ConAgra Culture

Consumer and shopper insights converge in ConAgra’s culture of collaboration

Of all the many reasons to join ConAgra as its chief marketing officer, Joan Chow says the relationship between Sales and Marketing was one of the best.

“When Doug Knudsen and I met we just hit it off right away,” says Joan, referring to her counterpart in the sales department. “Doug and I were totally aligned on the need to create a shopper marketing organization, so there was no tension over that.”

That was two years ago. Joan had just finished a nine-year tour at Sears, culminating as chief marketing officer, giving her a keen appreciation for the retailer’s perspective.

ConAgra certainly has come a long way since then. One year ago, the company placed ninth in the Hub Top 12 for excellence in shopper marketing. This year, ConAgra came in second, after Procter & Gamble.

To what would Joan attribute this success? It’s in the culture.

“It didn’t matter to either Doug or me whether shopper marketing reported to Marketing or Sales because either way we knew we were going to be connected,” she explains.

Shopper marketing ended up reporting to Marketing, but the way it works is that about three-fourths of Joan’s team is in the field with the Sales teams. Their goals are completely aligned.

“Sales and Marketing are using the same metrics, so whatever the goals are for that retailer, those are the shopper organization’s goals,” says Joan.

Another great reason for joining ConAgra, says Joan, is that it’s fun. “We’re serious about our work but not afraid to joke about ourselves,” she says, adding, “It’s really important to have fun at work.”

What is it about the ConAgra culture that lets you have fun?

Our leadership values are authenticity, courage and vulnerability — and those are things that we value in our folks. So, we make sure that we find people who are like that, who are not afraid to be open and authentic and vulnerable.

“Vulnerable” is a word that I think scares a lot of people. But it’s all about just being open about who you are, knowing when to ask for help and just being able to engage in great conversations with folks. Those things just combine to make ConAgra a fun place to work.

Is the CMO position new at ConAgra?

It is kind of new. There was someone in charge of marketing, strategy and international who ended up leaving and ConAgra decided to have a CMO as a stand-alone position.

They wanted to make sure that we created centers of excellence that were staffed by functional experts who lived and breathed marketing every day. That way we could free up the brand folks to really be brand managers and run their businesses.

How did you structure the shopper marketing organization?

We bundled together two existing organizations — shopper insights and category leadership. Then we added two new organizations — shopper marketing itself, and in-store marketing.

We pulled them into one group and called it Integrated Customer Marketing. This combined team is having really great success, not only with our sales teams, but also with our brand teams.

Where does shopper marketing fit within the overall marketing strategy?

It’s a critical element of it. You can’t escape the fact that, as much as we do these great national marketing programs, customers want to know how you are going to activate shoppers within their stores. What we do has to fit with their brand experience, what they are trying to create within their formats, and also their shopper segments.

If we have a new product launch, we make sure that our shopper teams are part of the entire launch discussion. We make sure we have an overall theme for the marketing launch and then a plan to activate that within each individual customer.

So, shopper marketing is a crucial part of our marketing strategy. It’s a group that we continue to invest in and grow.

How has shopper marketing changed at ConAgra?

Previously, we only had one person on the Walmart team and then one person creating bundled programs nationally. So, this was truly a different focus.

We now have dedicated teams that sit within the sales team who are focused on different customers. We also have shopper insights teams that sit within the sales teams. Then we’ve got in-store marketing teams that are focused against brands and customers.

How challenging is it to apply shopper insights at retail?

We haven’t found that to be a challenge. Our shopper insights team has been in existence for three years and they have done some amazing work with some of our customers.

They have done shopalongs with our customers’ consumer segments and focus groups as well as shopper insights around what we call the Seasons of Mom. We’ve taken those insights to our customers and then created shopper programs around them.

What are the Seasons of Mom?

There are seasons that moms have in terms of what happens after the holiday season, as well as during Spring, Summer and the Back-to-School seasons. We have insights into their mental calendars around those timeframes.

We take our shopper insights and say to our customers, “Here’s what we understand about your shoppers; here’s what’s going through their minds; and here’s how we can create programs in your stores that really resonate with them.”

What makes shopper insights different from consumer insights?

There are differences between the two and also ways that they can leverage one another. We have consumer insights teams that work with the brand teams to understand our core consumers, target growth consumers, and the deep insights that drive their behavior. They look at both category and brand insights.

