Kellanova had an issue with Special K within the U.K. last 12 months. The vitamin- and protein-rich cereal had seen volumes decline and stagnating market penetration. As its premium price went up, indexed at 145% higher in comparison with the remainder of the category, other metrics went down. While awareness was not an issue for the 70-year-old brand, consideration rates began to mirror those of personal label brands.
To address Special K’s flagging interest, Kellanova — a bunch that markets snacks including Pringles and Cheez-It, together with international cereal brands following the Kellogg Company’s 2023 split into two firms — turned to LiveRamp for a clean room. The technology allows marketers to access and collaborate on various data sets while protecting privacy and has regained industry attention as the necessity for more customer insights creates friction with mounting data-privacy concerns.
“Clean rooms [for] improving our targeting is one in all the massive areas we identified as having a measurable impact in our work and our reference to the patron,” said Louise Cotterill, Kellanova’s global senior director of insights and intelligence.
The traditional marketing approach for Special K had been demographic-based and used one set of promoting creative. But by unifying postcode-level Circana data with 20 million addressable records from Experian, Kellanova was capable of higher understand household compositions and interests.
“How will we segment and discover [consumers] and transcend demographics into their purchase behavior, historical behaviors and competitor buying [behaviors]? Are there higher predictors of who’s going to purchase the cereal?” said Cotterill.
The revamped approach identified two distinct groups of Special K consumers: loyal buyers that the brand needed to encourage to purchase yet one more time to grow the brand, and lovers of the brand who only bought discounted Special K and needed an additional push to buy the product at full price. Kellanova tailored existing creative to match these cohorts, crafting stronger call-to-action messages for each groups, and deployed it across social channels including Meta and YouTube.
Brand lift and behavior change
Traditionally, CPG marketers relied on inference to find out which campaigns drove which purchases. That changes when using a knowledge clean room.
“With the clean room, we will do a partnership with a retailer, and we will see exactly who purchased,” Cotterill said. “We’re capable of do as close as we will get to closed-loop [measurement], and see which groups are buying. That’s why we’re so confident on this approach.”
Using the tactic, Special K saw a 9% sales lift with price-conscious consumers who hadn’t purchased the brand within the last 12 months but were brought back at a better price point. Plus, these consumers tended to purchase private label, demonstrating that marketing — not only price reduction — could bring them back to the brand. The marketer saw even stronger results with loyalists, who generated a 36% sales lift by buying more of the brand than usual at a premium price.
In addition, Kellanova ran a consideration impact study to see how long-term consumer behaviors modified. The demographic-based targeting showed no bump in consideration, but using the clean rooms showed a lift in consideration three-times higher than the industry average. All in all, the brand new approach took about three months of labor.
“It was a extremely amazing opportunity to essentially put all the pieces when it comes to the strategy, the advanced analytics, the really advanced measurement into play, and see how it really works for our brand,” Cotterill said.
In-house and beyond
The success of the Special K campaign demonstrates how Kellanova can use LiveRamp’s clean room technology to enhance targeting and drive business results. Relying on a mixture of in-house data scientists, external tech and data partners is helping to hurry up the campaign process for the packaged foods giant. The first project under this method took months to do while similar initiatives now take three or 4 weeks.
For the insights to drive outcomes, Kellanova relies on agency partners that know how you can unlock data and apply it to decisions around creative and media. In the Special K example, the creative team needed to determine how you can change the decision to motion in the present campaign, while the media team needed to alter the buy from a platform well-suited for the demographic goal (TikTok) to 1 that favored the clean room data (Pinterest).
“We do the evaluation, the business intelligence work and the audience constructing all in-house, but then we work really closely with the creative and the media partners,” Cotterill said. “It’s very much a partnership, nevertheless it’s been amazing having the info scientists in-house, because you only learn lots more… The closer they’re to the info, the closer they’re to understanding how the long run marketing is going to work.”
Kellanova is applying the clean room technique to other brands in its portfolio and into different markets. But the work doesn’t produce a one-size-fits-all model, especially as regions across the globe have various levels of information available, not to say privacy regulations. Paradoxically, the more rigorous the info rules, the more applicable the work is elsewhere.
“Can we do it in one in all the more restrictive, still very vital markets, and is that going to work? If so, then I do know that I’ll have the ability to take that to … every other other key markets outside of that,” Cotterill explained. “We intentionally select tougher markets in order that we all know we will scale it.”
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