Kraft Foods

How Kraft connected their brands with multicultural markets.

Challenge:
Kraft Foods needed an in-store merchandising strategy to increase penetration of its key brands among U.S. Hispanics. The strategy needed to excite retailers and ultimately move product to the target market.

Solution:
AMS helped Kraft understand how the Hispanic consumer shops and what cultural cues drove purchasing decisions. We used a rigorous process of market intelligence collection and analysis. Scanner data, competitive activity, mystery shopping, category and consumer secondary data coupled with supermarket executive interviews all helped assess Kraft's market situation.

We identified information gaps, primary research needs and design requirements. Through qualitative and quantitative consumer research, relative positions of the market's categories and brands were clarified. In addition, AMS helped determine what motivated Hispanic moms to buy Kraft products, how moms used the products at home and what supermarket promotional offers attracted their attention.

In the next phase, we used these insights to develop individual brand plans. They detailed the category/brand opportunity for each brand with preliminary marketing strategies. These same insights were shared with Kraft kitchens to develop recipes that aligned with the Hispanic consumers' meal preparation patterns. They were also used by Kraft corporate communications to develop relevant and motivating promotions as well as to create synergies between local and corporate messaging.

Finally, the brand and promotional plans created were shared with respective sales teams in key ethnic markets.

AMS supported the sales force to help sell the ethnic programs. Los Angeles became the launch market and featured four promotions coinciding with key shopping periods during the year.

Results:
How effective was the plan? The first Hispanic program hit break-even by the second promotion. That result was not expected until all four promotions had been executed. The program was then rolled out to Texas, Illinois, New York and Florida with increasingly positive results.

Since AMS's work began with Kraft Foods and their one-person ethnic marketing department in 1991, Kraft has become one of the top three ethnic marketers and merchandisers in the U.S.