The shopper insights folks connect very closely with the consumer insights folks, but they look at the insights from both the retailer’s and the shopper’s perspectives. For example, the Slim Jim consumer is typically a young teenage boy, but the Slim Jim shopper, depends on the store. If it’s a convenience store, the shopper is the teenage boy, but if it’s a grocery store, it could be his mom.

So, we want to understand her perspective when she goes into the store: What’s the appropriate message that’s going to resonate with her? Where should we be placing Slim Jim in the store? That’s where shopper insights really come into play.

It’s really about understanding the shopper’s mindset and then the customer’s mindset in terms of what they are trying to create in the stores. Then we bring those insights back into the brand teams so that they have that understanding as well. We make sure they stay very connected.

Do you have a favorite shopper insight?

That’s like asking someone to choose between her kids! I am very pleased with the Seasons of Mom research that the team has done. They have been able to work with a lot of retailers with these insights and create programs. It’s been very, very well received.

How do you balance the emotional and the rational aspects of shopper behavior?

It’s not easy. Every purchase decision, if you really dig deep, is an emotional decision. The question is, how do you make sure that you understand the insight behind the shopping behavior?

Our insights team continues to dig really deeply into that kind of knowledge. Once we understand the shopper insight behind the behavior, we can develop marketing that creates brand demand.

It is possible to quantify that emotional factor?

Yes. Let me use Chef Boyardee, as an example. I don’t know if you’ve seen our new campaign that talks to moms about Chef Boyardee. If you haven’t had a chance, you can find it on YouTube.

As moms everywhere know, it’s really hard to get kids to eat vegetables without them making a big fuss about it. With Chef Boyardee, it’s such an easy way to get vegetables into their diet that this becomes a non-issue.

So, our campaign is around the fact that we’re secretly nutritious but you don’t have to tell your kids. We’ve gotten some great results in terms of share improvements since that campaign has rolled out. We’ve been able to translate insights into marketing communication to drive results. That’s how we measure it.

Why are you doing television commercials?

Television is still an important part of our marketing mix. For our big brands, we have 360-degree marketing programs and television is an element of that (see sidebar).

We’ve also included a lot of effort around digital and social media, and all of the other traditional vehicles as well — in-store and shopper marketing, of course, being critical elements of those plans.

 

How do you see the potential of social media?

We’ve actually been doing a lot of work with blogger moms and even working with some of our customers and their blogger mom groups. We’ve also done work with Facebook and Twitter. It’s something that I feel very strongly about that is going to become a more and more important part of the marketing equation.

Social media is a way not only to create brand demand but also to have a two-way, direct conversation with our consumers. That is something we’re going to continue to invest in and continue to grow as part of our overall marketing portfolio.

How will these emerging media change the shopping experience over time?

Word-of-mouth is going to be very critical in terms of getting people to talk about our brands and recommend them to one another. We’ve tested digital coupons and they work well for us.

It’s a matter now of getting the appropriate
scale with digital coupons or coupons delivered via your cell phone. And then digital signage is something that we continue to look at. We’ll keep testing these different things to see what kind of return we get.

 

Do you see retail as a medium in the traditional sense?

I don’t think anything is traditional anymore. Even traditional isn’t traditional! So, retail is a
very important marketing avenue for us. Just think about all the traffic that’s in the stores — all of those
people, all of those eyeballs. That’s why we’ve invested in developing an integrated customer organization.

We do feel that retail is a very important component of the whole marketing mix. But it’s got to work with the customers and what they are trying to accomplish and be based on a strategy for that category or that aisle. How do you go about reinventing that aisle experience? That’s the thing that we’re very, very keen on.

How is value defined at ConAgra?

We’re very fortunate because we have a tremendous array of brands that provide great value for our consumers from a nutrition perspective, convenience perspective, and taste perspective. We define value from the consumers’ eyes. For some consumers it could be all about providing easy, convenient and healthy food like Healthy Choice.

For others it could be, “Hey I want a dinner that everybody in my family is going to love, that’s really affordable.” That could be something like Banquet, where you can get a complete meal for about a dollar. Or, “I’d love to have a very inexpensive lunch box treat for my kids.” For that, we’ve got Snack Pack Pudding. It all depends on how she defines value. But however she defines it, we have something that meets her needs.

Do you see store brands as a threat?

The way we see it, consumers want choices. If a brand is relevant and meaningful to her, she’ll continue to use that brand. We continue to invest in innovation for a lot of our products because it keeps them relevant. It generates continued excitement in the category and drives demand for that brand.

