Pillsbury Social Media Campaign

Courtney Spencer, Abisoluwa Akinboboye, Colton Fenner, Ahliyah Gavin

History (Bisolu)
Pillsbury has consistently maintained its household name, positioning itself as the market leader
in the baking-goods industry for over the past 60 years. However, the company has not always
occupied this space in the industry; it has gone through its fair share of various acquisitions,
incorporations, and mergers starting from its inception in 1869 (Raga, 2016).
In 1967 and 1983, Pillsbury acquired both Burger King and Haagen-Dazs respectively, but after
its acquisition in 2001 by its rival General Mills in a 10.5 billion dollar deal, forming the fourth
largest food company in the world (Barboza, 2001), Pillsbury ceased to exercise control as the
parent company over either them.
Historically, the company has taken big strides in innovation as Pillsbury scientists reportedly
developed the first solid food eaten in space by astronauts in the year 1962. Leveraging on that
achievement in the 1970s and 1980s, space food sticks were sold for the non-astronaut public as
fun snacks that were rich in carbohydrates and protein. The sticks had a variety of flavors such as
peanut butter, mint, caramel, orange and chocolate (Chopra, 2019).
The American food and beverage brand (Pillsbury) was named the third-most loved food brand
by the “Most Loved Brands Survey” in 2018. Pillsbury often reaches out to home chefs with
simple recipes through their social media channels; their recipes are often instant hits with some
of them getting shared over one million times. The Pillsbury Doughboy character has appeared
in hundreds of commercials over the years. However, it was originally named “Poppin’ Fresh” to
convey the dough’s freshness in early marketing communication efforts.
Some of the company’s specific areas of involvement include, but are not limited to, the
following: food processing, flour, vegetable, ice cream, milling bakery products, and fast-food
restaurants.
Pillsbury Bake-off (Courtney)
Pillsbury hosts a yearly Bake-off to promote their baking products. The competition began in
1949 to celebrate Pillsbury’s 80th birthday and to promote Pillsbury’s baking flour. The Bake-
offs feature a panel that narrows down thousands of entries to a top 100 list who then compete in
a live competition to win a grand prize. The grand prize amount has varied over the years, but
most recently the grand prize was $50,000.
The primary rules for the competition have always been that the applicant’s recipe must use
Pillsbury, and they must also submit a personal story behind their recipes, such as the inspiration
behind it, memories they associate with it, and more. Each contestant must be 21 or older, but
also must be an amateur baker. This is what makes the bake-off relatable to audiences – not a
single contestant has ever been to culinary school or owned a bakery.
Today, the bake-off is hosted on live television, and audiences can vote on their favorite recipe
online which will then be factored into the judges’ decisions.
Pillsbury Fun Facts (Courtney)
 Pillsbury crescent rolls are vegan, and they also offer a variety of gluten-free items in
select stores[ CITATION Bel \l 1033 ].
 We all know the Pillsbury doughboy, but his original name was “Poppin’ Fresh,” and
would pop out of the dough in commercials[ CITATION Pil \l 1033 ].
 The Pillsbury Dough Boy was “born” on November 7th, 1965.
 Before the doughboy was animated, he was a clay model worth $16,000.
Target Audience (Courtney)
Primary Target Audience: Anyone under the age of 21 who would be likely to bake with family
or friends over the holidays. They like the idea of holiday traditions, but maybe want to change
up what they’ve always done or start a new tradition of their own. They most likely have used
Pillsbury in the past to bake with or have seen their parents use Pillsbury. We are not trying to
get this target audience as a customer right away, but rather instill Pillsbury as a product their
family uses during the holidays so that they will become a loyal customer when they are adults.
Primary Target Audience Buyer Persona: (Appendix A) For our primary target audience, we
have Alexia, 10 years old. She has a smartphone, a tablet, and uses YouTube Kids frequently.
Her primary concern is eating food and having fun over the holidays.
Secondary Target Audience: Parents or guardians who have a child under 21. They will be
around the ages of 25-50. This audience will most likely already bake at home for the holidays
and wish to pass down those traditions to their children. They have already used Pillsbury to
bake with before – we are simply asking them to use it more and make it a part of their holiday
tradition.
Secondary Target Audience Buyer Persona: (Appendix A) Allison is a 30-year-old mom who is
very busy working, taking care of kids, doing household chores, and cooking for her family. Her
concern for the holiday season is making it enjoyable for her children and keeping up with her
holiday traditions for her kids.
Current Social Media Usage (Ahliyah, Colton)
Pillsbury uses multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
YouTube, and Pinterest. Overall, Pillsbury’s social media is consistent across all platforms
utilizing images of recipes made with Pillsbury products and short videos or posts of recipes.
