Take a moment; do you remember grocery shopping as a child with your mom? Maybe you got to pick out something in that brightly lit cereal aisle. Oh, the rainbow of coloured boxes, the tastes and the surprises they held. The choice was endless and one of the hardest decisions to make. Maybe it was a fight to get your pick, but there was one brand that was always mom and kid approved...Honey Nut Cheerios (HNC).

The cereal category has changed. Back then, the challenge was standing out in a very competitive environment. Today, the brand has had to deal with much more. HNC has been challenged due to the ever changing attitudes towards breakfast, resulting in a decline in the overall category. If that was not enough, the brands’ core consumer was aging (remember those childhood memories? Cheerios?) and there was no strategy in place to re-engage them.

In order to tackle the problem head-on, we created a purpose-driven campaign targeted specifically at our brand champion. Re-igniting our relationship with our core consumer had to be derived by creating a link to them through a shared common interest. We identified that the brand needed to be more meaningful and that we needed to stand for something and do something that benefitted the world beyond just being a tasty cereal.

We have all heard about the devastating effects of the rapidly declining honey bee population. Understanding that bees are responsible for the pollination of 1/3 of our fruits and vegetables we knew that this was definitely a concern for us as a food corporation and for others as well.

Bring Back the Bees was a campaign conceptualized through the opportunity to help Canadians help save the bees and ultimately save our food supply. There was such a tight linkage between the cause, our mascot and our key product ingredient that it we knew we could make a real difference, and we did.

Our campaign resulted in positive growth for General Mills Canada driving a sales lift of 8.8% nationally and growing volume in a declining category. The ROI surpassed General Mills Canada norms by 29%!

Most notable our small Canadian office became a powerful force globally as the campaign was exported to the United States. The rarity of this can’t be overemphasized. Picking up a Canadian campaign and deploying it across the American market never happens. In fact it is generally the other way around: most advertising that appears in Canada has been adapted from American creative. Our creative broke that mold.

Furthermore, even though this idea was rooted in one brand, it was an idea that the entire General Mills as a company could rally around. The HNC experience opens the door to a host of other food issues. Giving, General Mills an opportunity to use it as the first plank in a very scalable platform of purposeful marketing and a campaign to stand behind for the long-term.