If you’ve noticed that the Pillsbury Doughboy looks a little different recently … you’d be right.
Poppin’ Fresh—to use his official name—is a little thinner. The legs are longer, and the eyes have a bit more definition. And, importantly, he’s changed his outfit: His tie is now blue, rather than the traditional white.
The new mascot is part of a Pillsbury rebrand on the part of General Mills, which has owned the brand since 2001. The Doughboy has been an iconic piece of Americana since his debut in 1965—making him a “boomer,” in the words of Teman Evans, General Mills’ global chief of design.
At Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau on Dec. 5, Evans described Pillsbury as one of General Mills’ billion-dollar brands, alongside other household names like Cheerios, Old El Paso, and Betty Crocker.
“The No. 1 rule that I’ve been given as chief design officer is that you don’t break the billion-dollar brand,” he said.
So why risk breaking General Mills’ cardinal rule? “The answer is growth,” he said.
“We have what we call a leaky bucket. Our brands lose about 40% of their consumers every year,” Evans said. “And if we just recruit that 40%, we’ll stay flat. To grow, we have to recruit beyond that 40%.”
And if Pillsbury doesn’t see growth, someone else would be attending a future edition of Brainstorm Design, Evans joked: “Flat is not acceptable.”
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General Mills, No. 203 on the Fortune 500, reported $4.8 billion in revenue, a 1% drop year on year in its most recent quarter, which ended Aug. 25. (General Mills will report its next quarterly earnings on Dec. 18.) Yet in what might be good news for Pillsbury, CEO Jeff Harmening noted to analysts that inflation was pushing consumers to eat more at home.
“Food at home is four times less expensive than food eating out, on average,” he told analysts. “Consumers are still economically stressed.”
‘Roll with the real’
Evans’s first step was to figure out the strategy behind the new brand. “I can never imagine design starting without strategy first,” Evans explained. “It’s like walking through the wilderness with no compass or North Star.”
The team, including General Mills’ agency partners, settled on a new tagline: “Roll with the real.” At Brainstorm Design, Evans explained what the shift meant: “Every day is messy, it’s unexpected, so we need to roll with it … You need to be ready for anything at any time, so we’re going to be ready to roll.”
There was a business reason behind the new strategy as well. “If you think about this brand, we show up on the holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving. But if we were going to grow, we knew we needed to be part of every day,” Evans explained.
Then came a day at General Mills’ archives, home to 150 years’ worth of branding and advertising material. “All design work at General Mills starts in the archives,” Evans said. “If I could have any other job besides the one I have … I would be an archivist. This is where the history of our brands live.”
(The other thing Evans dug up in the archives? Poppin’ Fresh’s family: his wife, Poppie Fresh; his children, Popper and Bun-bun; Flapjack the dog; and Biscuit the cat.)
‘Like the melting together of cinnamon rolls’
The Pillsbury rebrand touches every aspect of the company’s marketing material: not just a new mascot, but a refreshed barrelhead logo, a new jingle, and even a new typeface.
“There was a shift from that stark white to a warmer, doughier white,” Evans explained. “We also started to round out those serifs, so then they were like those soft baking rolls that consumers love.” Another way the new brand evokes Pillsbury products: a ligature that blends the two Ls in the logo together, “like the melting together of cinnamon rolls.”
Poppin’ Fresh got his start as a physical object manipulated through stop-motion animation. But with the rebrand, General Mills has gone all in on 3D animation. This allows the company to do more with its mascot—to not just stand next to the company’s food, but touch and interact with it.
Now, Poppin’ Fresh is set to appear in new TV advertisements, on social media stickers, and even on the Jumbotron at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium. “This new, dynamic brand world that’s full of motion allows us to show up in different forms of media, [and] has reinvigorated the Doughboy to be relevant for the future,” Evans said.
