Pillsbury

Ivan Gullen, the Marketing manager for Pillsbury’s Refrigerated Baked Goods (RGB) needs to plan a marketing strategy for the upcoming fiscal year. RGB was the fourth largest category in the General Mills Canada portfolio and its performance has been stagnant with flat growth rates over the last few years. Refrigerated Cookies comprise of 62% of RGB’s unit sales and contribute majorly towards profits in this category. Gullen with the help of Lou Pasto, General Mills Consumer Insight Manager, has undertaken the usage and attitude study to understand the target market of refrigerated cookie users in Canada. Both Gullen and Pasto feel that understanding the local consumers will help them plan an effective marketing strategy for Refrigerated Cookies. Furthermore, to get more insight they have also conducted a qualitative research using In Home and Discovery workshop. The attitude & usage study as well as the qualitative research methods have contributed a great deal in understanding the consumers of RGB products. However, the current undertaken research is not enough to plan an effective marketing mix for the next fiscal year, which can promise both better sales and higher market penetration. The qualitative research undertaken by TerraNova market strategies Inc. has helped us understand the emotional appeal and hedonic reasons associated with baking cookies. It unveiled the fact that consumers are looking for easy, quick, practical and affordable products, the research also highlighted that consumers had a healthy image of the Pillsbury brand and the nutritional value was satisfactory. However, planning a marketing strategy based on these results would be unreasonable. The methods used to collect the above data were not the best ones. For example: the in home emersion study provides an understanding of how consumers deal with the product once they have purchased it and does not give sufficient data around what

motivates them to purchase the product in the first