For decades M&M’s conjured memories of focus groups for me.
During my years in consumer insights departments (aka marketing research) for Veryfine Products and Dunkin’, I sat behind the mirror watching customers react to new product ideas, ad campaigns, and new store designs.
To welcome clients, focus group facilities stocked the back rooms with an array of soft drinks and snacks.
A bowl of M&M’s was de rigueur. Sometimes multiple bowls, both plain and peanut flavors.
It’s easy to lose track of how many you nibble during a two-hour session.
But your scale knows.
I quickly learned to stake out my seat and move those bowls as far away as possible.
I hadn’t given M&M’s much thought until my friend Mark Schaefer asked me to provide a brand perspective on their recent hullabaloo in an interview for his online community.
After watching M&M’s marquee 2023 Superbowl commercial, my friends Dominic and David insisted I write about the trainwreck.
Who am I to deny a request?
Okay folks, as Maria sings in The Sound of Music, let’s start at the very beginning.
M&M’s launched in 1941 as military rations. Their hard candy shell enabled soldiers to carry chocolate in warm weather.
Ask anyone over age 40 about M&M’s and we’ll tell you they “melt in your mouth, not in your hand.”
M&M’s adopted that tagline in 1954, likely inspired by the military purpose. Commercials showed mothers happier with M&M’s because they did not cause the mess of other chocolate candies.
Were civilians worried about messy chocolates? Who knows?
The tagline’s claim became both brand differentiator and purpose.
M&M’s introduced their spokescandies, red and yellow cartoon characters, in 1960.
By 1999, there were 5 computer-generated figures: red, yellow, orange, blue, and green. Each had a distinct personality.
Red was bossy.
Yellow was a peanut M&M and portrayed as dim-witted.
Orange was anxious.
Blue was confident.
Green was the only female in the group. She was a diva, depicted as “sexy,” and sported go-go boots.
The last use of the tagline I can find is this 1997 ad with the spokescandies as guests on Dennis Miller’s talk show.
Forty-three years with one tagline. Impressive.
In 1998, M&M’s marketing team must have decided people no longer worried about chocolate melting in their hands.
Just like that, the tagline melted away, taking the product’s differentiation and purpose with it.
A close look at M&M’s ad campaigns over the next 20 years shows a brand having an identity crisis.
1998: “Official candy of the new millennium.” MM are the roman numerals for 2000. Get it?
2001: “What is it about the green ones?”
2002: Contest to choose a new color to add to M&M’s bags – purple won.
2004: “Chocolate is better in color.”
2007: “There’s an m in everyone.”
2011: “Can’t resist m.”
2012: Ms. Brown introduced during Superbowl 2012 as “Not your average chocolate.” Ms. Brown was confident, strode in stilettos, and wore smart eyeglass frames.
2017: Clean energy promotion
2018: “Always fun.”
As I mention in my book, Teenage Wastebrand, brand identity is a combination of purpose and attributes.
On January 21, 2022, M&M’s announced their mission (aka purpose) “M&M’S® promises to use the power of fun to include everyone with a goal of increasing the sense of belonging for 10 million people around the world by 2025.”
This new purpose set them up with two obvious brand attributes: fun and inclusive.
M&M’s implemented several initiatives:
M&M’s also tweaked some spokescandies in January 2022, seemingly in support of their mission.
Red became nicer.
Orange embraced his true self, worries and all.
Ms. Brown lost the Ms. and traded her stilettos for pumps.
Green swapped her go-go boots for sneakers.
Changes to the female characters, Brown and Green, caught conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s ire.
"M&M's will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous," Carlson said. "Until the moment when you wouldn't want to have a drink with any one of them. That's the goal. When you're totally turned off, we've achieved equity. They've won."
In September 2022, M&M’s introduced Purple spokescandy, a female, peanut M&M designed “to represent acceptance and inclusivity.”
When a limited-edition pack came out in January 2023 featuring only the female characters and supporting “women out to flip the status quo,” Carlson chimed in again.
He called Purple “an obese and distinctively frumpy M&M” and chided Orange for “becoming a poster boy for the mental-health crisis.”
It’s no mistake that the mission announcement and the limited-edition women’s initiative pack both came in January.
