Lessons from Betty Crocker Cake Mix
Tuesday, 16 August 2011 00:00
By Heidi Tolliver-Nigro
This is a story I heard at one of the recent trade shows. I wish I could remember who I heard it from or the details of the story, but I don’t. I’ve Googled it, too, and can’t find it. So please indulge me as I tell it from memory.
So the story goes, years ago in the early days of commercial cake mix, Betty Crocker wanted to increase sales of its cake mixes. Because its original mixes required women to add water and eggs, its marketing team figured it could increase sales by making the recipe even simpler. Powder the eggs and its customers would just have to add water. The idea was to appeal to busy moms who wanted great tasting cakes without the work.
Instead of boosting sales, the change tanked them. Why? Because busy or not, customers wanted to feel like they were baking from scratch. Just adding water wasn’t really “baking,” in the eyes of its customers, so the change — while simpler — made the mix less appealing. Betty Crocker put the requirement to add real eggs back in and sales bounced back up. Their customers felt that they were baking again.
What does this have to do with you? Betty Crocker made a mistake by not fully understanding what drove its customers and prospective customers to make purchasing decisions for its products. It knew its customers were mostly women. It knew that they were extremely busy, and it is likely that during this period many were going into the workforce for the first time. What the company didn’t know was what drove the specific purchase decisions for the products it was selling.
It is times like this when surveying your customers can really pay off. Whether it’s encouraging them to fill out a survey online, respond with a tear-out card, or respond using a personalized URL, sending out those surveys and soliciting their feedback helps you understand what makes them tick. Once you understand that, you can tweak your marketing message in a more powerful — and effective — way.
So whether you are launching a new product or marketing or repackaging something tried and true, maybe it’s time to take your customers’ temperatures again.
Heidi Tolliver-Nigro is an industry analyst specializing in digital, 1:1, personalized URLs, QR codes, and other marketing technologies as they apply to print. You can contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
