General Mills is launching a website where consumers can customize their breakfast cereals.
General Mills new website, mycereal.com, allows consumers to customize the cereals that they order based on their own health needs and taste preferences. The new system, which involves direct delivery of the individualized cereals, is intends to boost flagging sales of cereal in the US market.
Several cereal companies have been highly innovative in their use of the Internet as an interactive marketing tool. Mycereal.com is, however, much more ambitious and risky than its precedents. First, it requires a significant amount of customer input. Second, the products will be sold at the premium price of $1 per serving, in single serve containers. While this is not expensive compared to buying breakfast from a foodservice outlet, it does represent a considerable increase in the cost of eating breakfast at home. Finally, the venture requires customers to plan what they want to eat, which runs against the grain of current consumer trends. Initially, to offset this risk, the scheme will only be rolled out to a limited group of consumers.
Similar ventures show that mycereal.com’s success is far from guaranteed: Procter and Gamble-backed Reflect.com, which enables members to customize their cosmetics, has yet to break into the mainstream. Meanwhile, other schemes that have asked customers to plan consumption in advance have met with mixed success.
It is unlikely that General Mills venture will change current, general consumption patterns (a move towards one-handed meals, on-the-go) and behavior (eating out of the home). Its greatest success will be in providing the company with valuable data on what different consumers want to eat at home and who these consumers are. General Mills can use the site to assess the price sensitivity of its consumer base and drive its innovation in the grocery channel. This in turn could give it a valuable competitive advantage.