M&M’s are a long-time Superbowl advertiser. Generating buzz around the brand prior to the game helps them get publicity and more mileage from their Superbowl ad spend.
Both the spokescandy changes and Carlson’s outbursts stoked the PR fire. Hundreds of media covered the controversy, including CNN, Vox, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.
M&Ms kept mum to the hoopla in 2022.
On January 23, 2023, after Carlson’s second outburst, M&M’s announced the spokescandies were taking “an indefinite pause” and SNL alum Maya Rudolph would replace them as spokesperson.
A message from M&M'S. pic.twitter.com/EMucEBTd9o
— M&M’S (@mmschocolate) January 23, 2023
Tucker Carlson declared victory. Pundits and commentators hypothesized why they would do this.
Five days later, the indefinite pause proved to be a publicity stunt. M&M’s assured the world the spokescandies would be back with an ad during the Superbowl.
The public was primed for a major M&M’s statement on inclusion or at least an entertaining commercial. They received a lame mock ad for clam-flavored M&M’s.
The spokescandies addressed their return in an ad that ran AFTER the Superbowl game was over. Three spoke, but said nothing about inclusion.
While it is true that a brand identity sets direction for marketing communications like advertising, it does more than that.
A brand’s purpose serves as a North Star for the entire organization. It determines strategy and initiatives, guides employees in decision-making, and shapes company culture.
Employees want to work for a brand with a purpose they believe in.
But a brand purpose only succeeds if the company embraces it and is willing to defend it.
Otherwise, it’s lip service.
M&M’s used their purpose to fund a few initiatives, create a sensitivity board, tweak their spokescandies, and generate publicity.
When public discourse didn’t go as planned, the company recoiled and used the moment for another publicity stunt.
Their commercials seemed to say don’t take us seriously.
Two days after the Superbowl, M&M’s announced they were celebrating the official return of the spokescandies by doubling the number of $10,000 grants offered to “change-making women” from 10 to 20, “putting the ‘fun’ in funding their initiatives while increasing the opportunity for trailblazing women to champion a positive impact on society.”
M&M’s PR team generated lots of free press coverage, but the brand has taken a big hit on their credibility.
Their actions have left me wondering:
I’m betting many M&M’s customers are wondering too. M&M’s may be repelling people more than making them feel included.
If M&M’s believe they are uniquely poised to use fun to promote inclusivity, then they should lean into it, not shy away when controversy hits.
Begin in house. The first people M&M’s should make feel included are their employees. They need to feel the fun and inclusion before they can help the brand demonstrate that to the world. If M&M’s culture isn’t fun and inclusive, no campaign can convince the world the brand is.
Stand up for your beliefs. View Tucker Carlson’s commentary as more than just publicity. It’s challenging the brand’s identity. Bark back.
Let your identity guide you. If you are fun and inclusive, those attributes should guide your message and voice as you support and defend your purpose.
Demand your creative team meet the challenge. Ask your agency to craft a response, not a retreat. Red used to be bossy and is now nicer. Maybe he could address the situation via what he has learned about kindness and inclusivity, in a fun manner of course.
Involve Maya Rudolph. A casualty of M&M’s publicity seeking is their underutilization of the veteran comedian. Not only is she a fun, fabulous talent with the right demeanor to help M&M’s mission, but she is also Black and Jewish, embodying the brand’s attributes.
Accept that not everyone will agree. This is where many brands struggle. To have a purpose means to stand for something. Not everyone will agree. It’s ironic, but standing for inclusion may deter some people.
Using fun to promote inclusivity is a great idea. I hope M&M’s can implement it beyond publicity stunts and donations, and not melt when challenged.
What was your reaction to M&M’s marketing hullaballoo?
***
Check out this much better Superbowl commercial from 2021 – already on the fun and inclusive trail a year before they announced their new mission.
After spending the winter of 2021 producing my book and the early spring getting it into the world, I needed a fun break.
Don’t we all?
Instead, I decided tackle one of the biggest brand dilemmas of the year.
Who should host the quiz show Jeopardy!?
If you haven’t been watching or somehow haven’t heard, Alex Trebek, host of the show in daily syndication for 37 years, passed away on November 8, 2020 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
His passing added to the upheaval we’ve experienced since March 2020 for many Jeopardy! fans.
