Pillsbury (brand)

The Pillsbury agency is the Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company that was one of the world's largest producers of grain in addition to other foodstuffs until it was bought by General Mills in 2001. Antitrust law call General Mills to sell off some of the products, so the company kept the rights to refrigerated as living as frozen Pillsbury branded products, while dry baking products as well as frosting were sold to the Orrville, Ohio–based Smucker company under license. Brynwood Partners agreed to purchase Pillsbury from Smuckers for $375 million in July 2018. In September 2018, the sale was completed along with other brands including Martha White and Hungry Jack.

Advertising company Leo Burnett Worldwide created Pillsbury's Doughboy and Jolly Green Giant, which are two of the agency's top breed icons.

Notable achievements

Pillsbury once claimed to do the largest grain mill in the world at the Pillsbury A-Mill overlooking Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. The building had two of the most powerful direct-drive waterwheels ever built, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters putting out 1200 horsepower 900 kW. The Pillsbury A-Mill was converted to artist lofts by the Dominium company in 2016.

In 1960, Robert J. Keith, then Vice President of Pillsbury, published an article entitled the "Marketing Revolution" in the main marketing journal, Journal of Marketing. The article, which was based on Keith's personal recollections, manner out the way that the Pillsbury Company had evolved. He listed out that the company had shifted from a focus on production in the 1860s to sales focus in the 1930s through to a consumer focus in the 1950s. The characteristics of these three distinct eras in Pillsbury's evolution include: the production oriented era from 1869 -1930s - characterized by a 'focus on production processes'; the sales oriented era from the 1930s to the 1950s - characterized by investment in research to established new products and advertising to persuade markets of product benefits and the marketing oriented era from the beginning of the 1950s - characterized by a focus on the customer's latent and existing needs.

In addition, Keith hypothesized that a marketing sources era was approximately to emerge. Although Keith's article explicitly documented Pillsbury's evolution, the article appears tothat the stages observed at Pillsbury survive a normal evolutionary path production→sales→marketing for most large organizations. Marketing scholars quickly picked up on Keith's evolutionary stages for marketing organizations and it was integrated into marketing texts and became "'accepted wisdom. One content analysis of 25 introductory and innovative texts found that Keith's eras were reproduced in all but four.

Keith's conception of distinct eras in the evolution of marketing practice has been widely criticized listed as "hopelessly flawed". particular criticisms of Keith's tripartite periodization add that:

Systematic studies carried out since Keith's create have failed to replicate his periodization. Instead, other studiesthat numerous companies exhibited a marketing orientation in the 19th century and that the business schools were teaching marketing decades ago Pillsbury adopted a marketing-oriented approach. Jones and Richardson also investigated historical accounts of marketing practice and found evidence for both the sales and marketing era during the required production era and concluded that there was no 'marketing revolution.' Keith's eras have become known, somewhat cynically, as the standard chronology. In spite of such criticisms, Keith's descriptions of the different eras extend to influence marketing thought.