How General Mills’ Partnership With Fetch is Solving Major CPG Challenges

 

On March 15 at 1:00 PM ET, Fetch CEO Wes Schroll and General Mills Chief Brand and Disruptive Growth Officer Doug Martin will sit down for a LinkedIn Live event to discuss the rapidly shifting consumer environment. In today’s shopper landscape, growing brand loyalty is essential to meeting business objectives. Join this event to learn how General Mills worked with Fetch to foster brand love with its new Good Rewards program, a loyalty club with provable incremental success.

Interested in learning more about the General Mills partnership with Fetch? Check out the below article from August, 2022.

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Retailers, restaurants, and even grocery stores have long laid claim to the rewards-program space. But for CPG companies that work with disparate retailers across dozens of brands, forging a direct incentive program with customers has been a major hurdle.

The challenge of instituting such a program even impacts one of the largest CPG brands in the US, General Mills. In their quest to build a better connection with their customers, and better connect their portfolio of brands under one umbrella, General Mills partnered with Fetch to create the Good Rewards program.

Recently, Fetch Founder and CEO Wes Schroll sat down with Doug Martin, Chief Brand and Disruptive Growth Officer for General Mills as part of Fetch’s In A Snap! conversation series to discuss why this partnership is so exciting, and how it solves a major challenge facing CPG brands with such a large national footprint.

Watch the full conversation below:

 

Where CPG Brands Struggle

It’s no secret that there are countless behind-the-scenes struggles facing CPG brands these days. From inflation to sourcing ingredients to supply chain delays, the macroeconomic conditions of the moment deeply impact what products are available and what they cost to produce.

In the end, however, these behind-the-scenes problems are felt on the consumer level. Traditionally, CPG brands haven’t had a reliable conduit for offers or rewards and loyalty programs. Unlike retailers who control the products they sell at the point of sale, CPGs deal with vast networks of retailers and, outside of circular advertisements or discounts, struggle to forge a one-to-one connection with their customers.

What’s more, even if they do manage to reach customers with discounts or rewards, attribution of that data and activity presents a major hurdle when it’s dispersed over so many points of sale.

This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that CPG brands have wide portfolios of brands under their umbrella. For a customer looking for a single point of entry to the products they interact with on a daily basis, it’s a lot to ask to juggle five, 10, or 15 different rewards programs to save on these essential items.

“There’s a lot of problems for consumers to solve right now,” says Martin. “One of them is that the world keeps getting more complex. [Consumers] want brands to work together and come together. They want things to be easier. They want a single portfolio entry point into more significant rewards versus managing it in ten separate places.”

Through a unified CPG rewards program, General Mills is able to connect their diverse “House of Brands” with consumers and build that desired one-to-one connection in order to “solve problems and deliver joy” to consumers, as Martin says.

How Fetch is “Designed for Brands to Win”

For brands like General Mills with such a large product portfolio and a large consumer base—Martin estimates that General Mills products are in more than 90% of US households—the issue isn’t as much market penetration, but connecting the dots and rewarding consumers for the everyday purchases they’re already making.

This is where Fetch comes in. While General Mills has the products and consumers, it’s unrealistic to expect them to also house a data engineering team capable of creating a rewards platform as robust as Good Rewards, maintain it, and scale it.

“When you have a company like Fetch that has 740 employees who are only focused on developing that tech, it allows us to move faster and be there for the consumer,” Schroll says.

Couple a dedicated team with a built-in active monthly user base of 15 million, and you have a platform “designed for brands to win,” as Martin says.

To learn more about the power of the Fetch platform, contact our team today.