Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

144 BRAND RELEVANCE
dominated in terms of fi ber content among cold cereals, with
some 57 percent of daily requirements of fi ber and 14 grams of
fi ber per serving. The brand was profi table in part because it had
an intensely loyal following (the highest loyalty of any cereal
brand) and required no marketing. However, sales were low and
dormant.
In 2007, when the need for fi ber got additional traction in
part because of its role in balancing carbohydrate consumption
in low - carb diets, Fiber One was aggressively extended.
The Nature Valley team, realizing that the Fiber One brand
could play in its arena, worked to develop a line of bars using
the Fiber One brand and promise. In the fi rst year the product
line exceeded the coveted $ 100 million year - one sales mark.
Building on that success, General Mills used the Fiber One
brand to introduce high - fi ber entries in other food categories
including yogurt, bread, muffi n mixes, toaster pastries, and cottage
cheese. All these had suffi cient fi ber levels to make them
the leaders of their categories on the fi ber dimension. It was a
good example of spanning business silos by combining and leveraging
assets, in this case a brand, recipes, marketing, and production
capabilities.
In 2000 General Mills introduced a soy - milk product branded
8th Continent in a joint venture with DuPont. DuPont had
developed a sweeter soybean product and lacked access to the
distribution channel, so the joint venture made good sense. The
soy market was in total over $ 2 billion and growing rapidly;
the soy - milk market was around $ 200 million, with the Silk
brand having over 50 percent of that, and was projected to grow
to $ 1 billion in just a few years. The opportunity was there. In
2004 General Mills introduced a light version of the product.
However, it turned out that the soy - milk demand was not the
growth area it had appeared, in part because of some uncertainty
about its health claims and because the business required a substantial
investment making the return marginal. Deciding that
the investment dollars could best be used elsewhere, General