General Mills
Hello, Cereal Lovers
Primary challenges to solve for:
Reclaim Breakfast Relevance
Cereal had quietly slipped from its throne as a go-to breakfast, edged out by options that felt more modern, portable, or health-forward. The challenge was to reinsert cereal into people’s daily consideration set not by competing head-on with nutrition trends, but by reframing its value. This meant reminding consumers that cereal wasn’t just fuel, it was ritual, comfort, and a small daily moment of joy worth returning to.
01
Turn Nostalgia into Participation
While many people had fond memories of cereal, nostalgia alone wasn’t enough to drive behavior change. The opportunity was to transform passive sentiment into active engagement by inviting people to celebrate cereal culture in a more expressive, communal way. This required creating a platform where fans could see themselves reflected, contribute their own takes, and feel like part of something larger than a single campaign.
02
Bridge Brand Storytelling with Digital Experience
To bring the campaign to life, the digital experience needed to carry the same energy as the broader campaign while offering something uniquely interactive. The website became the connective tissue, translating broadcast and social storytelling into an experience users could explore, engage with, and share. It balanced playful content with intuitive design, ensuring that the tone felt spontaneous while the experience itself remained seamless and accessible.
03
Challenge
By the early 2010s, traditional cold cereal was losing ground at breakfast to trendier and perceived healthier options like yogurt, smoothies, and oatmeal. Despite being present in the vast majority of American households, cereal consumption had been gradually declining as consumer habits shifted toward more portable or protein-focused morning foods.
General Mills set out to reignite excitement around cereal by reminding people why they loved it in the first place. The goal was to reposition cereal not just as a breakfast routine, but as a nostalgic, playful cultural staple worth celebrating again.
Approach
The Hello, Cereal Lovers campaign was designed as a connected ecosystem of storytelling, social engagement, and digital experience, with the website as its central hub. I led the end-to-end UX for the site, ensuring it reflected the campaign’s playful tone while remaining intuitive and accessible.
I conducted discovery and research to understand shifting breakfast behaviors, then translated those insights into wireframes and interaction models that supported an exploratory, content-rich experience.
I also designed for social media integration, surfacing user-generated content and enabling seamless sharing to extend engagement beyond the site.
In parallel, I contributed to the branding and visual design, including creating the campaign tagline “Cerealously Fun,” which helped define the voice of the experience across touchpoints.
Results
What began as a campaign quickly grew into a social community celebrating cereal culture. The initiative generated strong engagement across social platforms, with hundreds of thousands of followers participating in the conversation and sharing cereal-inspired content.
Most importantly, the campaign helped reverse declining momentum for the category. During the campaign period, General Mills reported a 4% increase in cereal sales, demonstrating that celebrating nostalgia and community around a product could translate directly into renewed consumer demand.
The campaign also received industry recognition for its innovative use of social storytelling and integrated media, proving that even a decades-old category could find new life through a creative digital-first approach.