His last show aired on January 8, 2021.
Since January 11, 2021, the show has been running a sequence of guest hosts.
Replacements have included broadcast journalists Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper, Mike Richards (the show’s executive producer), Aaron Rodgers (Green Bay Packers’ quarterback), and Ken Jennings (winningest contestant in Jeopardy history).
The parade-o’-guest-hosts has been amusing and is scheduled to continue through at least mid-August 2021.
Just as life will never be quite the same post-pandemic, Jeopardy! will never be the same without Alex Trebek.
To move forward we must all find our “next normal.”
Jeopardy! fans’ next normal includes a new, regular, well-chosen host.
Both the parade of guest hosts and uncertainty surrounding the future permanent host suggest to me that the Jeopardy! brand was unprepared to lose Alex and is feeling somewhat lost now.
Let’s help them out, shall we?
The Jeopardy! brand was born in 1963 on a plane during a conversation between entertainment mogul Merv Griffin and his wife Julann about the quiz show scandals of the 1950s.
Merv wanted to create a new quiz show but feared the scandals showing the outcomes had been fixed had tainted the format’s credibility.
Julann jokingly suggested Merv give the contestants the answers.
After Julann tossed Merv “5280 feet” (“How many feet in a mile?”) and “79 Wistful Vista” (“Was that Fibber McGee and Molly’s address?”), he jumped on the idea.
I had no idea who Fibber McGee and Molly were before my research.
Art Fleming hosted the NBC and weekly syndication versions of Jeopardy! from 1964 to 1975 and from 1978 to 1979.
By the time the show was revived in 1984, the brand was 20 years old.
You could argue the brand was in adolescence then, attempting to regain its footing by shifting from weekly syndication to daily, instituting a digitized game board, and replacing Art Fleming with Alex Trebek.
The story of how Alex Trebek got the hosting job is less brand redirection and more opportunistic moment.
One night while Chuck Woolery was hosting Wheel of Fortune, he was hospitalized and Trebek filled in last minute. Wheel of Fortune was also a Merv Griffin creation. Griffin liked Trebek’s seamless performance and offered him Jeopardy!
A Sports Illustrated article from 1989 stated there were Jeopardy! purists who still regarded Fleming as “the authentic Mr. Know-It-All,” and that he was accosted frequently to answer fans’ trivia questions and settle answer disputes.
Clearly Sports Illustrated considered its purview akin to the corresponding Trivial Pursuit category at the time, “Sports and Leisure.” How much athleticism is there to ringing that buzzer?
Alex Trebek will always be the original host for those of us who started watching when the show was revived in 1984.
Art Fleming described Jeopardy! as “one big party game” and “an entertaining way to fill up 30 minutes, but basically fluff.”
In his 37 years of hosting, Alex Trebek became the face of Jeopardy! and put his own take on the brand.
On the Jeopardy! website, he is quoted as saying “I think what makes Jeopardy! special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to reward and encourage learning.”
The dozens of Jeopardy! templates offered to teachers on the internet support that notion. Teachers use the game to engage students and help them self-assess their mastery of a subject.
Jeopardy! won a 2011 Peabody Award, the first bestowed on a television quiz show in more than 50 years. Given in 2012, the citation said the award was “for decades of consistently encouraging, celebrating and rewarding knowledge.” It called the program “a model of integrity and decorum.”
Successful brands don’t happen by accident. They succeed by design.
This design includes three key elements which serve as guiding forces for the brand.
The first two elements – the purpose and the personality – constitute the brand’s identity.
Based on the hosts’ comments, the Peabody award citation, and my own experience watching the show for decades, I’d describe the Jeopardy! brand purpose as to entertain and educate by testing knowledge of trivia.
Jeopardy!’s brand attributes strike me as fun, educational, intellectual, and knowledgeable.
Jeopardy!’s values, which guide the behavior of the brand team including the writers who craft the questions, include integrity, decorum, research-based facts, verification, accuracy, and fairness.
Together Jeopardy!’s purpose, attributes, and values provide a context for everything the brand does, including selecting a new host.
The new Jeopardy! host needs to embody the brand.
