Sam's Club Leverages Instagram to Plug New Kellogg Cereal

Kellogg Co. is giving Sam’s Club an exclusive launch window for its flagship-brand “Caticorn” cereal before rolling out the limited-edition SKU to other retailers in March.The cereal is slated to be available through April, staying on shelves for the April 9 designation of “National Unicorn Day." The mixed-berry flavored cereal is O-shaped and sprinkled with edible glitter, while the bright pink and purple packaging depicts the namesake cat/unicorn hybrid. Priced at $5.98 for a 37.4-ounce box, the cereal is available both in stores and on samsclub.com.Enjoying the exclusivity, Sam’s Club has supported the Caticorn launch through email ads as well as commissioned editorials that link to the SKU’s product page on samsclub.com from a number of affiliate partners such as meadia outlet PopSugar and Hearst Magazine Media’s Delish. The warehouse club chain is also taking advantage of Instagram’s rapidly evolving shopping tools to connect users with the cereal without ever taking them off what Instagram calls a "visual storefront" on the mobile application.The retailer is plugging the “meow-gical” cereal using the “shopping on Instagram” tool that launched in 2017 in the U.S. and expanded to other countries last March. It allows businesses and brands to tag products (up to five per image or video and 20 per carousel) in their organic posts to create shoppable posts. The clickable tags lead to product pages containing:a “View on website” call-to-action (which directs to samsclub.com without exiting the app),a drop-down “Description” offering product details,a “More posts from samsclub” section, anda “Shop” call-to-action button at the bottom, which leads to an e-commerce page listing a plethora of Sam’s Club items for sale.The entire path to purchase can be completed on Instagram, whether it be from a post or a story. In September, Instagram also launched the test of a "shopping" channel on "explore," accessible through the app's magnifying glass tab, where posts containing tagged products (like the aforementioned) reach beyond a business' individual audience to reach another 200 million users daily, according to recent data from Instagram.Neither the wholesale club nor Kellogg’s are strangers to the unicorn theme. According to Google Trends, “unicorn cake” was the top “food” Google search in 2018. Last year, Sam’s Club debuted a multi-tier unicorn cake and even gave it a red and green twist for the holidays, while Kellogg’s released its “magic cupcake” unicorn cereal and “unicorn power” Pop-Tarts. Conagra Brands has also jumped on the unicorn bandwagon with the recent launch of Snack Pack “unicorn magic pudding.”

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