United Cereals

MG4504

CASE STUDY 8

UNITED CEREAL: LORA BRILL’S EUROBRAND CHALLENGE

FOR:

Professor Howard Kupferman

Written by:

Andres Torres

UNITED CEREAL: LORA BRILL’S EUROBRAND CHALLENGE

In 1952, United Cereal (originally started by Jed Thomas in 1910) began its European expansion by acquiring a baked goods company in England. From there, they expanded to the rest of Europe through the acquiring of small well established firms in the industry in different regions in Europe. The idea for this was to take advantage of already put-in place distribution lines which could safe significant amounts of money and time, as well as a better way to start marketing and branding United Cereal’s products. The expansion into European markets was ultimately done to achieve leverage by economies of scale. The opportunity to increase revenues was also there. United Cereal has a very well-established set of values that were known as “The UC way.” The company was very customer-centric by requiring a great amount of consumer tasting and analysis before launching new products. Nevertheless, innovation was greatly encouraged within the organization. In fact, United Cereal had more intellectual property than any other competitor in the market. United Cereal became famous for introducing “brand management” in the food industry. Using this system, brand managers operated under subsidiaries CM’s(country managers)(see Exhibit 4). Each brand was treated on a national basis, but was also a unique profit center. Efficiency and savings was big goal among brand manager, thus creating a healthy competition within the subsidiaries for sales. Loyalty was another big aspect of the United Cereal’s values, permitting managers with room to grown within the company encouraging results in every sector of the company.

Each individual country in which UC operated in acted out as a “mini UC”. While they acted under the same principles the UC was built on in the United States and the organizational...