General Mills Partners With Zyper to Build Virtual Superfan Communities

General Mills (NYSE: GIS), one of the world’s leading food companies, has partnered with Zyper, a marketing platform that connects brands with their superfans to drive engagement, insights, and sales, to build virtual fan communities for General Mills’ brands. As part of the agreement, General Mills will use Zyper’s software to initially identify the Betty Crocker and Fibre One brands’ top 1% of fans on social media, and then grow and manage the brands’ respective virtual fan communities in Australia, the Middle East, and the UK.

“At General Mills, we strive to create genuine connections through food by continuously deepening our consumer empathy,” said Arjoon Bose, Europe & Australasia Head of Brand Experience and Culture at General Mills. “Community is at the core of some of our most loved brands’ DNA and we have handpicked Betty Crocker and Fibre One to start with to step-change and elevate community as a central pillar of our brand experience efforts. Betty Crocker has been an essential part of the homemaker community for nearly 100 years and is currently experiencing a renaissance where we have a sacred duty to lead the conversation. We’ve seen tremendous success with Fibre One, our snack brand that emotionally unites a passionate community on their journey of weight-wellness. Our next goal is to make dieting engaging for this community by building an active ongoing dialogue and strengthening this affinity.”

The top 1% of Betty Crocker and Fibre One brand fans will get early access to upcoming innovation, product, personalised swag as well as access to exclusive digital experiences and rewards and event invites.

“Consumers are looking to engage with brands in a much more unfiltered way, especially in the new environment triggered by COVID-19,” said Amber Atherton, CEO and Founder of Zyper. “Authenticity is now a crucial ingredient in effective brand storytelling and Zyper is creating an entirely new category of community-based brand advocacy. We are thrilled to partner with General Mills to help the company build communities of real fans around its beloved brands, especially at a time when people are looking to connect and share online more than ever.”

Mr. Bose continued, “Our partnership with Zyper is a game-changer in how technology will enable us to identify micro-communities at a hyper-local level and create engagement by inviting individual fans into our product and brand universe to learn from them and imagine where we can go next and how we show up. Creating these private tight-knit spaces and bonding moments for our biggest advocates allows us to create a groundswell of trust and stay at the forefront of cultural conversation. By acknowledging and incentivizing them, we evangelize real people who love our brands in a purposeful manner and democratize real influence.”

Zyper’s software uses computer vision and natural language processing to source the top 1% of a brand’s biggest fans and build strong brand communities. Once these superfans have been identified, Zyper invites them to join an interest-based community hosted on its software platform. These communities provide a constant stream of trusted, user-generated content (UGC) that sparks conversation and boosts sales while unearthing new product and purchase insights. Farfetch, LVMH, and L'Oréal are among the companies already using Zyper to build communities of loyal brand fans.

About Zyper

Zyper is a peer-to-peer-marketing software platform that enables brands to leverage their most loyal customers as a new marketing force. The platform uses technologies such as computer vision, natural language processing and predictive analytics to identify the top 1% of a brand’s most loyal fans, who create authentic brand-related content to share with their own communities, ultimately driving brand engagement, insights and revenues. Founded by entrepreneur Amber Atherton in 2017, Zyper is enabling beauty, apparel, footwear, and food and beverage companies around the world to connect with their superfans and build communities around them.

About General Mills

General Mills is a leading global food company whose purpose is to make food the world loves. Its brands include Cheerios, Annie’s, Yoplait, Nature Valley, Häagen-Dazs, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Old El Paso, Wanchai Ferry, Yoki, BLUE and more. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, General Mills generated fiscal 2019 net sales of U.S. $16.9 billion. In addition, General Mills’ share of non-consolidated joint-venture net sales totaled U.S. $1.0 billion.

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