General Mills Canada’s “Bring Back the Bees” ad campaign is one of the neatest marketing campaigns focusing on the environment to come down the road in a long time.
The company has launched an integrated campaign around the issue of the worldwide decline in bee populations, pledging to help find a solution to unstable bee populations. On their colorful and appealing webpage, “Bring Back the Bees,” consumers can not only find facts about bees, but reasons why they are an important part of the human food chain.
But the neatest part of the campaign is that General Mills Canada is giving away 35 million wildflower seeds, one for every Canadian, courtesy of Vesey’s Seeds. It shouldn’t be too hard for the company to reach its goal because it has already sent out 25,066,350 seeds, 72 percent of its goal. All a Canadian has to do is go to the webpage and sign up.
General Mills Canada shares some interesting facts about bees
One of every three bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators who spread pollen across crops. Think about some of your favorite foods, like apples, coffee, corn, and of course, honey. Actually, speaking of honey, the bee is the only insect that produces food eaten by man.
And did you know there are over 20,000 species of bees in the world? Bees have different tongue lengths, too, depending on where they live and the type of flowers they drink nectar from. Bees have very good color vision, much like humans. They can detect the bright and showy blue, purple, violet, white and yellow colors of flowers.
Why do honey bees buzz? That distinctive sound they make is due to their wings stroking incredibly fast, about 200 beats a second. And they can fly for up to nine kilometers at speeds of up to 25 kilometers an hour. Yet with all this, it only takes an ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
“This is the first time in the brand’s history that we’ve taken ‘Buzz’ off the box,” said Emma Eriksson, director of Marketing for General Mills Canada. “One-third of the foods we depend on for our survival are made possible by the natural pollination work that bees provide. With ongoing losses in bee populations being reported across Canada, we wanted to leverage our packaging to draw attention to this important cause and issue a call to action to Canadians to help plant 35 million wildflowers—one for every person in Canada.”
The “Bring Back the Bees” campaign is running from March through July.
