Advertising Media 3303

Final Project: Kashi Frozen Pizza

Members:
Rita de Obarrio, Gabriele Petrylaite, Cooper Wildeson, Lucas Crespo

Date:

December 10, 2016

Kashi Frozen Pizza

Plan Summary

This report provides an analysis of the problems that Kashi Frozen Pizza is facing against its competitors and why they are currently not in the top 10 in the frozen pizza industry.  Secondary research was conducted to gather key business insights on the brand Kashi and their current marketing strategy. The competition in the frozen pizza market industry is high and the way that Kashi is positioning itself in the market as being natural and organic is confusing customers and not reaching the right target audience. Additionally, since Kashi does not currently spend a lot of money on advertising and only gets exposure from the least expensive mediums, they are unable to reach the amount of consumers that their competition reaches. Kashi Pizza must not only expand their category to fit a larger target market, but at least half of the growth must come out of the competition’s business.

By evaluating the target audience, competition, and past creative and media backgrounds of Kashi, we were able to conclude with a solution for Kashi and its creative and marketing strategy. This is for the purpose of building awareness for the overall brand and enticing consumers to purchase Kashi Frozen Pizza over its competition. We plan to advertise Kashi on a variety of mediums, such as outdoor, radio, magazine, and digital through a year-long campaign to target health-conscious individuals.

The Problem
        Kashi faces the problem of the lack of familiarity among consumers with the actual brand and the brand extension of frozen pizza as compared to its competitors. There is a blurry difference between the definition of the words “organic and natural,” which illustrate Kashi’s brand and this confuses consumers (See Figure 1.0).  Additionally, Kashi does not advertise on many traditional media and focuses primarily on digital advertising, which limits the audience they are able to reach, and overall they do not spend a lot of money on advertising. Thus, their current marketing strategy does not fully reach the intended target audience since Kashi chooses to focus their media mix into the most exposure for the least amount of money, which would be through Newspaper and Radio. Their competitors have larger advertising budgets and use that money to get more exposure through mediums of Television and Magazines.  

    Figure 1.0

Target Research

In terms of the target audience for frozen Kashi pizza, we found that potential consumers could include those who buy frozen pizza, frozen food, organic pizza, pizza, Kashi pizza, organic food and natural food. Thus, the Kashi target market will most likely buy these pizzas in grocery stores, since around 62% of shoppers who buy organic food do so in grocery stores (The Food Institute Report 2001). According to Statista in 2015, 70.3 million people living in households used frozen pizza in the last 7 days, out of the population for 2015 that was 244.19 million people. Lastly, potential consumers have been found to be attracted to “single-serve pizzas,” since they serve as an alternative for snacks (Friedman 2008).

We interpreted MFP data in order to determine our target consumers after analyzing practical shoppers and segments of frozen pizza. From the data, we’d like to focus on the following target columns: Frozen Pizza consumers, which make up 51.31%, and Heavy Frozen Pizza consumers, which make up 16.8%. We will focus on people with active lifestyles because they represent a great portion of our health-conscious target audience. Additionally, we will focus on Kashi Cereal users because they would most likely be interested in buying more Kashi products. In terms of gender, we would target primarily women because they have a higher percentage in all three categories of people who eat frozen pizza, lead a fitness lifestyle, and buy Kashi cereal as their primary cereal brand. Out of both men and women for those categories, women had a higher percentage of 73.3%. However, men cannot be ignored because they represent a significant percentage as well, but they will not be the prime focus of our target audience. For age, we decided to look at people ages 25 to 54 because they have the highest percentage of usage among the three categories (frozen pizza, lead a fitness lifestyle, and buy Kashi cereal as their primary cereal brand). Any additional marketing budget could be addressed to the remaining age groups. Women younger than 24 do not even represent more than 11.1% for each of these categories, along with women older than 54 who only represent 18% for each category. Therefore, we chose to focus on women ages 25-54 who represent more than 20% for each of the categories mentioned above.

In terms of media that would reach our target audience, we would give magazines a medium to high weight since the middle quintiles have high index numbers and additionally, the heavy quintiles have above 100, which is higher than average, index numbers all of the three categories (frozen pizzas, lead a fitness lifestyle, and buy Kashi cereal as their primary cereal brand). We would on the other hand, give TV low weight because the three categories show high index numbers in the light TV quintiles.

Target Profile: Clarissa White                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Clarissa is a 42-year old mother of two who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Sports Management from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently the CEO of the yoga studio CorePower Yoga. Clarissa lives an active lifestyle and is constantly reading Food and Nutrition magazines. She prefers to learn from magazines rather than from TV with regards to nutrition. Clarissa is interested in organic and natural products and recipes to cook for herself, and for her children. Since she works from 8 A.M. until 5 P.M. she finds it hard to be able to cook every day; therefore, she sometimes relies on frozen food when it comes to feeding her children and her family. However, since Clarissa is conscious about what she and her family eats, she looks for frozen alternatives that offer healthy and natural ingredients.

