Monica McGurk, Global Chief Growth Officer, Kellogg’s

The past year and a half has been characterized largely by disruption. What are the big success stories for your brand over the last 12 months?

Set against the backdrop of the global pandemic, social inequality, the war for talent and the call for companies to do more about climate change, we unveiled our new vision and purpose. Our vision is a good and just world where people are not just fed but fulfilled. Our purpose is to create better days and a place at the table for everyone. This beautiful articulation of what we stood for really encapsulates not just our history, but our future. With the commitment to helping 3 billion people have better days by the end of 2030, that sense of purpose and mission has been activated within our brands since last year.

We’re creating opportunities within the community in a way that infuses cultural relevance and greater sensitivity into the way we develop our foods. We’ve brought inclusiveness to life through things like packaging with NaviLens technology, which makes cereal packaging available to the sight impaired. Similarly, we’ve invested in a wonderful initiative called the “Chef in Residence” program, which aims to create career advancement opportunities for black chefs who are underrepresented in food R&D.

Additionally, our brands have their own activations in purpose: Movember and Mr. P., Black Girls Run with Special K, the way we’ve articulated and gone to market with Pop Tarts more recently, celebrating ‘Dia de los Muertos’, and doing it in a way that we’ve got beautiful Mexican folk art on the food. We’ve paired it with donations to youth and community focused arts organizations in the Hispanic community around the United States.

Your brand is very close to consumers – you sit on their tables every day. What’s your perspective on the evolving consumer? How is your brand responding to changing consumer perceptions and attitudes?

Consumers are looking for a delicious experience that’s either going to fulfill their functional needs or their desire for great taste. I think that a personal affinity with the brand and what it signals about me is something that has morphed over time, and that the ethical value of brands is top of mind for a lot of consumers.

In our industry we sometimes think that this is about a socio-economic tier, or just a certain segment of consumer, and I think that’s a mistake. I believe there’s a sea change in expectation. When we look at our data, we see the value of trust and ethics, there is a shifting ethos that talks about how people are looking for more transparency and authenticity. The audio and the visual have to match, and because of the world of transparency that we live in, it’s very easy for a brand to get called out

.For us, it is all about the conservation efforts that we pledged to make and deliver around the world. It’s about working to support and sustain a million farmers as they move towards things like regenerative agriculture. It’s about the food donations and the efforts we make to delivering nutritional enhancement in our food, attacking hidden hunger directly. We have one of the lowest plastic packaging footprints in our industry, 79% of our packaging volume overall is recyclable and we have commitments to keep driving that number higher. We think and talk a lot about how we engage our community quite broadly to be culturally relevant and part of the solutions that are needed for communities to have a sustainable food system.

It’s not a CSR initiative; it’s in our DNA. It gets back to our founder and his vision for having affordable, accessible and nutritional food available around the world.

We see the value of trust and ethics, there is a shifting ethos that talks about how people are looking for more transparency and authenticity.

Increasingly, we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brand’s commercial landscape, and that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Do you see yourself playing outside of what would have been the “traditional” financial services category?

It’s never been a more exciting or challenging time to be a marketer. Succeeding now as a brand is about winning share of mind and hearts of customers in truly authentic ways. It’s no longer about brilliant advertising or defining yourself by a category, it’s about engaging customers in the places and through the passions they care about. It’s also about delivering a product or a service that adds value to their life in a consistent, trustworthy, frictionless, and delightful way. I think the brands that are doing that the best have a deep commitment to consumer insights, and then create the communication channels with customers where those insights can add value to customers’ daily lives. The other thing from a category perspective, if you look at the changes in customer behavior, commerce, technology, payment, and financial services are all converging. The brands that are winning in this space, really know the customers the best and use that insight to deliver delightful customer experiences consistently.

In times of great turbulence, purpose is a grounding for resilience and it gives people a reason to get up and go that extra mile every day.

For so many of the businesses with whom we interact, the competitive landscape has shifted. How do you characterize your competition today?

In the food industry the category lines are blurring, and it’s where a lot of innovation is taking place. The category is less relevant than the occasion in which someone is eating. We have a big investment in proprietary consumer occasions data around the world, where we can peel the onion on how people are eating, or why they’re eating what they’re eating throughout the day and over periods of time. That is the great font of insight for how we communicate about our foods, or the type of innovation that we need to bring to create a seat at the table for everyone.

That sort of insight led us to launch our cereal snacks business in the United States, Jumbo Snax, which has been a fantastic growth driver with our retailers and has brought new households into the category. It’s a wonderful innovation that basically created its own category, and it’s all driven around that insight on cereal snacking. I think it’s great to reframe your competitive set in the market that you’re in, because as you do that, you open up new avenues for growth.

Is there anything you’re looking at on the horizon in terms of trends or where the business is going?

The culinary adventurism in our population is currently high. Culinary adventure as an escape during the pandemic is one reason, but I think it’s also due to the multicultural and inclusive society that we’re in. So, bringing that to life in flavor profiles and creating little pockets of really interesting, cross cultural food experiences is something that we’re already leaning into, and I expect will accelerate in the next five years.

From a more technical side, we know that there’s a lot of burgeoning research around the impact of the microbiome and gut health on your overall health, your mental well-being or your physical health. It’s an area that’s ripe for further research. And then of course, sustainable materials. With all of the focus on climate change and environmental sustainability, there’s so much innovation going on there. That’s another place that from a technical and marketing standpoint, we will be looking at.