What's your favorite idea you never sold? We all have one. Mine came during an intense month-long pitch for Mars global communications, with an emphasis on M&M's.
Like any good planner, the minute the brief hit my desk I was hitting up friends and family members to let me talk to their kids and teens about candy. Not concerning at all. This part of the process is in fact what I love about brand strategy -- the actual talking to people part. I spoke to kids and teens across the US, asking about their favorite candy, the lunchroom hierarchy and what really goes on at middle school slumber parties. In the process, I learned a few fascinating things about how the typical human child (and later human adult) consumes their chocolate-covered confections.
For one, M&Ms are a time-based treat. Each morsel is itself a neat packaged treat within the larger wrapper; M&Ms and other bite-sized treats lend themselves well to being doled out over the course of an event. Watching a movie? Better to grab the M&Ms over the Snickers if you want your snack to make it past the opening credits.
Sharing is a myth. For some reason, marketers like to pretend that because there are multiple M&Ms in a package, that means they're meant to be shared. Sorry, but no. In our health-obsessed society, candy has become personal indulgence, not community unifier. And also, nobody wants to share their candy. Get your own.
And the most important observation was that each person observes their own ritual when eating M&Ms, consciously or not. Think of the last time you ate M&Ms. Whether it was thirty years ago or last Thursday, you probably ate them the same way as you would today. Maybe you have them two at a time. Eat the green ones first. Only peanut M&Ms, carefully dissected by layer. Perhaps you do the shovel, and eat them by the mouthful, without order or reason, you sick animal. The point is, we each have our ritual, the thought of which, immediately triggers the thought of eating M&Ms.
What I love about this fact, is that not only is it a personal ritual, but it's one that surprisingly reveals aspects of the eater's personality. Do you prefer order or chaos? Friendship, or independence? Not only do we have a ritual, we have a whole zodiac of personality indicators ripe for sharing in all manner of media. People love to share their horoscopes, their Myers-Briggs type, and whatever personality indicators they've accumulated over the years. It's time to add M&Ms into the indicator.