Using Scintilla to Turn Customer Signals into Category Growth
How Post Consumer Brands used Scintilla insights to launch a new customer-centric product
Backed by Scintilla insights, we swapped one of our cup products with another that led to 2x portfolio velocity for the segment.
When their Walmart merchant challenged Post Consumer Brands to solidify their status as a leader in the Ready-to-Eat Cereal category, Post responded by diving deep into the category, the products in it, and—most importantly—its customers.
See how Scintilla insights helped Post craft an innovative new product to fill a gap in their assortment and meet customer needs.
The opportunity: Driving growth in the Ready-to-Eat Cereal category
As one of the most recognized consumer brands in the space, Post had the potential to look beyond their own business and drive growth and innovation across the category. Their Walmart merchant challenged them to uncover growth opportunities that could help shape cereal strategy at Walmart.
Post met the challenge by kicking off a 6-month period of exploration and analysis with the goal of preparing their updated strategy in time for their next Line Review. Their team had a simple goal: getting more customers to buy more products more often.
The approach: Lead with the customer, follow with the category
Post decided to start their journey by understanding cereal customers, then backing out to the entire category. They knew cereal customers weren’t uniform—the team would need different strategies for different demographics.
The brand’s Honey Bunches of Oats cereal, for example, indexed highly among Hispanic shoppers. The team used Scintilla Shopper Behavior reports like Cross Shop, Best Customer, and Basket to better understand how to reach that demographic, layering regionality on top of the reports for a more robust analysis.
Next, the Post team used Assortment Deep Dive to dig into product trends. Cereal cups were a high-volume product for the category, with Post’s own Oreo Puffs cup topping the list of repeat purchases. Post used weekly unit velocity data to find more opportunities to optimize their assortment, making tweaks that resulted in a 41% velocity increase for the Honey Roasted variety of the Honey Bunches of Oats cup.
At this point, Post decided that the best way to discover what customers needed was to ask customers themselves. They used Customer Perception to survey shoppers about the health benefits or additives they’d like to see in their cereal. Protein emerged as a clear winner, while a follow-up survey suggested that the Honey Bunches of Oats brand was a prime candidate for extra protein.
The results: New launches with the customer at the center
Post used the survey responses to guide their newest innovation: Honey Bunches of Oats Protein, the culmination of the customer and category insights the Post team gathered over these six months.
Post added that the data they collected “isn’t just numbers—it’s a story. And stories lead to smarter decisions, deeper partnerships, and better outcomes for customers.”
