Mindshare: Cheerios' Hacking Prime Day

Research shows that 85% of shoppers using Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa to make their purchases only buy the items that Alexa recommends. And when they shop again, Alexa will only recommend the products they bought last time.

With voice-based shopping on the rise, and sales intrinsically linked to purchasing habits, Cheerios partnered with Mindshare to make sure its brand was the one and only choice of cereal on the platform.

It achieved this by leveraging one of the world’s biggest shopping days, Amazon Prime Day, to put Cheerios top of Alexa’s mind and establish a shopping history. By designing an offer to give away a free box of cereal to every customer that spent $40 or more, it resulted in the search results for Honey Nut Cheerios peaking, effectively hacking Amazon’s recommendation algorithm.

Consequently, Honey Nut Cheerios became the number one grocery item on Prime Day with sales increasing by 64% in comparison to the previous week, and year. 80% of customers were new to the brand a few months down the line too. Every time someone said, “Hey Alexa, add cereal to my cart,” Alexa recommended Cheerios, turning the threat of being delisted on commerce platforms into a competitive advantage and establishing brand loyalty for the future.