General Mills Creates New Consumer Experiences
There is no doubt about it — General Mills Corporation (www.generalmills.com) has entrepreneurial spirit when it comes to reaching consumers in new ways with new products. One of the company’s recent ventures, Gluten Freely (www.glutenfreely.com), is the perfect example. In just six months, this entirely new direct-to-consumer channel was launched and quickly met with consumer adoption and enthusiasm.
“The General Mills New Ventures group has been tasked with creating new ways of doing business,” says Dom Alcocer, marketing manager of New Ventures, General Mills. “Through our entrepreneurial mind-set that we have in new ventures, we’ve been able to bring our new business ideas from concept to launch in much less than a year for far less money than we’d ever been able to before.”
A Consumer in Need
Ever attentive to new consumer and health trends, General Mills started noticing in 2008 that people who either must or choose to follow a gluten-free diet were having difficulty finding gluten-free products and information.
Gluten, a protein naturally found in grains, like wheat, barley and rye, can cause adverse reactions in some people, most notably, those who suffer from an autoimmune disorder called celiac disease. Medical experts estimate that 1 in 133 people have celiac disease. Many more people are believed to have some level of gluten sensitivity even without the disease.
Recognizing a need among the gluten-free community, General Mills started making and promoting a wide range of gluten-free products, such as Betty Crocker gluten-free desserts and reformulated Chex cereal products as well as gluten-free Bisquick and Hamburger Helper. The products hit it off big with their targeted consumers.
Yet, even with a strong portfolio of General Mills-branded, gluten-free products, the company felt that there was still room for improvement in the way in which it delivered these products and information to the public.
“We realized that people with celiac disease, and others who have some kind of gluten sensitivity or who just want to live a gluten-free lifestyle, were having particular difficulty in simply locating all of the great foods that they need to make this diet come to life for them,” says Alcocer. “They couldn’t find places to buy the products, and they had to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting through the Internet to find recipes and other information about gluten-free diets.”
Alcocer and his colleagues brainstormed some specific ideas about how to best tackle the problem. They wanted to quickly create and launch a direct-to-consumer online channel that would allow customers to buy gluten-free products directly from General Mills. And, in building the channel, they wanted to avoid the high costs and headaches of using traditional on-premise hardware and software that would require ongoing IT expense and maintenance.
Building a Channel
At General Mills, each aspect of developing, making, distributing, marketing and selling a product or solution is connected and collaborative. In line with its tried and true method of leveraging both internal and external resources, the company partnered with the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research, The University of Chicago celiac Disease Center and General Mills Bell Institute of Health & Nutrition to develop an ideal solution for gluten-free consumers.
On the technology front, another partnership with BrandJourney Venturing (www.brandjourneyventuring.com), a company specializing in developing entrepreneurial ventures from ideas to revenue in under 12 months, led to the decision to use the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft Corporation (www.
microsoft.com) to develop, host and support a cloud-based solution.
“Having a solution in the cloud is the most efficient way for us to build up capability, one consumer at a time, while saving dollars and time every step along the way,” says Alcocer.
Together, this network of partners proceeded to develop Gluten Freely, a one-stop Internet shop for the gluten-free community, in record time. The new business channel took about six months to develop using Microsoft Visual Studio tools and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Product and customer data is stored in Microsoft SQL Azure, a self-managed, multitenant relational cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. The solution also supports federated identity with social networking activity, prompting users to create a link when they log on to sites, like Facebook or Twitter.
Live since March 2011, Gluten Freely gives consumers access to a broad range of resources, including recipes, blogs, community forums, and medical facts about gluten along with coupons, a product locator, and an online store where they can choose from a selection of more than 400 gluten-free products, which are then shipped directly to the consumer’s door.
And in a surprising, consumer-centric twist, only 30 percent of the products sold on Gluten Freely are General Mills’ products. The remainder are offered by other companies, like LARABAR, Blue Diamond Growers and Better Batter, in an effort to provide the largest possible selection to consumers.