 Facebook
o 4,712,071 likes
o ~10 posts per day
o “Average” customer interaction in the comments
o Posts are generally product advertisements or recipes that include Pillsbury
product
 Twitter
 o 24.2k tweets
o Following 11.4k
o 148k followers
o 1714 likes
o Tagging big names; link to posts/ links they’ve been tagged in; recipes
 Instagram
o 862 posts
o 370k followers
o 199 following
o Content:
 Photos of food
 Videos: recipes; cooking tips; main recipes; appetizers; desserts; finger
foods
 Tags: Tagged by people who use Pillsbury
 Audience/Community: women; people who love to cook and bake;
mothers
 YouTube
o 43.4K subscribers
o Recipes
o Video duration between 15 sec to 1:30 min
 Pinterest
 573,806 Followers
 701 Following
 Content: recipes; dinners; pastries; seasonal items
SWOT Analysis of Pillsbury (Ahliyah, Courtney)
Some strengths for the Pillsbury Company and our campaign include:
 The Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest coming up in 2020 will mark the 50th year the contest has
been going on. This milestone will build momentum for our campaign (Pillsbury
Kitchens, 2017).
 Products of General Mills, Pillsbury’s parent company, are growing in popularity
amongst kids and homemakers. One example of a popular product is Pillsbury’s flour and
crescent rolls (Pillsbury Kitchens, 2017).
 Pillsbury has high brand recognition from using icons like the Pillsbury Doughboy
(Pillsbury Kitchens, 2017).
  Pillsbury has vegan products (Bellomo, 2016).
Some weaknesses for the Pillsbury company include:
 Online voting has not successfully created an online buzz before with past bake-offs.
 More people are starting to eat out on Thanksgiving or Christmas and therefore are less
likely to bake family dinners.
Some opportunities for the Pillsbury company include:
 Bring in more people through social media and use the momentum of the bake-off's 50th
anniversary to kickstart excitement for the campaign.
 While reduced interests in cooking could harm the number of people buying certain
Pillsbury products, Pillsbury can use their easy recipe ideas to encourage people to bake
at home instead of eating out (Pillsbury Kitchen, 2017).
Some threats for the Pillsbury company include:
 Competitors: Kraft Foods, Mondelez, Kellogg, and PepsiCo.
 Increased concerns for health and health foods. Pillsbury is mainly associated with sweets
and desserts.
 Reduced interests in cooking
Outline of the Campaign (Ahliyah, Courtney, Colton, Bisolu)
This year is the 50th annual Pillsbury Bake-off. To encourage families to bake with Pillsbury and
continue their family baking traditions we will host a Jr. Bake-off competition. Beginning in
November, we will announce the Jr. Bake-off, asking children and their parents to make a video
of them baking with Pillsbury and post it to YouTube.
The main individual entering must be under 21 and the recipe must be included either within the
video itself or in the description; each video must also contain the hashtag #PillsburyJrBakeOff.
The contestants may share their video on other social platforms to gather more likes, but the
video must originally be posted to YouTube. This will keep the voting to one platform and keep
children under 13 on a social media platform they legally can access (YouTube Kids).
For the final competition, we will narrow down the applicants to the top 30. We will then fly the
candidates out to New York where we will host an in-person Jr. Bake-Off competition. The Jr.
bake-off will be live streamed on Facebook and YouTube and will have one celebrity judge, Paul
Hollywood, and two hosts, comedians Rhett and Link.
Paul Hollywood is a celebrity baker who is most widely known as one of the judges on The
Great British Baking Show (Paul Hollywood Recipes, n.d.). Rhett and Link (Rhett McLaughlin
and Link Neal) are a comedy duo that runs the popular YouTube channel “Good Mythical
Morning” with 16 million subscribers (Good Mythical Morning, n.d.).
There will be three (3) Category winners, one (1) of which will be the Grand-Prize Winner, and
two (2) Special Prize winners, for a total of 3 winning entries. One category winner will be
awarded the Grand Prize, which includes a check for $50,000. The two (2) category winners who
do not win the Grand Prize will each receive a category winner prize that includes a check for
$10,000.
The contest will be judged using the following metrics: views, likes, comments and
engagements. The goal is to increase the buzz (awareness) about Pillsbury among millennials
and Generation Z. The contest winner will be announced on December 20th. As part of
Pillsbury’s corporate responsibility strategy, in place of the kitchen makeover from GE
appliances (the normal prize for winners of the bake-off), the winners will get a scholarship
valued at approximately $10,000 to help with school expenses at a college of their choice.
