General Mills Tries a New Tack to Reach Tough Customers--Children
Most grown-ups know General Mills as a maker of breakfast cereals. But many kids don’t know General Mills from General Grant.
These same kids, however, are very familiar with the names of its breakfast cereals such as Cocoa Puffs and Count Chocula, not to mention its toys such as Play Doh and Strawberry Shortcake.
Children, of course, aren’t supposed to know much about General Mills. For its part, however, General Mills is trying to learn all it can about 6- to 12-year-olds. There are about 20 million youngsters in this age bracket nationwide, and they eat a tremendous amount of cereal.
Advertising aimed at children has long been controversial because it seems to prey on the naivete of youngsters as consumers. But advertisers say that the opinions of children can mean the life or death of some products.
“Kids are becoming more brand-conscious, more media-conscious and more vocal,” said Peter Benziger, senior vice president at Child’s Play, a division of the Greenwich, Conn.-based research firm Moran and Tucker.
What’s more, many mothers in dual-income families feel guilty about not spending enough time with their children, said Arlyn Brenner, vice president of Child Research Services, a division of Great Neck, N.Y.-based McCollum/Spielman Research. “So they reward the kids by letting them pick out the products they like.”
With children making more decisions, General Mills is eager to influence them with its ads. But the company has found it tough to figure out what kids like or dislike about advertising.
With the introduction of a new fruit drink called Squeezeit, executives at the Minneapolis-based company are taking some unusual steps to see if the ads cut it with kids.
For one thing, General Mills is beginning to realize that adult researchers don’t always relate well to kids. So now it has changed the way it uses interview sessions held in shopping centers. Instead of using adults, it now lets youngsters ask the questions.
“Kids can relate to other kids,” explained Kathy Welander, a research consultant for General Mills Inc. “They do a much better job than adults.”
Witness the way General Mills checked out commercials for Squeezeit--a new fruit drink that comes in a plastic bottle that must be squeezed to drink. It dispatched its researchers to shopping mall interview rooms where commercials are often tried out on potential customers. But this time, the adult researchers are not the ones asking children the probing questions afterward.
“We picked a boy to ask the questions,” explained Welander, “because young girls will listen to boys, but young boys won’t tolerate listening to girls.”
The 13-year-old is on videotape. In a 10-minute presentation, the hired actor introduces himself to the other kids, shows the commercial and then asks a series of questions. The adult researchers merely record the answers.
The quiz becomes a game to see what the youngsters remember and what they like or dislike. It is crucial to honest responses, said Welander.
“We think we know what we mean when we say something in an ad, but maybe one little thing in the commercial will offend the child or teen-ager that we’re trying to reach.”
Other advertisers are learning this same lesson.
Lego Toys, the maker of Lego building blocks, is constantly testing its commercials on kids, said Spencer Plavoukos, chairman and chief executive of the toy maker’s ad firm, the New York office of Lintas: USA.
“But they’re not trying to see if the commercial will actually sell toys. With kids, you can never know that for sure,” said Plavoukos. “They’re mostly trying to see if the commercial does something that turns kids off.”
Of course, advertisers are also trying to grab the attention of kids by constantly surprising them.
In a new ad for Kool-Aid, for example, sunglasses have been placed on the beverage’s longtime logo, the smiling Kool-Aid pitcher. The pitcher even comes to life, playing an electric guitar while crashing through a brick wall.
“You can’t talk to children in linear story lines any more,” said Edward H. Meyer, whose ad agency, Grey Advertising Inc., creates ads for Kool-Aid. “What they see in the real world is something much more jagged and fast-paced. If you want a kid to want your product, you have to make it a part of his life. You have to exclude grown-ups. You have to make it his.”
Colgate Account Comes With Stock
Colgate-Palmolive Inc. wants its two ad agencies to take stock in Colgate. Literally. So, Reuben Mark, president and chief executive of Colgate, is doing something about it. Every time people at one of its ad firms--from those who create ads to those who buy media time--are assigned to handle the Colgate account, they are sent a framed stock certificate good for a handful of shares of Colgate stock.
“It’s purposely designed to make this a long-term relationship,” said Mark. “And immediately, the creative process seems to improve.”
Mark estimates that about $120,000 worth of Colgate stock has been handed out over the past three years to workers at the ad firms Young & Rubicam and Foote, Cone & Belding. Both agencies create ads for Colgate.
Those workers who have been employed on the Colgate account for the past three years have about $600 worth of Colgate stock, Mark estimated. And when employees leave these ad agencies? Said Mark, “They’re free to do whatever they want with the stock.”
A Little Research Can Go a Long Way
Why is so much advertising so bad?
For that matter, why in a recent advertising industry study did nearly 50% of the people surveyed agree that most advertising insults their intelligence?
At a New York meeting of advertising industry researchers last week, one research expert blamed the problem on the low opinion that many ad executives hold toward consumers.
“Many marketing and advertising executives are cynics themselves,” said Donald L. Kanter, chairman of the marketing department at Boston University. “They basically believe that consumers are passive and will pay attention to their ads no matter what they show them.”
And it is up to advertising researchers to show ad executives that lousy advertising only makes cynics out of viewers, Kanter said to some 2,000 executives attending the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual conference.
“The object,” said Kanter, “is to get advertising and marketing executives to think of consumers as active, decision-making people, not as passive, sentimental lightweights.” So far, it seems like not much has worked. But one executive suggests some answers could come from an often-neglected department at many ad agencies--the research department.
And agencies are putting more money into research. Michael J. Naples, president of the Advertising Research Foundation, says that last year, advertisers spent more than $2 billion on advertising research--up 14.3% from the year before.
“Research is becoming more than a department at companies,” said Naples. “Soon, advertising research data will become every bit as compelling to some corporations as their financial data.”
The next step, he said, is to standardize advertising research so that there is more agreement on how to interpret the data being collected. Right now, “everyone is doing their own thing.”
