I was in the candy aisle at the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne on Monday night, buying nothing I needed, and the M&M's bags still had the characters on them. Same green. Same orange. Same redesigned shoes that somehow produced four months of cable news.
By Tuesday morning, Mars had announced an indefinite pause on the spokescandies and handed the job to Maya Rudolph.
Half the trade press called it a stunt, a Super Bowl setup, a wink at everyone who spent the fall yelling about a cartoon peanut. Probably true. Mars is good at this and the timing is not an accident.
Which is why the lesson the industry is already extracting worries me more than the pause does.
That lesson goes: do not touch the mascot. Redesign nothing. Keep every character so smooth that nobody can get a grip on it. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I know how that slide gets written, because I have written it.
The mistake was never redesigning the characters. The mistake was letting people who do not buy your product decide who your characters are.
Here is the part that gets lost. The redesign was tiny. Different footwear, softened silhouettes, a line about inclusion in the press release. Nobody in the candy aisle was confused. The outrage came from people who were never going to be moved by a bag of candy either way, and it came because a cartoon is an easy thing to be furious about on television.
Three things follow.
One, volume is not a market signal. The loudest response to your work almost never comes from your buyers, and a brand that cannot tell those groups apart will spend a decade steering by noise.
Two, a pause reads as a verdict. Mars did not say the criticism was wrong. Mars removed the characters, which tells everyone watching that the criticism worked. That is a lever you have now handed to strangers, and levers get pulled.
Three, nerve is not a personality trait. It is an asset, and it depreciates when you do not use it. Patagonia gets to sue the federal government and sell more fleece because it has spent forty years making that move legible. Liquid Death sells canned water on the strength of never once flinching. Neither of them tested their way there.
Three, nerve is not a personality trait. It is an asset, and it depreciates when you do not use it.
Mars is not in danger. They will sell an ocean of candy in February and Maya Rudolph is funnier than the rest of us. But the next brand in this position will learn the wrong thing, and the slide will say hold steady, wait it out.
Truffles and Barnaby were on the counter when I got home, uninterested, which is roughly the correct response to a shoe.