Market Information

Competition in the frozen pizza market industry is extreme and Kashi Pizza is not one of the top 10 industry leaders. The leader in sales of frozen pizza brands of the United States in 2016 is DiGiorno, which is owned by Nestlé, at $1,009.3 million in sales. The second most ranked pizza was by Red Baron Pizza at $597 million (See Figure 1.0). In terms of frozen pizza consumers in millions in 2016, DiGiorno has 40.29 million consumers, followed by Red Baron at 16.2 million consumers. (Statista 2016).

                       Figure 1.0 Sales of the leading frozen pizza brands of the United States in 2016.  Source: © Statista 2016 

The top 5 markets that we choose to give greater advertising weight to are Dallas, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland and Tampa, as shown in Table 1.0 below. Our process for choosing the top 5 markets included sorting the markets based on the highest EV% and then out of the top 20 EV% markets, choose markets based on highest category development index (CDI), followed by ranking the brand development index (BDI). We chose this criterion because we wanted to take into account both markets with a high category index and brand index and thought it would be wise to make sure that these markets had a high estimated value. This is designed to find the top markets in categories and brands that would choose to buy frozen Kashi pizza and pursue a healthy lifestyle. Additionally, these large cities include many natural and organic stores that sell organic products, such as Kashi.

Table 1.0 Top 5 Markets for Kashi

Creative and Media Background

Kashi has focused on the “all-natural” aspect and the fact that their products include “Seven whole grains on a mission” in their advertisements to appeal to an audience concerned about health and real ingredients. Kashi also emphasizes the fact that they have “green” packaging for their products.  Their products primarily get sold at natural food grocery stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Kashi products are nutritious, yet they are slightly more expensive for consumers.

In terms of Kashi’s current audience versus its competitors’ audiences, consumers of our competitors’ who are leading frozen pizza sales (Totino’s Party Pizza, TombStone, Digiorno, etc.) are not worried about natural and organic ingredients, as Kashi’s consumers are; rather, they are looking for convenience and product quality (See Figure 4.0).  An example of a Kashi advertisement below for one of its product line extensions shows how much emphasis is placed on being organic and doing good for the world (See Figure 3.0).

      Figure 4.0 Kashi’s important claims: ALL NATURAL, 11g Whole Grains. 

              Figure 3.0 Kashi Cereal advertisement

As of August 2016, Kashi has taken a new look at their core business model and decided that they want to be a part of a market category that would “impact the lives of farmers and consumers, and promote sustainable farming” (Chan 2016). Since less than 1% of farmland in the United States is organic, Kashi has created an initiative that allows consumers to help increase organics by purchasing products that are marked Certified Transnational to help provide more financial assistance to farmers. Kashi’s new initiative is being used as a way of advertising to their target market of healthy conscious people who want to eat healthy and save the planet. Figure 5.0 below shows insight on the plan that Kashi has in their marketing strategy.

Figure 5.0 Increasing Organics Initiative

In addition, below are some advertisements and promotional activities of Kashi’s competitors showcasing the differences in their pizza advertising creatives as opposed to Kashi’s. From these advertisements, Kashi could be inspired to incorporate ideas from the leaders of the frozen pizza market and does not have to shy away from trying to be all natural and organic. These competitor brands can actually bring ideas to Kashi. For example, TombStone’s promotion of offering consumers coupons for movie tickets can be incorporated in Kashi’s creative strategy where they can introduce coupons for free fitness classes which is an activity that their target market is interested in.

Competitor's Advertisement Examples:

Figure 6.0 Compilation of Competitor Pizza Ads

Competitor’s Promotional Activities:

Figure 7.0 Compilation of Competitor Promotions

For Kashi’s website appeals, they promote their brand personality through their website, instead of a single food or product or category. In contrast, DiGiorno, the leader in frozen pizza sales,  does not promote their brand, but promotes a single category on their website: frozen pizza. Below are examples of the front pages of both Kashi.com and DiGiorno.com, Figure 8.0 and Figure 9.0.

Figure 8.0 Kashi Website

Figure 9.0 DiGiorno Website

Months in which frozen pizza sales are popular among consumers and when sales spike are during sports seasons, during winter, and during the summer. The sports season has a huge impact on pizza’s sales increase. According to Super Bowl’s food statistics, there’s a tremendous rise in pizza consumption on Super Bowl Sunday (Super Bowl Statistics 2016). Frozen foods are a seasonal department and the department tends to show some seasonality during the summer months and also in March, which is known as National Frozen Food Month. Frozen food sales increase during the summer months due to the weather and especially when school is out for kids and students. Additionally, in terms of fall and the colder months, pizza tends to have a very busy sales season because people are less likely to go out to eat dinner in the cold weather, so they stock up at home with frozen pizzas (Avant 2011).  

