choices were "excited," "satisfied," "bored" or "frustrated."

With just three exceptions, "excited" was not how most readers would describe how they feel about their typical shopping experience. The exceptions were their shopping experiences at Amazon, Ikea and Costco — and even then by only 46, 44 and 43 percent of respondents, respectively. Just 50 percent or more of readers said they felt "satisfied" while shopping at seven of the 24 stores — Target, The Home Depot, Lowes, CVS, Walgreens, PetSmart, and Barnes & Noble. continue …

Like, What? If you "Like" Mozart, To Kill a Mockingbird, and curly fries, chances are you have a high IQ. If you "Like" Huggies, Weight Watchers and Scrapbooking, you’re likely in a relationship. If you "Like" Maria Sharapova, Hunger Games and Sportsnation, you’re probably single.

Those are some of the conclusions reached in a study of Facebook "Likes," which gleaned all sorts of insights into personal characteristics. "People who share the ‘Likes’ do not realize that they are sharing very private issues as well," says Michal Kosinski of Cambridge University, who led "a study of 58,000 US Facebook users." continue …

The Invisible Gorilla. The link between advertising and obesity may not be all that it appears to be, write Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in The New York Times (3/10/13). Christopher and Daniel, co-authors of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, question a study in which researchers reported a link between the preponderance of outdoor ads for food and obesity.

The researchers first recorded every outdoor ad they saw "in 228 census tracts around Los Angeles and New Orleans," and then telephone surveyed the locals, "paying them to report their height, weight and other information." Based on this data, the researchers concluded: "For every 10 percent increase in food advertisements, the odds of being obese increased by five percent." continue …

Reader response to Chris Hoyt’s white paper on the bifurcated state of shopper marketing today. In our January/February 2013 edition, Chris Hoyt of Hoyt & Company wrote an analysis of The Hub’s 2012 Shopper Marketing survey, in which he reported "a serious bifurcation of the discipline."

Chris wrote: "Shopper marketing as an industry practice clearly means different things — and has very different standards — for different camps. From positioning to funding to measurement, the survey indicates a growing split."

We posted a link to Chris’s white paper on LinkedIn’s Shopper Insights & Marketing Group (which The Hub moderates) and it quickly provoked a lively discussion. Following are excerpts of some of the comments, edited for space and clarity. continue …