Mother's Cookies Getting a Rebirth Under Kellogg

Kellogg is hoping that it can leverage social media to bring a once-regional brand, Mother’s Cookies, national. The plan, which attempts to transfer buzz among Mother’s original fans from the West Coast and link the cookies in consumers’ minds to “moments of joy,” is devoid of traditional media like TV and print. The campaign started this month with a Facebook “cookie personality” quiz, scavenger hunt and a moving, collage-like mix of videos and photos now running on MothersCookies.com. WonderGroup, Cincinnati, collected the footage from a one-month tour of West Coast cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. In each case, consumers were given four different samples of Mother's Cookies and then asked to recount, on camera, their memories of eating the cookies.One man strummed a guitar while singing with a cookie in his mouth; another talked of how she and her friend had “stockpiled” Mother’s Cookies after learning that the company had ceased plant operations in October 2008. (The business went into bankruptcy under the ownership of Catterton Partners, a private equity group.) A third consumer professed her love of Mother’s Cookies mainly for their link back to childhood.WonderGroup chief creative officer Jeff Jones said the campaign was prompted by research which showed that most consumers didn’t know that Kellogg had brought the cookie brand this past May. “I lived in California for eight years, and this is a highly passionate brand that people grew up on,” Jones said, adding that one fan became so upset he started making T-shirts dedicated to Mother’s Cookies.In its research, WonderGroup also found the brand had 84 percent awareness on the West Coast, and 12 percent in eastern U.S. regions, so the trick, in bringing it back, was to leverage that connection, Keith Cheek, the agency’s chief development officer, said. And, unlike other snacks, Mother’s Cookies wasn’t a brand people ate to be happy. Consumers would eat it when they were happy, he said.The campaign, targeted at “cookie-loving adults” aged 30 to 54, builds off the insight that “when something loved is lost, the devotion to that item can be even stronger when it returns,” said Mother’s Cookies associate director Michael Toner. To that end, Kellogg has made the cookies available on Amazon.com, and it’s driving sales and usage occasion through online games such as a cookie hunt which takes consumers to different blogs to search for images of the cookies. When completed, a a fireworks explosion takes over the screen. The winner then receives a dollar-off coupon towards a bag of Mother’s Cookies, said WonderGroup account executive Meredith Miller-O’Brien, who worked on the launch.Sales of Mother’s Cookies, a $30 million brand, have declined since it’s had no appreciable spending since 2007, per data from IRI and Nielsen. (IRI’s data does not cover Walmart and Nielsen’s numbers exclude online spending.) Kellogg, though, sees the opportunity to take the brand national. “The response from customers has been very strong and we are pleased with the results so far…Mother’s has proved to be a complimentary fit [for] Kellogg,” Toner said.

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Mother's Cookies Getting a Rebirth Under Kellogg

Elaine Wong

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Elaine Wong