It’s a tall order to be fun, entertaining, intellectual, knowledgeable, and well-behaved. Even taller to be a model of integrity.
Not every guest host has filled the order.
Amanda Hess noted in her article in The New York Times that guest hosts have fallen into four categories: Jeopardy! champions, celebrity doctors, news anchors, and jocks.
The division of labor is not even among the categories.
According to the posted schedule, eight news anchors/journalists will get a chance to host. They occupy half of the hosting spots.
The other half includes two champions (Ken Jennings and Buzzy Cohen), two celebrity doctors (Mehmet Oz and Mayim Bialik), two jocks (Aaron Rodgers and Joe Buck), plus executive producer Mike Richards who has hosted other shows, and actor LeVar Burton.
I understand the bias toward news anchors for their integrity, intellectual poise, and knowledge. The fun factor among them? A yawn so far.
Dr. Mehmet Oz’s participation prompted a group of former contests to write a letter in protest, as the doctor’s personal brand attribute of pseudoscience clashed with “a show that values facts and knowledge.”
Dr. Oz’s hyping of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 remedy on FOX news was among the more recent in his history of questionable pronouncements.
Amanda Hess advocated for Ken Jennings or Aaron Rodgers among the hosts that have appeared so far.
Jennings was pleasant.
Aaron Rodgers started out a bit stiff but then seemed to relax and enjoy the show, especially in this personal moment.
No one has stood out yet as the aha! moment choice.
There is great anticipation for the last week in July. LeVar Burton will host.
Burton is an actor, producer, educator, and author whose credits include playing Kunta Kinte in Roots, host and producer of PBS’s Reading Rainbow for 23 years, and playing Lieutenant Junior Grade Geordi La Forge in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as in movies based on that series.
Burton was not on the initial schedule, but producers may have been compelled to include him after Joshua Sanders started a petition for him to host.
As of this writing, the petition 254,078 signatures.
Why have more than a quarter of a million people signed this petition?
Burton’s unbridled enthusiasm for reading, learning, and truthful storytelling has shone through in every role, podcast, video, and book he has created.
In other words, he checks every box in the Jeopardy! brand.
The host the Jeopardy! producers choose will determine how the show fares going forward. With such a large franchise, it is understandable the decision would seem risky.
While it is unlikely the producers will please everyone, by using the brand’s clearly defined guidelines they have a good shot at pleasing most of their audience and setting the brand up for a bright future.
I hope you can see by Jeopardy!’s example that brands aren’t just nice-to-haves for marketing. They underlie everything your organization does and how it serves your audience.
Brands provide a foundation you can rely on when facing major decisions like replacing a beloved front man after 37 years.
Have you determined your brand’s purpose, attributes, and values and shared them with your organization?
And who would you like to see as the new regular host of Jeopardy!?
P.S. If you haven’t defined your brand’s purpose, attributes, or values yet, you can find detailed step-by-step guides in my book Teenage Wastebrand: How You Can Stop Struggling and Start Scaling. Or you can call me for help.
P.P.S. LeVar Burton has my vote!
Liz Solar is a voice talent who has been heard in everything from TV commercials to documentary and audiobook narration to animation. I was honored to be a guest on her Embark podcast recently.
We had a fun and wide-ranging conversation about how:
You can listen here.
On February 28, 1984, about seven months before Jeopardy!’s Alex Trebek era began, Weird Al Yankovic released his second album of parody songs including “I Lost on Jeopardy.” The song is hilarious. For the full experience, pause the video to read each of the clues.
You can listen to the song that inspired Weird Al’s parody, “Jeopardy” by Greg Kihn, who makes a cameo in Al Yankovich’s video.
Inspired to try out for the show? Go here to take the Jeopardy! anytime test.
Or peruse the final jeopardy questions for the last 30 years here.
A new client requested a Skype call recently.
I installed Skype on my new laptop and wanted to test drive a call with my son AJ.
When I asked him, AJ said he did not think he had it installed on his four-year-old laptop.
Then he asked if my new client was 80 years old.
The implication was clear: Skype was out. No one was really using it anymore.
With a gleam in his eye, AJ then said: “Hey, you should write about Skype.”
