Brand Reinvention Deep-Dive: How Conagra is Taking the Cake to the Next Level

Welcome back to Strategic Marketing Insights!

This week, we're excited to be taking a deep-dive into Conagra's brand reinvention strategy. Take an iconic, if a little dated, name in cake baking. Stir in a tonne of purchase and behavioral data. Add in cultural anthropology techniques and a jobs-to-be-done framework to identify an unsolved consumer problem. Whip in a bit of Dolly Parton influencer effect, and what do you get? A completely reinvented brand that would make Duncan Hines, the man who put his name to the preprepped cake mix back in the 1950s, proud.

Sharing insights at Strategic Marketing 2022, Ashley Lind, Senior Director, Consumer Insights, Predictive Science at Conagra Brands, said Duncan Hines’s refreshed success was the result of the American packaged food company’s continued search for “pockets of growth”. What the group had learned, she said, was that consumers today wanted to recreate the “epic” baking experiences being offered by popular bakeries.

However, social and recipe data – hashtags like #cakefail and #bakingfail – revealed that this was easier said than done. It was clear, said Lind, that there was an “attractive area of demand, as well as a clear problem to solve” but also a significant opportunity to not only “unlock portfolio modernization, but also ‘premiumization’”.

Step one in this brand reinvention process was to update existing base baking mixes. From there, new premium products were launched, such as a range of ‘Epic’ baking kits to cater to a variety of possible demands: cakes for modern health to keto lifestyle mixes.

As Lind explained, these moves have liberated the brand from its one-dollar price point and are now selling at five times within the category. Going further still, Conagra also worked on a collection with Dolly Parton’s team to “augment cultural relevance” and harness the influencer effect. This included creating a limited-edition brand box, with all the “good ol’ southern favorites”, that was only available directly through DuncanHines’s website. According to Conagra’s Mathews, this wasn’t simply transactional, it was about building a community, as evidenced by the data:

? Seven minutes – the time it took for the limited-edition box to sell out

? 70,000 – the number of people searching for the next box

? 50,000 – the people that joined the new Duncan Hines baking community from zero, and this is forecast to grow to a million

Don't miss the next Dolly Drop - you can check out the limited edition Dolly collection next week.

Stay tuned for more Strategic Marketing Insights!

Issy Paul

Global Project Director

Strategic Marketing

She/Her

Reuters Events