Sara Lee Drives Brand Growth by Leveraging Shopper Insights

Shopper insights have been on the radar screen of most CPG companies for several years.
But being aware of the wants, needs and motivations of shoppers is only the first step on the long road to success. Acting decisively on that information remains the key.

That’s the roadmap used by Sara Lee which credits its insights culture for building brands
such as Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm and Ballpark. This carefully-nurtured culture ensures
that strategies and marketing initiatives are grounded in consumer and shopper observation and feedback.


“Consumer and shopper insights drive strategies,” said Philippe Schaillee, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Sara Lee North America. “They drive our initiatives, and they drive all of our decisions. We consistently ask the ‘why’ question. If we cannot answer the ‘why’ question, we have to go back to the drawing board. We have to go back to the consumer. We have to go back to the shopper.”

Indeed, Schaillee said that his cross-functional teams need to see or hear from consumers in their normal consumer habitats. They need to observe consumers or shop along with them in a retail store.

He listed four critical pillars to the Sara Lee way of marketing:

Be disciplined and prioritize resources against the right brands and categories in the portfolio
Be extremely targeted in marketing
Focus on incremental innovation
Leverage category leadership platforms to simplify the shopping experience and drive meaningful category growth.

“There are tremendous benefits to properly assessing the potential and the role of each brand in our portfolio and maximizing the value of our portfolio,” Schaillee explained in a presentation recently in San Antonio at conference hosted by Symphony/IRI Group. He outlined how Sara Lee divides its brand portfolio into thee parts:

Strategic Investment Brands such as Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage and Hillshire Farm merit substantial investment because they have the greatest potential for growth.

Support & Grow Brands like Ballpark – potentially the next Strategic Investment brands – receive solid levels of investment. However, they don’t have the overall growth projections of the Strategic Investment brands.

Sustain Other brands in the portfolio have received lower investment, but posted sales growth for improved profitability.

“Jimmy Dean is a prime example of how compelling, differentiating insights, targeted marketing, a powerful sequence of innovation in products and packaging, and a collaborative category-centric approach with retailers can lead to tremendous, consistent growth,” he said. “In other words: insights, innovation, impact.”

He said Sara Lee for a long time defined the competitive set of its iconic brand as other breakfast sausage brands – and that market share was gained within that competitive set.
However, the “big revelation” came when studying the broader breakfast landscape.

“We learned that we only represent 0.7% of all breakfast occasions,” he said. “That was absurd! We finally understood that we had blindfolds on and that the opportunity was so
much larger.”

So Sara Lee studied the need states across the breakfast landscape which led to an insight to target the strongest opportunity for long term volume growth. That target consumer was the “Chaotic Compromiser.”

“This person juggles raising kids, tending to the household, and likely has an out-of-home job,” Schaillee said. “She is often already a Jimmy Dean consumer as well as the household’s primary shopper. This person has defaulted to frozen breakfast items because they are inexpensive, consistent, easy to prepare and frankly because her whole family likes them – especially the kids.

“But this leaves her dissatisfied,” he continued, “because she has two fundamental, unaddressed needs that go into her family’s breakfast. She really wants a breakfast that her family can afford, and she has a need for sustainable energy for herself and for her family. They want a breakfast that will last until lunch, not something that gives them an empty feeling in their stomach early on in the morning. That’s where Jimmy Dean comes in by providing a hot, protein-based breakfast.”

To set its marketing objectives, Sara Lee worked with the Symphony/IRI Group on such
topics as household penetration, buy rate, loyalty, and an aggressive but achievable timeline. In addition, telling the Chaotic Compromiser about the benefits of Jimmy Dean for her family was a priority. This was done via print, web, social media and in-store messaging and on-shelf coupons.

Schaillee explained that one final step was needed beyond a focus on insights, targets, messaging, and path to purchase. To continue to grow penetration, Sara Lee needed to address some key barriers that held some consumers back from purchasing Jimmy Dean brands.

“So over the last seven years, we have been able to drive sustainable growth through product innovation,” he said. “It doubled the size of our brands, and it transformed the category growth rates. You will see much more in the coming years from this brand from an innovation aspect.

“We determined consumers were looking for a convenient weekend breakfast experience,” he continued. “That’s how the Breakfast Bowls were born. We learned that some consumers craved really that hot, protein breakfast, but they were concerned about calories. No problem! That’s how the D-Lights came into the market.”

Beyond product innovation, new packaging and value proposition can radically change consumers’ consideration of brands and translate into a purchase, according to Schaillee.

“So we learned that more shoppers would buy our products if we would offer a four- and an eight-count package instead of a two- and a six-count,” he said. “That’s pretty straightforward, right? But to get to that, we had to test probably a hundred types of combinations with some proprietary ROI tools to really make sure that we would get to the right packaging combinations and the right price points.

“As we reinvented our Jimmy Dean sandwich line,” he went on to explain, “we introduced new products into the marketplace and conducted virtual store testing with one of our preferred partners. We wanted to ensure that we could partner with retailers to ensure category growth, not just add more products on the shelf. That’s what it’s all about.”

He said the overall frozen breakfast category benefited the most from allocating space,
adjusting product adjacencies, and reducing SKUs. Significant increases in facings for frozen protein breakfasts drove overall category improvement.

“Innovation in product, packaging and value proposition [led to] sustainable growth,” Schaillee summed up. “We know that because of the growth rates that we’ve seen over the last two and a half to three years in our business. And we drive category impact. We do that through great cooperation with our retail partners leveraging our category leadership platforms.”

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