This is what happens when your children grow up watching you write a monthly marketing newsletter.
And so here we are.
AJ had a point.
Skype use for internet phone and video calls was so prevalent in June 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary added the verb to Skype, acknowledging its standard-bearer status akin to brands like Google, Band Aid, and Xerox.
How did they fall so far so fast?
In August 2003, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis launched Skype along with a team of Estonian engineers. The team designed Skype as a peer-to-peer calling system, which translated voice to data and transmitted it over the internet. This same team had used similar code to launch Kazaa, a music file sharing system, a few years earlier.
Their idea was to “democratize global communication” by making voice calls cheap.
Two Skype users could converse for free via their computers. For a low cost, Skype users could call a mobile or landline phone anywhere in the world.
Skype use soared. In February 2004 the company added audio conference calling. By October 2004 Skype managed 100,000 concurrent users. One year later, the concurrent user count had jumped to one million.
Skype’s utility attracted a suitor. eBay bought the company in September 2005 for $2.6 billion. eBay’s vision was that Skype technology would facilitate communication between its buyers and sellers.
But eBay buyers and sellers preferred to communicate via email due to its anonymity.
eBay’s conservative bank-like culture also proved a bad fit for Skype’s youthful startup culture. Skype went through several management teams in four years.
Yet Skype kept growing. In January 2006 the brand added video conferencing. In April 2006 the number of registered users reached 100 million. The number jumped to 530 million by 2009 and to 663 million in September 2011.
I was one of those millions in 2007.
I had a tea and herbal supplement client based in Switzerland with a U.S. management team in Eastern Massachusetts. The client team members, their PR agency and I tried to video conference via Skype several times during my six-month engagement.
Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t.
Due to the culture clash and the community preference for email, eBay sold a 65 percent stake in Skype to an investor group in September 2009 for $1.9 billion.
Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype in May 2011, giving the investors a hefty return.
While Microsoft was purchasing Skype, Eric Yuan was founding Zoom.
Yuan had spent 13 years in Cisco-Webex’s engineering group. His last year he lobbied Cisco management to let him rebuild the Webex video conference offering to improve it. Cisco declined.
Yuan left and mobilized 40 engineers to realize his own cloud-based video conference service. Yuan’s vision for Zoom was to build a robust technological foundation so the service could “make communications frictionless.”
Zoom launched in January 2013 with an initial conference maximum of 25 participants.
Within a month, Zoom had 400,000 users. By the end of May 2013, that number had grown to one million. Strong growth, but still .17 percent of the 600-plus million that Skype had.
Like humans, brands succeed when they know who they are and how they want to be perceived.
The “who they are” is the brand’s purpose. The brand’s attributes define “how they want to be perceived,” a.k.a. the brand’s personality.
Together they constitute your brand’s identity.
Brands in adolescence often flounder because they have not taken the time to establish their identity, and thus have no guidelines for growth or design.
By 2011, the peer-to-peer technology Skype was built on was showing its limits.
Users experienced long load times, browser windows filled with ads, browser and app crashes, and unpredictable updates that derailed users’ meetings.
Peer-to-peer technology also did not play well on mobile phones.
Skype was a brand in adolescence with an identity crisis.
While Skype’s initial purpose was to “democratize global communication” by making calls cheap, it was far from the only company doing that now. In addition to Cisco-Webex and Zoom, Apple Facetime, BlueJeans Network and the newly launched Google Hangouts were among users’ choices.
Skype’s purpose had ceased to differentiate it from competitors.
The brand needed to craft a new purpose like Spotify did when their original one no longer differentiated them. But that did not happen.
Instead management focused on a core strategy of making its services as broadly available as possible.
Nor did Skype put forth a deliberate brand personality.
In the void, users associated it with adjectives describing their experience: wonky, unreliable, slow, buggy, infuriating.
Having three owners in six years did not help. Each owner looked to profit from Skype but not to invest in the brand’s future.
eBay wanted it for buyer-seller communication. The investor group wanted to turn a quick profit. Microsoft wanted Skype’s cool factor.
Microsoft began transferring Skype from its peer-to-peer technology to a cloud-based application in 2013, but took years to complete the process, frustrating and alienating users.
