General Mills launched the "Hello, Cereal Lovers" campaign to reinvigorate sales of its cold cereal and increase its social media presence. The campaign utilized multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest to engage consumers, share cereal recipes from celebrity chefs, and highlight the nutritional benefits of cereals. Tactics included contests, craft projects using cereal boxes, and partnering with chefs to post cereal-inspired dishes. The campaign was successful in gaining over 600,000 Facebook likes and keeping the hashtag #LuckyToBe trending on social media. While challenging to measure long-term impact, the campaign generated ongoing buzz around General Mills cereals years after its launch.

1. General Mills: Hello, Cereal Lovers.
By Stehen McConahy
Social Media
Professor Strahler
Slippery Rock University
October 15, 2015

2. Introduction
Cold Cereal is my favorite breakfast food and the most popular breakfast food in
America. General Mills has a 40% share of the $10 billion cold cereal business in the
United States (Lukovitz). General Mills, a company best known for its cereal, was
noticing plateauing sales in its cereal department. They decided to reinvigorate
America’s taste buds by launching the “Hello, Cereal Lovers” campaign.
General Mills is specifically trying to increase their sales in the cold cereal
department by utilizing social media (Cassinelli). They devoted their campaign to brand
advocacy and reestablish brand awareness by using social media. They looked to target
consumers as a whole and specifically targeted adult consumers. They worked to use
new media outlets as well as traditional marketing methods to generate buzz about
General Mills. They focused heavily on engaging consumers, revitalizing their brand,
and establishing a strong social media presence.
Analysis
“Americans still love cereal, but the reality is that there are a lot more breakfast choices
out there now”(Lukovitz). Hello, Cereal Lovers decided to take a brand agnostic
approach for this campaign. General Mills worked through their web page and through
social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest to show
people how important and fun General Mills is as a company (Newman).
Some of the tactics used included sharing recipes, requests, ideas, and news. For
instance on their Facebook page, one woman suggested that General Mills bring back the
original Trix cereal (The cereal that actually had the cereal pieces represent what the fruit
would actually look like). One of the other major contributions this campaign provided

3. was the reemergence of French Toast Crunch in January of 2015 (Morioka). “We have
been overwhelmed by the consumer conversations, requests and passion for the cereal to
come back” said Waylon Good the marketing manager for big G (Morioka). Another
important aspect was that they were working to increase their reach to kids and adults
over the age of 55.
One of the ways that General Mills was trying to promote this campaign was
using some timing techniques. They used this to their advantage by launching their
campaign during National Cereal Lovers Week October 14th through October 20th.
One of the unique tactics they incorporated for the campaign was to get consumer
submissions of recipes. On Pinterest they created different boards to highlight the many
uses of cereal. This idea started to take flight when they created the “Battle Outside the
Bowl Sweepstakes.” Consumers would enter their favorite cereal recipes for a chance to
win $1,000 and a case of their favorite cereal of choice.
They also teamed up with celebrity chef, Justin Warner to have him create
numerous cereal inspired dishes to show the fun, variety and versatility of General Mills’
cereals. Justin Warner posted some of these recipes to his twitter page and General Mills
also created videos of Justin cooking that they eventually posted on YouTube. Some of
these dishes included Cocoa Puffs Carbonara, Scallops Crudo with Vanilla Chex, and
Fizzy Trix. Some of the other chefs brought in to create some recipes included Amanda
Freitag, Dale Talde, Harold Dieterle, Elizabeth Falkner, and Nate Appleman.
One of the hashtags created was #LuckyToBe. This was originally used as a
message for Pride Week but also began to become important and become a part of this

4. campaign (Wong). It incorporated a different demographic and also created a buzz that
was used by not just those at Pride Week but was then captured and used on social media.
Increasing foot traffic surrounding the brand was also a key component of this
campaign. Using Tumblr and Facebook they highlighted the important nutritional
benefits of their cereal by stressing the amount of whole grains and vitamins they use in
their cereal. They provided a link to cerealbenefits.com, which was an entire webpage
dedicated to specifically showing how General Mills’ cereals are nutritious. In Pinterest,
they created a board about nutrition while on Tumblr they created a page to promote the
issue.
Some of the other fun craft projects used to increase foot traffic was to give fun
and easy craft projects that were posted on the hellocereallovers.com webpage. These
were easy crafts that used boxes of General Mills cereals as part of every craft. These
craft projects included creating “snacklaces,” creating guitars with rubber bands, toy
garages, post cards, jetpacks, and magazine holders.
Conclusion
This campaign brought to fruition the many possibilities that social media has the ability
to create. Social media generates buzz and it is a part of our lives. I loved the bubbly and
vibrant approach they took to connecting with consumers. They were personable and
tried to relate to their consumers by showing that they too find cereal as important as the
regular consumer.
A suggestion that I believe could have worked well with this campaign would be
a box-designing contest. I think it would have been another activity that would have had

5. consumers involved for much longer periods of time instead of just pinning something to
a board or retweeting a tweet.
Currently (As of October 16, 2015), their Facebook page has 609,276 likes.
Between July 2013 and October 2013, the Facebook page gained 127,500 likes
(Lukovitz). On Twitter they have 19,700 followers and still have people creating videos
and using the #LuckyToBe.
I find one of the hardest aspects to measure through social media is staying
power. I find this campaign to be one that is still being used by General Mills to keep
consumers excited about their cereal. The intriguing part about this, is how do you
measure a campaign whose flame hasn’t yet burned out? This campaign has captured the
power that social media provides because people are still following and staying in touch
with what General Mills has to offer. This is the untapped potential of social media that
gives marketers the ability to connect with many people very quickly and for long periods
of time.

6. References
ALAN CASSINELLI. (2013, December 31). 13 Best Social Media
Campaigns of 2013. Postano.com. http://www.postano.com/blog/13-best-social-
media-campaigns-of-2013
KARLENE LUKOVITZ. (2013, October 10). General Mills Launches
National Cereal Lovers Week. Mediapost.com.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/211055/general-mills-launches-
national-cereal-lovers-week.html
LYNNE MORIOKA. (2013, October 14). Cereal Lovers, We Salute You.
Blog.GeneralMills.com. http://www.blog.generalmills.com/2013/10/cereal-lovers-
we-salute-you/
LYNNE MORIOKA. (2014, December 5). We’ve Got Big News About
French Toast Crunch. Blog.GeneralMills.com
http://www.blog.generalmills.com/2014/12/weve-got-big-news-about-french-toast-
crunch/
ADAM NEWMAN, A. (2013, July 24). Online, a Cereal Maker Takes an
Inclusive Approach. New York Times. p. B5.
CURTIS WONG, M. (2014, June 6). Lucky Charms Marks LGBT Pride
Month With #LuckyToBe Campaign. TheHuffingtonPost.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/06/lucky-charms-gay-pride-
_n_5460659.html

7. Works Cited (Social Media Platforms Used)
Campaign Webpage http://hellocereallovers.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HelloCerealLovers?fref=ts
Instagram https://instagram.com/hellocereal/
Pinterest https://www.pinterest.com/hellocereal/
Tumblr. https://www.tumblr.com/search/Hello+Cereal+Lover
Twitter https://twitter.com/HelloCereal

8. Appendices
CocoaPuffs CarbonaraCreated By Celebrity
Chef Justin Warner.
#LuckyTobeMessageand information
Golden Grahams Fried Chicken By Amanda
Freitag
Nutrition Information regardingthenew Trix
cereal
Snacklaces