While it’s “really in the DNA of the Special K brand to represent women effectively and consistently and accurately,” there’s a direct impact on the brand’s sales as well, according to Special K Marketing Director Christie Crouch. “When we represent women and families equitably, it’s just more relatable to more people,” Crouch says in this interview with Beet.TV.
In 2017, Kellogg became involved with the #SeeHer initiative of the Association of National Advertisers, starting with its Special K brand. The ANA launched #SeeHer in the summer of 2016 to encourage a more accurate portrayal of all girls and women in media, as Advertising Age reports.
“What I’m really proud of is beyond Special K we have embedded the #SeeHer thinking across all the brands within Kellogg and have really embraced the #SeeHer principles to influence all of our marketing,” Crouch says.
During Advertising Week 2018 in New York City earlier this month, Kellogg announced that it had submitted its Special K “Own It” campaign to be evaluated with the ANA’s Gender Equality Measure (GEM) score, which is used to quantify consumer reaction to the treatment of women in advertising and programming. IRI then leveraged its IRI Lift solution to uncover correlations between the Kellogg advertisements’ GEM scores and offline sales lift.
Just knowing that Special K ads scored very well with its GEM scores was “a huge step in really validating and understanding how we were going to market as a brand and building our capabilities as a creative team,” Crouch explains.
The IRI research showed that Special K ads with the highest sales lift had the highest GEM scores, whereas ads that generated the lowest sales lift had the lowest. Moreover, the highest sales lift occurred when advertisements appeared during commercial breaks of TV shows with above-average GEM scores.
“We’re really seeing that brands that take a distinct point of view on reflecting the vales of a huge segment of our population, we’re connecting our brand benefits to the values of consumers much more effectively than we have in the past,” says Crouch. “So we’re thrilled to say that when we have high-testing GEM scores, we’ve seen a significant increase in our brand sales.”
You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.