Skype’s domination in the international call market - which had grown to 40% in 2014 – masked the urgency of strategically addressing the brand.
In addition to its identity crisis, Skype was oversleeping as well, ceding ground to competitors.
Yuan’s “make communications frictionless” purpose for Zoom had led the brand team to invest two years in developing the technological foundation before the service launched and kept them focused as it grew.
Zoom gained a reputation for being easy to use, easy to access and reliable. You did not need an account to use it. You could do a 40-minute call for free. Non-tech users appreciated the single-click access.
Zoom had unique features that further endeared users to the brand:
Photo by visuals on Unsplash
While Skype’s management was focused on growth, Yuan led the Zoom team to focus on user experience.
Yuan’s focus on making current users happy was also part of his philosophy of not growing too fast.
But Zoom’s appeal prompted fast growth anyway. By June 2014, Zoom had 10 million users. Eight months later that number had quadrupled to 40 million.
As competitors continued to flood the market and improve offerings, Skype’s unreliable performance and protracted technological upgrade caused users to abandon it.
Microsoft did not know what to do for Skype.
In the absence of a strategic brand identity – a purpose and defined attributes - they still sought to be the cool kid in the group.
In September 2015 Skype rolled out a succession of “mojis” – custom emojis that included video clips and animations from Universal Studios, BBC and Disney muppets. A set designed by Paul McCartney followed in February 2016.
In 2017 Microsoft redesigned Skype to look more like Snapchat, with a Highlights feature allowing users to share temporary copies of their photos and videos.
Neither effort enamored users who just wanted quality, reliable video conferencing.
“Cool” was not an adjective users associated with a difficult app so that attribute did not stick.
Skype app ratings in the Apple App Store in the U.S. dropped from 3.5 stars to 1.5 stars.
Meanwhile in 2016 Microsoft launched Teams, a “unified communication and collaboration platform.” Microsoft invested heavily in Teams, which did everything Skype could do but better.
In September 2018, Skype Director of Design Peter Skillman announced yet another Skype redesign based on customer feedback. But it was too little too late.
On July 30, 2019 Senior Product Marketing Manager James Fray announced that Skype for Business would cease to exist on July 31, 2021.
Skype’s demise was sealed before the coronavirus hit.
Once the pandemic arrived, many Skype customers jumped to Zoom for its reliability and ease of use. First-time video conference users went directly to Zoom.
The moment that could have been Skype’s glory went to Zoom instead.
And while Zoom has grappled with privacy and security issues, its focus on user experience and attention to those issues keep many users on the platform.
Your brand identity is not a nice-to-have, but the rudder of your business.
To avoid Skype’s fate and grow your brand:
Identify your brand’s purpose. It should be clear, timeless and not product dependent. Notice how Zoom’s purpose – make communication frictionless – is not tied to a particular technology.
Share your purpose. Everyone on your brand team should be using the purpose as a guideline to decide offerings, align processes, serve customers and interact with partners.
Determine your brand’s attributes. These are a combination of what your brand is known for and what it aspires to. Your attributes should be unique to your brand – not characteristics required in your category to compete.
Infuse everything with those attributes. Your communications, packaging, customer interactions, work place environment (on site and remote) – all should ooze your brand attributes. Repeated use and consistent adherence to your attributes is what builds your brand’s reputation.
And as you saw with Skype, in the absence of deliberate brand attributes your audience will assign their own.
Once set, you should not need to revise your brand identity unless market conditions evolve so that it no longer differentiates your brand.
At meeting time my new client called me on the phone instead of Skype. Not worrying about Skype’s technology meant the call was easier and more relaxed.
After the call, I uninstalled Skype. I’m hoping not to need it.
Are you video conferencing? If so, what’s been your experience?
"Honest Zoom Meeting" (3 minutes) Early in the pandemic creative agency Don't Panic put together this caustic, somewhat profane, entirely inappropriate and very funny video.
Coronavirus Parody H of the Stage's original song set to the sounds of Skype. (3 minutes 22 seconds, but song ends at 2:14)
14 Hilarious Tweets About Video Calling That Everyone Can Relate To Right Now No Twitter account needed. My favorites are #4, 8 and 14 (4 minute read)
