General Mills’ Box Tops for Education
In the mid-1990s, the Promotions Group at General Mills was struggling with a problem, one that had been plaguing them for years-and only getting worse. California moms don't redeem coupons. Coupons are the bread and butter of consumer goods promotion groups. But the harried lifestyle of California women was resulting in fewer and fewer clippings. General Mills is a company that exerts great influence on the packaged goods food industry. All General Mills divisions have a #1 or #2 market share in their categories. The company enjoys more than 90% penetration in households with children, and its brands such as Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Yoplait, and Hamburger Helper have long, warmth evoking histories with moms.
But, as California goes, so goes the rest of the country. General Mills Promotions could see the writing on the wall. They knew that decreasing rates of coupon clipping meant more than giving up a pricing tool, it meant losing a relationship with moms at two critical decision-making moments: Sunday mornings with the newspaper and the moment when they pick the product off the shelf. Coupons have long been the promotional tool for creating loyalty to a food product. The Promotions Group over California looked around, first internally to Yoplait, and its Save Lids Save Lives breast cancer program, then to a competitor, Campbell's soup labels for education, and decided they needed a cause-related program.
In 1997, General Mills launched Box Tops for Education in California. The program looked fairly simple: rip off a box top and take it to your kid's school and General Mills will donate 10 cents to the school. (At first, they offered 25 cents, but that got a bit steep). Behind the simple rip-and-return program there's a bunch of things going on, much of which is done by volunteers. The General Mills Promotions Group prepares bilingual coordinator kits for schools around the country. Each participating school identifies a coordinator who runs the program for her school (the vast majority of coordinators are women but a few are men). Although most are parents of children, a large number of the coordinators are teachers. Through a Web site, chat groups, sales representatives, and the coordinators kits, the school coordinators learn about different ways to promote and manage the program. They are responsible for creating all of their own flyers, banners, and other communications. And many spend out of their own pockets to promote the cause. The coordinators develop incentive programs to get kids to participate. Some have special pizza parties for the class in each grade that brings in the most box tops. Others hold special events around holidays such as Halloween and Christmas for children who bring in a certain number of box tops. Many a school principal has ended up being dunked in water, dressed up like a clown, or otherwise humiliated when schools reach their box-top fundraising goals. One of the most fun events is called kitchen raids in which students go around their neighborhood and ask their neighbors if they can "raid" their kitchens for box tops.
The program begins about a month before school starts. Coordinators are sent the new kits and encouraged to create kick-off events, back-to-school flyers, and fundraising goals. The coordinators meet with school officials to discuss major events during the year. Many of these coordinators check in weekly and meet with teachers and administrators to promote the program. They set up drop boxes to collect the box tops and group them into bunches of 50 for redemption. General Mills encourages coordinators to promote not just the box-top clipping part of the program, but also the Box Tops for Education Marketplace, an online program that allows people to shop at major online retailers and donate up to 10% of the purchase to their school, and the Box Tops for Education Visa Card, which donates 1% of each purchase to their schools. But the vast majority of those participating in the Box Tops for Education program are box-top clippers.
Collecting actual box tops is a tangible means of doing something for your school. You feel like you are making a difference. You don't get quite the same feeling from clicking a button online or swiping plastic through a credit card machine. And consequently, neither the Visa card nor the online shopping program has been nearly as successful as the box-top clipping. Parents and children do it together. It's estimated that more than 20 million households have a pile of ripped box tops sitting on top of their fridge or in a drawer somewhere ready to be redeemed. In 1997, perhaps only a third of the schools in the country participated in the program while in 2002 less than a quarter of schools in the country didn't participate in the program. And much of this success is due to the fact that the clipping, communicating, collecting, and counting of cardboard labels makes people feel like they are contributing. And they contribute in a way that fits into their very harried lives. General Mills research shows that 82% of moms are looking for "easy, effective ways to be involved in their child's education." That's the interesting irony of this whole story. Those same California moms who couldn't be bothered to clip coupons are now spending much more time collecting box tops, the value of which is often lower than the coupons. More to the point, the time spent writing a check to your local school for $25 is a whole lot less than collecting 250 box tops. Yet, people do it. General Mills has donated over $70 million dollars to American schools since 1996. That's 7 billion box tops collected.
Whole communities are getting into the program. The newspapers are running free ads. The health care clinics, community centers, and local stores are setting up drop boxes for box tops. Retailers, hoping to capture a little of the glow, have begun offering to match box-top redemptions with their own contributions-a kind of two-for-one event. Recently, General Mills began coordinating efforts with local communities to conduct box-top promotions that highlight the local schools involved. The message being sent: "We're helping you help your schools by selling you our products."
It would have been very easy for General Mills to have looked at the feedback they were getting from the coupon research in the mid-90s and just stop promoting through coupons. There are still plenty of point-of-purchase displays to make, lots of samples to give away, and all kinds of sporting events to plaster your brand all over. Why clip box tops? General Mills is just as startled by the success of the program as industry observers are. They know that the program not only generates all kinds of positive word of mouth regarding their role as good corporate citizens, it also creates tremendous preference for their products. Box Tops for Education is fast becoming a brand in and of itself, and may soon rival Betty Crocker for trust in the minds of consumers. Now that General Mills has completed the acquisition of all of the Pillsbury brands-Green Giant, Progresso, and Old El Paso, to name a few-the label will be on over 4 billion packages across more than 20 categories in the grocery store.
General Mills has the numbers that show that Box Tops for Education has been very effective in driving share growth across their brands. They know that mothers and kids are literally scanning brands, looking for the labels. And, last year, box-top redemptions surpassed coupon redemptions to become the number one promotional vehicle.
According to Cone/Roper's 2001 survey, 77% of consumers say a company's commitment to a cause is important when they decide where to shop. Eighty-one percent say they are likely to switch brands or retailers to one associated with a "good" cause. Seventy-nine percent of consumers believe that companies have a "responsibility to support causes." And 86% of American teenagers think companies should give money or support to causes. General Mills knew all that. What they learned after the fact is that 60% of their employees felt better about working for General Mills and 48% felt greater loyalty to the company because of efforts like Box Tops for Educations. The program is not only creating meaningful brand experiences for parents and children, it's also making employees prouder of their own work.
http://www.boxtops4education.com