Goals/Objective (Ahliyah, Colton, Courtney)
 Goal:
o To get the next generation to cook with Pillsbury by cooking with their family
o To retain our loyal Pillsbury customers
o To increase our number of loyal Pillsbury customers
 Objectives:
o To get parents to teach their children to cook with Pillsbury products
o To increase our number of loyal Pillsbury customers by 15% over a 5 to 10 year
span
o To increase the positive sentiment from 11% to 50% during the span of the
campaign
 Strategies:
o Use the momentum generated by the 50th Pillsbury Bake-Off to generate buzz on
the brand
o Host a Pillsbury Jr. Bake-Off to include younger generations
o Utilize social media to attract parents and their children to the Jr. bake-off
o Show Pillsbury’s support of families and their children through corporate
responsibility efforts by providing contest winners with aid for their education
 Tactics:
o Announce the Jr. Bake-Off on social media
o Primarily use Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to promote and provide regular
updates on the contest.
o Live stream official Jr. Bake-Off from New York.
Key Message – Holiday Traditions with Pillsbury (Courtney, Ahliyah, Colton)
 Supporting Message #1: Preserving Tradition by teaching your children holiday baking
recipes with Pillsbury (encouraging them to take part in the Jr. Bake-Off)
 o Key Fact: Pillsbury has been used in family recipes since 1869
o Testimonial: “I remember when my mom first taught me to bake, and now I’m
looking forward to baking with my kids this holiday season.”
o Do not: reference old recipes as being superior to new recipes
 Supporting Message #2: New Recipes, Same Tradition (encouraging them to take part
in the Jr. Bake-Off)
o Key Fact: A lot of children aren’t learning family recipes anymore due to lack of
interest or families not teaching them. We want to encourage baking at home for
the holidays.
o Testimonial: “I never knew we had a family pie recipe that was 6 generations old
till I asked my mom if I could help her bake for Christmas this year!”
o Do not: highlight families who don’t encourage as much baking with their
children, we only want to encourage them to bake more.
 Supporting Message #3: Fun Facts-History of Pillsbury Bake-Off
o Key Fact: This year is the 50th anniversary of the competition
o Testimonial: “I’ve been keeping up with the Pillsbury Bake-Off competition for
years. It’s great to see they’re branching out and letting the younger generation
get involved, too.”
o Do not: focus primarily on the past. You should highlight what’s good about the
past but focus on making future traditions or editing those of the past.
 Supporting Message #4: How to participate in the Jr. Bake-off
o Key Fact: Register online with parents’ approval
o Testimonial: “I was able to help my daughter register for the Bake-Off very easily
—it only took a few minutes!”
o Do not: Encourage kids to sign up by themselves
Timing (Courtney, Ahliyah, Colton)
This campaign will align with the holiday season as well as the 50th anniversary of the Pillsbury
Bake-Off. We will announce the campaign on November 1st and open the link for submissions.
The submissions will close December 5th to allow for a panel to decide on the top 30 contestants.
We will then send out acceptance letters on December 6th with tickets to fly contestants out to the
Jr. bake-off that will happen on December 20th. This will give people a chance to cook the
winning recipes for their holiday dinners, as well as cook any of the recipes that will be posted
by contestants or ones that we repost throughout the campaign.
The primary social platforms that we will be using are Facebook and YouTube, and we will
supplement that by using Instagram. All Facebook content will be posted around noon, YouTube
content will be posted early afternoons on weekdays, and Instagram content will be posted
between the hours of 7-9 PM (Arens, 2019; Ferreira, 2019). These times are when there are more
active users on these sites. Since we are also targeting parents, this will still be good times to post
since there isn’t as much actionable research on the best times to post for teens or children.
Proposed Opportunities (Courtney)
The basis of our campaign is that most of our content will be user-generated content. We will
make a few basic posts and advertisements about the campaign, but a large majority of the
campaign will come from our audience. We will be posting weekly about our new favorite
entries, as well as other highlighted posts of recipes or stories that caught our eye.
This campaign focuses on word-of-mouth advertising. People typically respond better to a
review of a product from a typical person than other forms of advertising.
This campaign also will give us additional recipes to use, aside from the ones obtained during the
Bake-Off. The recipes entered into the Jr. Bake-Off will be used in promotional materials
throughout the campaign, but most importantly they can be used on our Pinterest page. This will
add more recipes, increasing the chance that when someone searches a recipe on Pinterest they
are more likely to find a recipe that uses Pillsbury. A 2012 study showed that 50 percent of
consumers find recipes on social sites, and today there are over 1.7 billion recipes on Pinterest
(Pinterest, 2019; Bold, 2019).
