Its Just so Sweet Sweet Sweet

On my last trip to the grocery store, I found myself walking down the cereal isle singing the song from the old Mini-Wheats commercial:

Although this song is incredibly annoying and almost always gets stuck in your head, it is a marketing moment of genius. It is right up there with the Telus hippopotamus song. These commercials rely on their ability to stay relevant in our minds and then when we least expect it, they come back to haunt us. I don’t even like Mini-Wheats and therefore passed through the isle and headed to the checkout. After a few minutes still humming the song in the checkout line, I actually put my basket down, returned to the cereal isle and grabbed a JUMBO box of Vanilla Flavoured Mini-Wheats. What was I thinking? In retrospect I still don’t like them but it was fun to purchase them and come home laughing about Mini-Wheats to my friend.

This is not Mini-Wheats first marketing scheme. Since their original introduction, they have also added flavored Mini-Wheats (Strawberry, Vanilla, Cinnamon, Blueberry and Brown Sugar) as well as smaller Mini-Wheats Little Bites for kid’s sized mouths. The kids version is actually quite clever because it captures an entirely new market segment without harming their original sales. Mini-Wheats found that mother’s weren’t buying the product for their small children because the “bite-size” was too large. Therefore by making the pieces smaller, they can entice families to buy Mini-Wheats for the whole gang!

Another innovative idea is the Mini-Wheats Hot Hot campaign which encourages consumers to warm up the milk before poring it over breakfast cereal. This increases purchasing over the winter because it claims that Mini-Wheats can be a “lightly-frosted, high-fiber way to keep warm this winter.” Clearly, with all their flavors, sizes and uses, Mini-Wheats truly are hot right now.