'Most brands talk about winning, Kellogg’s talks about everyday achievements'

While the FMCG sector has been facing tough times, first due to COVID and then inflation and economic constraints, the breakfast cereal market in India is growing fast. A study says it reached Rs 4,000 cr in 2022, compared to Rs 3,500 crore in 2021. 

exchange4media caught up with Prashant Peres, Managing Director of Packaged food major Kellogg’s (South Asia), to understand the factors driving the sector, and their own marketing strategy to further penetrate the market. 

Kellogg’s entered the Indian market way back in 1994 with its corn flakes, wheat flakes and basmati rice flakes. It was the time when the Indian palette was considered to be a challenging one to crack due to the diversity of breakfast items in the country.

After a lukewarm response in the initial years, the US-based company started expanding its reach and gradually became the market leader. Kellogg’s currently focuses on strengthening its category presence and innovating products like upma and rainbow-coloured, ring-shaped breakfast cereal ‘Froot Loops’. 

Excerpts of the interview:  

What are the factors driving the growth of the breakfast cereal market in India?

The category did very well during covid times as a lot more people were staying at home and probably had the chance and the time to have a proper breakfast. The penetration levels for our own brands have remained high and grown even post-covid. I think the prime reason is that the category actually has a lot more relevance now than it did ever before.  The awareness and need for nutrition and nourishment are at heightened levels especially due to the pandemic. 

How would you assess the performance of Kellogg's India as a broader portfolio in the last year and which category has been the growth driver for you?

We hold a high share in the breakfast cereal category and we are very happy to say that we have grown along with this growth of the breakfast cereal category despite the fact that there have been so many new entrants coming into the market and small players being bought over by big players. 

We strengthen the category growth because that is our job as a market leader. We have this dual task that we have to grow the category and at the same time, we have to defend and share with so many other players. We have also seen growth in the top end which is the muesli and granola segments. Granola is a segment we've actually built really from scratch in recent years.

Our kids' portfolio is growing stronger every day. We've recently launched a new variant such as protein muesli. We earlier expanded the category by adding almond honey cornflakes which are doing well. There is tough competition in the segment. 

Who do you think is your biggest rival at present? 

Rather than naming specific players, I would cite the evolving market and changing ownership patterns as emerging challenges. Large companies have taken over smaller startup players. Then international players such as the likes of PepsiCo and Nestle are also playing in this market for quite some time. As an organization, we respect our competitors a lot. We respect them because we believe that competition will always open new opportunities. The potential of this market is Rs 4,000 crores. We believe this is a market which should double over the years to come. We are focussing on innovation and renovation to penetrate the market further. 

You have come up with two new campaigns-one is the Masterbrand Campaign ‘Kuch kar dikhaane ki bhookh’ for children, and another ‘Galat Sawaal’ with fitness enthusiast Milind Soman. Can you elaborate on the concept and messages behind them? 

Our Master brand campaign is the core of what Kellogg's stands for. It is a wonderful campaign crafted in partnership with an agency which has created some very iconic campaigns over the years. 

Another one is based on a mother who is sending her kid to school. She will always tell the kid to have a good breakfast and set off to school because an empty stomach is not right. That’s the insight we've used and twisted it a little bit to say that the hunger to win and the hunger to achieve something for the day is what Kellogg actually stands for. We are not a brand like all others that only talk about winning. I think the real win for any mother is knowing that her kids have achieved their best for that day. 

Too many brands only talk about winning, but we are talking about everyday achievements. The campaign has this cute girl who does a range of things which she loves to do. Some of them are academics, some are sports but some of it is only her own playful self. She loves to dance and you can see her having time and the energy to do that as well during the day. So this is what Kellogg's wants to stand for. 

The second campaign is a very specific one for our muesli category. Many people have not heard the muesli and often mispronounce it. The first thing that our muesli campaign aims to tell people is to tell them what goes in it. It is a multi-grain product which works better for our bodies than single grains. It also has a lot of fruits, nuts and seeds. This lovely campaign talks not only about the ingredients and kind of energy it gives you but it goes one step further to say that muesli is better because it doesn’t have certain things which are bad for health such as trans fats. Some muesli products don’t even have sugar.  Hence, we have roped in Milind Soman who's really been a fitness icon for Indians over many years including me. He seems ageless. In the campaign, he talks about what's not there in our products and therefore it makes such a good breakfast for somebody like him. With his level of fitness, he's going to accept nothing less than the best and that's what this campaign is about. 

What are your marketing strategies for both campaigns in 2023?

These campaigns are going to be mainly digital because that's where the audience for these products is sitting. We have very different strategies for the two campaigns. The first one will be one of these iconic campaigns and it's gonna run across the length and breadth of this country. It’s a campaign for kids but talking to moms because, in the end, it is the mom who wants to give a good start to her kids every day.

Kids love our products such as Chocos. While it's starting with a television commercial, it is not going to be

restricted to television alone.  You will see a lot of other interesting things happening around this. 

The strategy for the muesli and granola campaign is quite different. We are looking at sampling our products to

as many consumers as possible.  We promote our products sometimes with other categories through physical sampling in the top-end stores. Through campaigns, we would like to debunk any myths about muesli but more importantly, educate consumers about what really your muesli is. Therefore it's very digital and we are trying to be target focused on the profile of consumers. 

What are your expectations from the new products that have been launched recently and their contribution to overall revenue? 

We have Pringles which is an impulse category and breakfast cereals which is a much more planned category. New product launches in the breakfast cereal take a longer time to build because you build them household by household habit by habit. We hope our new product launches grow at almost 2x the rate of our base growth and therefore they have to accelerate and be very incremental to the portfolio. 

How has your media mix evolved over the past three years with the advent of new media platforms and evolving consumption patterns? 

The media landscape as well as the consumption landscape is changing quite a lot in India. The biggest is the emergence of digital commerce. Within that is e-commerce as a channel of purchase and also as a channel of media consumption. Consumers are spending more time with social media platforms engaging with the digital world almost as much as they engage, especially at the top end. Youth are beginning to engage with these forms of media as much, if not more than, the traditional media vehicles like TV and print.

We've tried to be ahead of the curve right at all times by challenging ourselves with experimentation, testing and learning. We have done a lot of things in the e-commerce space and run a lot of new things in the digital media space to stay ahead of the curve and reach out to consumers in ways which are more and more relevant today. 

Our contribution to e-commerce is probably among the highest among food brands. Our spends on e-commerce has doubled over the last two years. The rest of our spends has not grown in the same proportion. For products like muesli granola portfolio, it's a very very significant part because that is targeted at a set of consumers we believe are more on digital than on traditional media. But our biggest brand is still Chocos and the target audience for that is moms and there the television media still plays a very huge role.