To stay relevant and continually evolve the site to meet its market’s needs, General Mills uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, a cloud-based version of the Microsoft enterprise sales and marketing software, for e-commerce analytics activities. Sales and marketing professionals now have a familiar user experience, enabling greater collaboration, streamlining of processes and access to real-time data that they can use to improve the experience for consumers who visit the site.
“Granted, GlutenFreely.com isn’t the typical, competitive way of marketing,” said Alcocer in a General Mills blog article that highlighted his ability to think way, way outside the box. “But our goal is to create a new solution to consumers’ needs.”
Building a Community
By taking a chance with cloud technology, General Mills is demonstrating how a large company can use innovative technology to directly engage with consumers and bring in new communities of customers.
The initial response to Gluten Freely was overwhelming, immediately generating the kind of consumer “buzz” that is highly valued by consumer products companies.
“In our first day, we had orders from more than 25 states; and of course, we now deliver to every state in the continental United States,” says Alcocer.
The entire platform scales so that General Mills can not only offer new business rapidly in North America but extend the solution into emerging markets as well. The service also helps reach customers who are in remote or rural locations and have limited access to well-stocked retail outlets.
The site has garnered a strong social media following. As of mid-October 2011, Gluten Freely touted upward of 96,000 Facebook likes and 900 Twitter followers.
As the site draws more consumers to the channel, the increased customer base draws more activity from partners and from competitors selling their products through Gluten Freely. This growing channel activity leads not only to more revenues, but also to more opportunities for deeper analytics by General Mills that can be used to drive the business forward.
Overall, quickly developing Gluten Freely using cloud technology from Microsoft laid a foundation for future business initiatives. The Gluten Freely site took about six months to develop. By comparison, its next venture, Betty Crocker’s Red Spoon Squad, took only three months to develop using the same Microsoft tools and technology. This time, a custom, touch-enabled application that runs on tablet PCs will be used by independent consultants to provide in-home cooking lessons using General Mills’ products and Gluten Freely recipes.
“That time will probably shrink even more for future efforts,” says Alcocer. “This is a huge competitive advantage for General Mills in terms of speed to market and the integrated analytics that can help drive new business models.”
“The General Mills New Ventures group has been tasked with creating new ways of doing business,” says Dom Alcocer, marketing manager of New Ventures, General Mills. “Through our entrepreneurial mind-set that we have in new ventures, we’ve been able to bring our new business ideas from concept to launch in much less than a year for far less money than we’d ever been able to before.”
A Consumer in Need
Ever attentive to new consumer and health trends, General Mills started noticing in 2008 that people who either must or choose to follow a gluten-free diet were having difficulty finding gluten-free products and information.
Gluten, a protein naturally found in grains, like wheat, barley and rye, can cause adverse reactions in some people, most notably, those who suffer from an autoimmune disorder called celiac disease. Medical experts estimate that 1 in 133 people have celiac disease. Many more people are believed to have some level of gluten sensitivity even without the disease.
Recognizing a need among the gluten-free community, General Mills started making and promoting a wide range of gluten-free products, such as Betty Crocker gluten-free desserts and reformulated Chex cereal products as well as gluten-free Bisquick and Hamburger Helper. The products hit it off big with their targeted consumers.
Yet, even with a strong portfolio of General Mills-branded, gluten-free products, the company felt that there was still room for improvement in the way in which it delivered these products and information to the public.
“We realized that people with celiac disease, and others who have some kind of gluten sensitivity or who just want to live a gluten-free lifestyle, were having particular difficulty in simply locating all of the great foods that they need to make this diet come to life for them,” says Alcocer. “They couldn’t find places to buy the products, and they had to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting through the Internet to find recipes and other information about gluten-free diets.”
Alcocer and his colleagues brainstormed some specific ideas about how to best tackle the problem. They wanted to quickly create and launch a direct-to-consumer online channel that would allow customers to buy gluten-free products directly from General Mills. And, in building the channel, they wanted to avoid the high costs and headaches of using traditional on-premise hardware and software that would require ongoing IT expense and maintenance.
