General Mills Inc. will launch a new marketing offensive Monday for its Yoplait Greek yogurt, an attempt to take back precious market share lost in the past few years.
It will be a tough slog. Golden Valley-based General Mills was late to the Greek party, while its rivals — notably Chobani — turned a niche product into the yogurt category's dynamo. And Chobani is on an offensive of its own.
General Mills made progress over the past year by reformulating its standard Greek yogurt and finding success with a new lower-calorie product called Yoplait Greek 100. Still, General Mills, one of the world's yogurt giants, has only a high single-digit share of the U.S. Greek yogurt market.
Yoplait is engaging Chobani head-on in a TV ad blitz, rolling out the time-honored taste test.
In a national "Taste-Off," as General Mills calls it, consumers sampled two Greek yogurts, without being told which was which. One was Yoplait's blueberry, which mixes fruit into the yogurt. The other was Chobani's blueberry, which features fruit on the bottom.
"We are so committed to making a Greek yogurt that tastes great," said Carla Vernón, Yoplait's marketing director. "We feel the commercial is an opportunity for people to taste it for themselves — tasting is believing."
The Taste-Off marketing campaign is also running via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, with General Mills asking consumers to do their own taste tests between Chobani and Yoplait.
Not surprisingly, Yoplait wins the TV taste test. But General Mills has good reason to highlight taste. Its initial Greek yogurt product was not only a latecomer, but was seen by some consumers as an inferior product. The first Yoplait Greek wasn't made through the "straining" production method common to Greek-style yogurts.
