General Mills shifted from mass marketing to personalized interactions by unifying fragmented customer data across brands. They use Salesforce to combine first- and second-party data, enabling one-to-one personalization at scale while prioritizing consumer trust and privacy.
This is a company that's been around for a long time. And for part of our history, just being big was a big part of our success. We wanted to tell everyone about our products, and often we wanted to tell everyone the same thing. Well, fast forward to today. People have an expectation of you speaking directly to them about the thing that matters most to them. And so now AI data and CRM are ways that we can achieve that promise in a way that's actually manageable for the team.
One of the things that's really important to General Mills is to build a relationship with our consumer. Having data is great, but unless the consumer feels like what we're doing with their data means something to them, we're not doing our jobs right.
We collected a lot of data from our consumers, but our teams didn't have the capabilities to understand consumer trends.
Because we are a house of brands, we have a lot of different data sets for each brand. Those used to be very disconnected. We wouldn't understand that somebody was maybe a member of Box Tops and engaging with our Betty Crocker platform and also loves tacos with Odo El Paso.
All of our products are sold through a retailer. We don't own that transactional data that can help us complete that loop. And so that was a major pain point. Salesforce has been an enormous help in closing that loop for us.
Data Cloud is very important for us because it's bringing our first party and our second party data together. Now we're able to understand who we're messaging and really refine these audiences in a very, very powerful way.
We used to think one to many was good enough. And what we're able to do with customer360 is get to one to one. And it truly is that personalization at scale that we've all been wanting and dreaming of.
We're able to unlock moments of joy because we're able to deliver the right information, the right recipes to make those special moments in their lives happen.
We would love to leverage a especially generative AI to help us unlock opportunities and be a lot more surgical in our pursuit of those opportunities.
Trust is more important than ever because our consumers are counting on us to protect their data, respect their privacy. It's about putting the consumer at the center of everything that we do. And we let our consumer be our guide.
We are never thinking about one transaction. We are thinking about delivering an experience and bringing people back over and over and over again. So to the extent that we can understand more about the consumer through this single source of truth that can increase our confidence that we're going to deliver the right product to them that they're going to love. If you put the right product in front of them, they have a great experience, they're going to come back and really that's where we generate long term value.