Evaluation (Colton)
The overall success of the campaign will be gauged on how many people participate in the Jr.
Bake-Off competition, how many new followers are gained as a result of the campaign, and how
many impressions we get from all the original and curated content being shared.
However, the goal of this campaign is about building and retaining brand loyalty, which can be a
difficult thing to measure. Quantitative tools like share-of-voice and sentiment scores are one
way that we might be able to see if our efforts for strengthening brand loyalty are successful.
Metrics before the Campaign (Courtney)
 Total number of mentions of your brand name: 3.9k conversations
 Sentiment –
o Negative – 21%
o Positive – 11%
o Neutral – 68%
 Gender distribution
o According to Talk Walker (Graph in appendix B), on November 12th, the majority
of those that are mentioning Pillsbury are men, 25-34 speaking English[ CITATION
Pil19 \l 1033 ].
Metrics to monitor during and After the Campaign (Bisolu)
Using Hootsuite, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics, the following metrics will be
monitored and strategically analyzed for this campaign. All highlighted metrics will be measured
for each channel (Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube).
 The best and worst-performing posts – this will be evaluated with the primary aim of
developing new benchmarks and KPIs in the future.
 Posts with the most engagement – posts that have the most engagement during the
campaign period will serve as a guide and help identify opportunities to better engage
with customers.
 Content with the best and worst performance – monitoring this will assist to determine
the best mix of content on the right channels at the right times.
 Publish times of posts with the best engagement – this will help us drive engagement
effectively by publishing posts around the times that Pillsbury’s followers are actively
using our selected social media channels.
 Video views – this measures the scope of the influence because it indicates how many
times the video has been watched by the audience.
 Post frequency (likes, comments, and shares) – we will put more emphasis on the number
of comments and shares of each post because they are user-generated actions that show a
higher level of engagement than just the number of likes.
 Click-through to content – the number of click-throughs to content will give an insight
into what is capturing the attention of the audience and will build unique audience
profiles that reflect the most valuable segment for effective use across any social media
channel.
 Post reach and impressions – given that the goal of this campaign is not to build
awareness, but establish brand loyalty, this metric (average number of impressions per
user) will help figure out effective frequency and prevent ad fatigue.
 Effective keywords – this will reveal how well Pillsbury’s website ranks and will rate the
performance of our social media campaign (using SEO efforts) to drive organic search
traffic to the website.
 The sentiment (positive and negative) – this metric will identify the need to make
resource changes to boost social media efforts.
Limitations for the Campaign (Bisolu)
The campaign is limited by the choice of platforms; Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram: The
selected platforms encourage the share of photos, videos, and comments through their pages.
However, there is no control over what competitors or dissatisfied customers will post that might
appear derogatory or provocative to the campaign efforts. The posts will be limited to these
platforms and cut out the audience on other social media platforms who are potential customers
of Pillsbury.
Christmas/seasonal campaign: advertisement overload. It will require more effort to retain the
attention of the audience through social media posts because many businesses put out a heft of
their marketing budget for in-season advertising and the audience is bombarded with various
posts. Seasonal campaigns such as this also have the potential of leading to seasonal business.
Financial constraints: today, organic (non-paid) posts to many Facebook business pages reach
less than 2% of the fan audience (Vende, 2017). We need to spend more money to be heard on
social media channels, but the budget allocated for this campaign is limited.
Conclusion (Bisolu)
The objective of this campaign is to retain the next generation of Pillsbury customers as loyal
consumers who cook with Pillsbury as their holiday tradition. We would hope to do this by
leveraging on the 50th anniversary of the bake-off challenge. Theoretically, getting parents to
teach their children to cook with Pillsbury will cultivate a family tradition, which will establish
brand loyalty towards Pillsbury.
The campaign is primarily targeted at the “Generation Z” (people born from 1996 – present day).
This group represents children who grew up with advanced technology for most of their lives,
some of them having a smartphone or tablet since they were very little. Sixty-three percent of
Gen-Zers prefer to see real people in advertisements, while only 37% prefer celebrities (Andrus,
2019); this justifies our choice of real-time videos via YouTube as well as celebrity judges and
hosts. This campaign is set to give them a high level of control and an active role in brand
engagement which would lead to repeat purchases, higher revenues, and potential customer
referrals from recipes shared.
We are not just creating a social media buzz for this holiday season, but rather creating a
relationship with our current and future customers. We are reminding parents of their love for
Pillsbury and instilling that love in children for the future.
Appendix A – Buyer Personas (Courtney)
Appendix B – Talkwalker Demographics for Pillsbury

Appendix c – Social Media Content Calendar

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