SWOT Analysis

Below is a table that analyzes the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that the brand of Kashi, and specifically its frozen pizza product line extension is facing.

Table 2.0 SWOT Analysis

The Solution: Creative Strategy

Our creative strategy would revolve around the purpose of this campaign, which is to get adult women that are generally more health conscious to consider Kashi Pizza as a healthy, convenient and organic alternative to traditional meals. This will be achieved by creating a year-long campaign with more emphasis during the football season that highlights the nutritional value and convenience and accessibility of this frozen pizza. The campaign’s main objective is to position Kashi in the same level as ordering food out or even cooking, so that it becomes  reasonable and great alternative to traditional food. The tone of the advertisement is light and quick, dropping different nutritional facts that differentiates Kashi from its competition, which makes the mood of the ads are supposed to be more relatable to the consumers by showing how simple it is to eat healthy. The image would primarily  focus on natural and organic ingredients that are attractive to the target audience with an addition of promotional messages that will entice consumers to try the product or repurchase Kashi Frozen Pizza.

Media Objectives

Target Audience Objectives

Our primary target audience includes health-conscious women and moms who want to give their family a healthy alternative. If we are able to communicate the competitive benefits of our product and move our target audience to the trial phase of the purchase process, we will be able to convert them. Our ultimate goal is to raise awareness among our target audience, and through awareness and trial, the healthy attributes and good taste of the product will create loyal customers and generate sales.

Reach, Frequency, and GRP Objectives

In order to accurately predict the frequency of our advertising messages and build awareness and preference among our target population we used Ostrow’s Model of Effective Frequency (See Table 3.0).

Table 3.0: Ostrow’s model of Effective Frequency

After summing all the points in Ostrow’s model of effective frequency we obtain a result of 1.0, the model then requires that we add 3.0 to the result, and our final effective frequency is 4.0. Additionally, we want to reach as much of our target audience as possible while simultaneously avoiding over-serving and thereby overpaying for our reach. So we decided, and according to MFP,  that a moderate reach of 75% would satisfy our goals with the minimum amount of waste. With all of this said we are expecting to reach by the end of our campaign at least more than 1000 Gross Rating Points, the specifics of it will be discussed later on in the campaign media spending flowchart.

Geographic Objectives

Our 75% reach will account for our national coverage, and will be combined with specific spot buys in specific markets. These geographic regions were evaluated and chosen based on their EV%, CDI, and BDI. The markets we chose specifically to target are; Dallas-Ft. Worth, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Tampa-St. Pete. Grocery stores that are popular in these metropolitan cities and that sell organic and natural products are Whole Foods, Central Market, and Trader Joe’s. Kashi products and Kashi Frozen Pizza are prime products to be sold at these stores.

Alternative Media Selection

To supplement our campaign we chose to utilize Shazam as an alternative media. Shazam will reach our target demographic as it appeals to almost everyone and as older generations become more tech savvy, they will learn about the beneficial new features, like QR code coupons which appeal to the shopping style of our target audience.  Shazam fits with the Kashi brand and frozen pizza market, as they are both utilitarian in nature and widely appealing.

With the use of Shazam, Kashi will be able to expand its message and more effectively convert audience attention to sales. Today, consumers tend use their smartphone the majority of the time they are interacting with other media, and this trend of simultaneous, multi-screen media consumption makes the use of Shazam more advantageous as an alternative media. Ideally, by using Shazam, our target audience will pay more attention to our message, and feel that is more relevant, by incorporating both screens in conveying our ad message. Specifically, Shazam could be used to reinvent coupons thereby encouraging trial of our product, or at least have a more lasting impression on our target audience's memory to encourage trial later.

As an alternative medium, Shazam is exceptionally effective in enhancing our campaign. Today, consumers are bombarded by advertising and distracted by multiple screens, Shazam will make our overall campaign more cohesive by reinforcing  our message in a variety of ways. For example, the radio component of our campaign normally has a very short message life and low levels of information recall, however by using Shazam, the relevant information is highlighted and can be used more effectively later. Similarly, with Shazam’s new visual recognition capabilities, magazine ads are no longer limited to the edges of the paper, various offerings can instantly be converted into digital and used at a later time. 

Shazam is used by over 100 unique people every month in the United States, its widespread user base therefore mitigates the importance of specific geographic objectives for the alternative medium. However, the use of Shazam in concert with our other ads, is completely up to the discretion of the consumer, which we hope will help improve brand image as it is less invasive. The Shazam feature our campaign would only last from September to February (this is when football season begins and ends). Because the cost of Shazam campaigns range from $75k-$200k and last several months, we decided to use it exclusively during our highest converting months with an option to expand given our remaining budget.