I’m not surprised that more consumers are trying store brands because they are trying to stretch their dollars. But in our portfolio, because we have so many great brands that provide great value, it’s really not something that I feel is at great risk.

We’ve also seen some good things happen for retailers when a private label product and a strong brand are both available to consumers. That’s something that we continue to work with our retailers on because it creates category growth. It’s not an either/or situation.

Is shopper marketing a potential bridge to store brands?

Shopper marketing has enabled us to reach different parts of the retailers’ organizations that the sales team hadn’t been able to reach before.

So, we’ve been able to build more bridges with our retailers. Within some of our retailers we’ve also been able to bring their marketers and merchants more closely together.

How have you applied lessons learned at Sears to ConAgra?

It’s about seeing things through a retailer’s eyes. What I keep telling our folks is, “These brands and products are available for all retailers to purchase, so you have to create programs that help drive their retail brands.”

So, what is it that we’re going to do for this retailer that’s going to be in line with their strategy and what they are trying to accomplish for their shoppers? How do you make sure you understand their shopper segments and which of our brands play with the different segments they have within their portfolios? Just helping to put people in the retailer’s shoes, and seeing things from their perspective, is very valuable.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth?

The greatest opportunity is a continued focus on innovation. ConAgra has a great innovation pipeline. We are focusing on fewer, bigger ideas and we’ll continue to invest behind innovation. Strong brands will continue to do well in this economy and we
have a lot of strong brands that fit this economy very, very well.

We’ll also increasingly continue to have better consumer and shopper insights that will then drive brand and shopper programs to drive sales and traffic, both for ourselves and our retailer customers.

How does innovation happen at ConAgra?

Culturally, we have a really strong innovation group that resides within the research and innovation organization, but that works extremely closely with our insights brand teams. So, we start with the consumer and their needs or wants that are not being met right now.

Or, in some cases, we bring innovations like our Healthy Choice Café Steamers, which was one of the top new product introductions in 2008. It’s about bringing new technology ideas to the category that focus on convenience, driving great taste and nutrition.

Have there been any surprises for yousince you’ve been to ConAgra?

I knew I’d like the people … I just didn’t realize I’d like them that much.

It’s just one big party over there?

It’s not that it’s a party. It’s just the passion and commitment of the people here is just amazing. I see that across different functions, in the home office, in the field, in our plants — at all levels. People are so dedicated to making great food that families will love. It’s just so heartening to see.

 

What does the future look like for ConAgra?

I think the future looks really, really strong. We’ve got a great innovation pipeline. We’ve got strong brands that continue to do well in the economy. We’ve got increasingly better consumer and shopper insights that will drive even more demand for our brands. The future looks very bright. •

–

SIDEBAR

Healthy Humor

Healthy Choice is a brand that had kind of lost its relevance and really needed a shake-up,” says Kathy Delaney, president of Nitro, the agency for ConAgra’s Healthy Choice brand.

It’s true that Healthy Choice is not exactly generating the same kind of excitement it did 20 years ago when Advertising Age called it “the most successful new food brand introduction in two decades.”

Today, Healthy Choice generates considerably less “buzz” than rival brand Lean Cuisine, according to Zeta Buzz, which tracks online chatter. But now that the recession is pinching pocketbooks, ConAgra figures it’s a good moment to remind consumers that Healthy Choice “offers value as well as convenience.”

So ConAgra is investing between $90 to $100 million to reintroduce the brand, including new packaging featuring an exclamation point and new advertising starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame.

The exclamation point is intended to convey “surprisingly good taste” and the commercials, directed by Christopher Guest of Spinal Tap fame, are meant to cut through the clutter by making us laugh.

The premise is that Julia “is not really sure whether she wants to endorse Healthy Choice” and the creative “echoes the episodic form of sitcoms for which she is known.”

In one spot, “a friend, played by Jane Lynch … criticizes her dining habits by comparing her to a dog eating peanut butter.”

The goal, says ConAgra CMO Joan Chow, is to break through “the fog of familiarity consumers have with the brand.” As always, a little humor helps. As Joan points out, with a last name like Chow, “It’s appropriate to work at a food company.”

[Source: Stuart Elliott, The New York Times, 4/3/09]

–

JOAN CHOW joined ConAgra Foods as executive vice president and chief marketing officer in 2007. Previously she was SVP and CMO of Sears, and led development of a trade-promotion planning tool at IRI. She began her career at Johnson & Johnson.