How Kellogg’s increased their sales by 60%
Making people stop and linger in front of a bowl of cereal seems a challenging, if not simply impossible, task to solve. Cereal brand Kellogg’s combined their own knowledge of their product with mixed reality and managed to both make people dwell in front of their product, react to the advertising and boost sales significantly.
Cereal may be a breakfast staple in most homes, but in advertising there is only so much you can do with such a mundane and unpretentious product, to attract customers and entice them into buying lots and lots of it.
Obviously, there are both health and nutritional aspects of the product that will interest some consumers, while others may be attracted to the taste or the fact that the breakfast cereal will simply keep your stomach full. But this is true of many other types of cereal and breakfast foods, so what is a brand to do in order to stand out and be that oh so special?
French division of Kellogg’s handled this specific challenge in a unique way; they chose to condense their knowledge about their Special K cereal and turn it into a holographic video of information about grains and flakes.
The solution
A Dreamoc HD3 display was placed in various retail stores around France, and a bowl of Special K cornflakes was placed inside each of them. The holographic video inside the display enveloped the physical bowl in three-dimensional hearts and ribbons and written information about the nutritional value and benefits of the product.
The hologram of grain on the ear whirling and turning into flakes gave the simple breakfast food extra substance by illustrating the process of growing a healthy food that ends up on someone’s spoon.
Teasing the brain
The mixed reality concept of combining a physical item inside the dreamoc display with the lucid colours and vivid movement of a three-dimensional hologram encircling it, has a remarkable effect on passers-by in a crowded retail setting. Customers are used to seeing cardboard cutouts, TV screens and posters in stores, and they tend to largely ignore these bits of everyday advertising, simply because there is a lot of it, and mostly it isn’t that interesting because the media itself is passive and one-directional.
However, the combination of tangible items inside a display along with realistic graphics teases the senses of the audience, and has an interesting effect on the human brain. The perception of reality is challenged, and the brain tries to grasp the difference between product and hologram, reacting to the holographic content as if it were really there as well as the bowl and the cereal.
The results
Passers-by that never intended to stop couldn’t resist watching, and during the campaign several people lingered long enough to watch more than one loop of the video.
Making people smile and wonder is not always enough, but the numbers tell their own story of success. During the complete campaign period an increase in sales settled at an astonishing 60 % in total, and one store even sold out on the very first weekend of having the dreamoc display.