Media Strategies

We crafted a 12 month campaign for Kashi that has both continuous and flighting media components. The campaign is set to start on September 1st, 2017 and will end on August 31st, 2018.  Below, there is a flowchart laying out the entire campaign month-to-month.

Figure 10.0  Kashi All Natural Pizza 12-month campaign Flowchart

Our plan, as shown above in Figure 10.0, is divided up into 3 phases and they are divided according to the respective media weight given to each month. The first phase would be from September 1st, when football season begins to December 31, 2017, and during those months the media spending would be moderate. The highest quantity of pizza sales often happen during these months based on factors such as convenience and tradition. During football season, pizza is the easiest and most widely accepted choice of food to cater to large amounts of people at game time watch parties and similar occasions.  During this initial phase we will buy 40 GRPs across Radio, another 40 GRPs for Magazines, then 41 GRPS in between Digital national and Digital spot. This means that for each month of this phase at least 120 GRPS are required to stay inside our marketing plan. This first phase in the flowchart does not take into account the GRPS obtained from Shazam or from Outdoors.  

Heavier media spending will be needed for the second phase, as it is the most crucial time in terms of sales, in our campaign. This phase needs heavier media spending because it will take place during the last two months of football season, January 1st all the way to February 28, 2018, which culminates with the Super Bowl and our most important time of year in terms of quantity of pizza sold.  Additionally, during winter, people tend to be less conscious about their physical appearance, in part because of the clothing style, and lifestyle. Consumers are less worried about fitness and developing a “summer body” and thus more likely to incorporate pizza into their regular diet. Therefore, we would like to spend heavily during winter months and back to school months , in hopes that we reach 220 GRP’s each month.

Our third phase covers the remainder of the year. It will start on March 1st and end on August 31,2018 . During these months the media spending weight will be very light in comparison to the rest of the year, only attempting to reach 40 GRPs each month with the exception of May. The month of May is an exception because it is beginning of summer, and we want to remind mothers that Kashi is still a relevant brand and a tasty alternative meal for their children or whole family when time is short. During May, our goal is to reach 119 GRPs.

                   Figure 11..0  Budget Distribution

Our initial Total Budget was of $12,000,000. The Total cost of our year-long campaign is $11,937,900 with a remaining $62,100 leftover overall for additional expenses. Figure 11.0 above shows our budget distribution and the budget was distributed through all of our media buys in the following way: On Radio (e.g. KHKS-FM – 106.1 Kiss FM), $628,800 were spent total and we are only buying space for the morning drive and evening drive dayparts of the medium since these is the time that most people are tuning in to listen radio broadcasting since these are the times in which people drive to and from work. On  Magazines we are spending $1,613,400 and only buying space in both: Women’s Magazines (e.g. Vogue, People) because that is our target profile’s gender,  and in General Interest Magazines (e.g. Reader’s Digest, Time). We are also buying space in  nationally distributed newspapers for $1,594,000. Then our most expensive media buy is OOH (Out of Home or Outdoors), these are billboards and signs (e.g. Airport Billboards, Sports Events) that will take $3,749,500 from our budget. We are also going to be spending $2,411,500 for national digital buys such as in Targeted websites (e.g. Yelp, Craigslist), mobile, social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), video publisher sites (Hulu, Amazon Prime) and video networks (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo). In addition to buying national digital buys we want to get specific with our targeting and will spend $88,900 to reach more directly our top 5 spot markets. Lastly, as mentioned above, we will take advantage of Shazam’s reach and interactivity and will buy branding space just for our 1st phase and 2nd phase of our flowchart. This will cost us a total of $780,000. Additionally, we’d like to exclude any sort of TV spending since it seems to be the case that this media receives the least amount of attention among our target market.

In summary, we feel confident that our creative strategy and media strategy for Kashi All Natural Pizza are strong enough and work well together as they boost the synergy in between all the individual components of our campaign plan.  By the time our campaign has ended we expect to have revived the Kashi All Natural Pizza brand in our target profile’s mind and manage to increase its sales in the by the end of 2018.

Our comprehensive plan identified opportunities within the brand category, a unique selling position as a healthy frozen food alternative that could sell especially well during winter, specifically around football season. Our plan will efficiently utilize Kashi’s available budget to advertise Kashi on a variety of mediums, centered around digital and make unique use of Shazam as a supporting alternative media,  to target an underserved market of health conscious professional women. Ultimately, our creative and media strategy will effectively build awareness for the Kashi brand, leading to an increase in Kashi’s market share and eventually higher profits.

References

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        consumed/.

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