The Decline and Fall of a Breakfast Icon
Last week, Kellogg’s, the iconic cereal manufacturer, announced that it was breaking itself up into three separate companies: Cereal, snacks and plant-based foods.
Presumably this is being done because cereal is a dying business (Gen Z hates Tony the Tiger) and Kellogg’s wants to unlock the value associated with the growth of the other two business lines (Gen Z LOVES Pringles and Gardenburgers.)
While acknowledging that eating Rice Krispies is a culinary anachronism, I will admit, proudly, that I still enjoy my morning cereal. And yes, I still eat Kellogg’s products. And so does Dyson (yes, THAT Dyson. Our vet wanted to get some more fiber into his diet, so Dyson gets some Special K mixed in with his dog food.)
The other day, I was blankly staring at the back of Dyson’s Special K box while eating my breakfast (cereal eaters know EXACTLY what I am talking about) and noticed that the entire back of the box was filled with an offer for free coffee pods.
Anyone who grew up eating cereal in the 50s, 60s and 70s knows about the free prizes that came inside many boxes of cereals. I remember fighting with my three siblings over who would get the prize at the bottom of a box. (Somehow, my older sister always ended up with the goods.) These prizes could be anything – baseball cards, decoder rings, whistles, stickers, toy cars. And they were AWESOME. Yes, they were cheap crap that would break about ten seconds after you took them out of the box, but so what? It was A FREE PRIZE!
To repeat: FREE F-ING PRIZE!!!
What red-blooded American kid who just spent four hours watching Saturday morning cartoons and consuming the raging river of kid-targeted advertising that accompanied those shows wouldn’t want a free compass/magnifying glass that came in a box of Quisp cereal?
Lest you think I am exaggerating the total awesomeness of these prizes, they are now collectible and offered up on eBay, in some cases at seriously stupefying prices.
At some point in the 80s, the prizes started to get lamer and lamer and then mostly phased out. Just like Cracker Jacks, the prizes eventually migrated to the Internet. So, instead of a cool miniature pinball machine (seriously), you would get a piece of paper that told you to go to a web site and do something. (This was likely due to a combination of cost cutting and the fact that every year, a certain number of kids would swallow a free pencil eraser in the shape of the Trix rabbit, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.)
Fast forward to 2022, and I am looking at this offer for free coffee pods on the
Special K box and I swear I would rather do YOUR taxes than jump through the multiple hoops required to get $10 worth of shitty coffee:
1.) Buy any three participating Special K cereals or bars between 12/2/21 and 3/31/22. (I’m done right here, since I am reading this on a box of cereal I purchased in June 2022. But, even if I COULD get in on this supercalifragilistic offer…
2.) Scan QR Code or go to KFR.com/freecoffee to register and upload receipts…
3.) Get (1) coupon good for a box of coffee pods by mail.
Then after waiting ?? months, I can take my coupon to the store and get a box of coffee pods, valued at “…up to $10.00.”
So, to review – I have to buy three Special K products, then register, then take photos of my receipts, then upload those photos then wait for a coupon in the mail, which is worth a max of $10.00, which I hope to not NOT lose and then remember to take to the store on my next coffee shopping outing.
If I were sort-of-competent with technology (which I sort of am), I estimate the photo-taking and the registering and the uploading would take about 30 minutes. If I assume I am making the minimum wage in Connecticut of $13.00/hour, my 30 minutes of time is worth $6.50, so I guess the value equation is kind of there. But for anyone making $20/hour or more, or who takes more than X minutes to jump through the hoops that Kellogg’s asks, then the time and effort to get that $10 coupon is, well… you get the point.
And given the current rising inflation rate, that $10 coupon will be worth… less… when it arrives weeks/months later.
But the bigger, simpler point here is: We used to dig through a box of baked sugar and carb nuggets to find something that provided instant joy. Now, we get to embark on what could be a three-month journey, where we give up more of our privacy in exchange for a… lousy coffee coupon. For lousy coffee.
Question: How many thousands of man hours of brainstorming, planning, planning meetings, creating, creating meetings, design (& meetings), layout (meetings), editing (meetings), reviewing (meetings), contracting (meetings), legal vetting (meetings), printing and promoting went into this idiotic offer?
And what was the customer uptake for this promotion? Probably pretty low. By the time you narrow down the number of people who eat Special K, who also have a coffee pod machine, who also read the box, who are also willing to and then manage to save all the receipts, who then upload them and yadda, yadda, yadda, you probably end up with a guy named Phil in Des Moines.
It's no wonder Kellogg’s is breaking itself up. Its best days are long in the past, and its current days are being managed by people who thought THIS coffee promotion was going to get Missy and Mikey Millennial to buy a box of dried rice and gluten flakes.
All that griping aside, I hope Kellogg’s cereal unit has a future that will be guided by an executive management team with better imaginations and plans than free bad coffee. After all, I still like Corn Flakes, even if I, and Phil in Des Moines, are lonely voices in the vast breakfast wilderness.