Building a Channel
At General Mills, each aspect of developing, making, distributing, marketing and selling a product or solution is connected and collaborative. In line with its tried and true method of leveraging both internal and external resources, the company partnered with the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research, The University of Chicago celiac Disease Center and General Mills Bell Institute of Health & Nutrition to develop an ideal solution for gluten-free consumers.
On the technology front, another partnership with BrandJourney Venturing (www.brandjourneyventuring.com), a company specializing in developing entrepreneurial ventures from ideas to revenue in under 12 months, led to the decision to use the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft Corporation (www.
microsoft.com) to develop, host and support a cloud-based solution.
“Having a solution in the cloud is the most efficient way for us to build up capability, one consumer at a time, while saving dollars and time every step along the way,” says Alcocer.
Together, this network of partners proceeded to develop Gluten Freely, a one-stop Internet shop for the gluten-free community, in record time. The new business channel took about six months to develop using Microsoft Visual Studio tools and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Product and customer data is stored in Microsoft SQL Azure, a self-managed, multitenant relational cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. The solution also supports federated identity with social networking activity, prompting users to create a link when they log on to sites, like Facebook or Twitter.
Live since March 2011, Gluten Freely gives consumers access to a broad range of resources, including recipes, blogs, community forums, and medical facts about gluten along with coupons, a product locator, and an online store where they can choose from a selection of more than 400 gluten-free products, which are then shipped directly to the consumer’s door.
And in a surprising, consumer-centric twist, only 30 percent of the products sold on Gluten Freely are General Mills’ products. The remainder are offered by other companies, like LARABAR, Blue Diamond Growers and Better Batter, in an effort to provide the largest possible selection to consumers.
To stay relevant and continually evolve the site to meet its market’s needs, General Mills uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, a cloud-based version of the Microsoft enterprise sales and marketing software, for e-commerce analytics activities. Sales and marketing professionals now have a familiar user experience, enabling greater collaboration, streamlining of processes and access to real-time data that they can use to improve the experience for consumers who visit the site.
“Granted, GlutenFreely.com isn’t the typical, competitive way of marketing,” said Alcocer in a General Mills blog article that highlighted his ability to think way, way outside the box. “But our goal is to create a new solution to consumers’ needs.”
Building a Community
By taking a chance with cloud technology, General Mills is demonstrating how a large company can use innovative technology to directly engage with consumers and bring in new communities of customers.
The initial response to Gluten Freely was overwhelming, immediately generating the kind of consumer “buzz” that is highly valued by consumer products companies.
“In our first day, we had orders from more than 25 states; and of course, we now deliver to every state in the continental United States,” says Alcocer.
The entire platform scales so that General Mills can not only offer new business rapidly in North America but extend the solution into emerging markets as well. The service also helps reach customers who are in remote or rural locations and have limited access to well-stocked retail outlets.
The site has garnered a strong social media following. As of mid-October 2011, Gluten Freely touted upward of 96,000 Facebook likes and 900 Twitter followers.
As the site draws more consumers to the channel, the increased customer base draws more activity from partners and from competitors selling their products through Gluten Freely. This growing channel activity leads not only to more revenues, but also to more opportunities for deeper analytics by General Mills that can be used to drive the business forward.
Overall, quickly developing Gluten Freely using cloud technology from Microsoft laid a foundation for future business initiatives. The Gluten Freely site took about six months to develop. By comparison, its next venture, Betty Crocker’s Red Spoon Squad, took only three months to develop using the same Microsoft tools and technology. This time, a custom, touch-enabled application that runs on tablet PCs will be used by independent consultants to provide in-home cooking lessons using General Mills’ products and Gluten Freely recipes.
“That time will probably shrink even more for future efforts,” says Alcocer. “This is a huge competitive advantage for General Mills in terms of speed to market and the integrated analytics that can help drive new business models.”