M&M's, every mention

Mars Inc. - The Chocolate Story (Audio) · Acquired Dec 16, 2024 · 64 mentions

• ▶ 0:00 Ben Gilbert Okay, David, how many current varieties of M&Ms can you name?
• ▶ 2:02 Ben Gilbert We picked M&Ms, thinking this'll be just some nice lighthearted fare about the candies and the characters on commercials that remind us all of our childhood.
• ▶ 2:56 Ben Gilbert You may know that they own the world's most popular candy, Snickers, in addition to M&M's.
• ▶ 9:21 David Rosenthal This is the company, you know, Mars, Snickers, M&M's, Milky Way, it's all to come here.
• ▶ 22:55 Ben Gilbert The fact that I'm looking down here at all these bags of M&Ms and the Snickers bar, we sort of just assume, oh, this is an industrial thing that just sort of comes off the line.
• ▶ 1:07:49 David Rosenthal As evidenced by the fact that, you know, here we are today eating the most popular candies in the world that Mars makes, and it's still Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, M&Ms, which we will get into.
• ▶ 1:24:50 David Rosenthal I pray for M&Ms.
• ▶ 1:24:56 David Rosenthal If he was religious at all, he was religious about Milky Way and Snickers and M&Ms.
• ▶ 1:35:11 Ben Gilbert The recent factory that they built to make M&Ms, and it's like a corporate headquarters and manufacturing facility, and there's a bunch of pictures on Google Maps of the exterior and interior, just like you would expect from anything…
• ▶ 1:35:43 Ben Gilbert But there are two big M&Ms waving at you out of the parking lot.
• ▶ 1:50:31 David Rosenthal But before we tell the M&M's story, now it's a great time to tell you about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.
• ▶ 1:53:30 Ben Gilbert M&M's.
• ▶ 1:53:33 Ben Gilbert I'm gonna eat some dark chocolate and some almond M&M's to celebrate.
• ▶ 1:57:46 unnamed speaker M&M's.
• ▶ 2:02:49 David Rosenthal So the Air Force was the biggest customer of M&Ms during World War II.
• ▶ 2:03:30 David Rosenthal Now, there's an interesting little sidebar to the M&M's story here.
• ▶ 2:04:09 David Rosenthal So three to four years before M&M's startup in the U.S. and two years before Forrest even leaves the U.K.
• ▶ 2:04:32 David Rosenthal The early M&Ms came in tube packaging just like Smarties.
• ▶ 2:06:09 David Rosenthal Meanwhile, during the war, as M&M's is starting up, and the U.S. military is a big customer, and Forrest is sort of rebuilding his empire in America, he's on the lookout for his chappies equivalent to bring into the U.S.
• ▶ 2:07:19 David Rosenthal And in 1942, this chemist and Forrest form another joint venture company in Houston, Texas, and they patent the method in America and start producing rice to sell, just like M&M's, to the military.
• ▶ 2:08:27 David Rosenthal So back to M&M's.
• ▶ 2:08:29 David Rosenthal After the war, Forrest and Bruce Murray, of course, now need to find new customers for M&Ms.
• ▶ 2:09:05 David Rosenthal It's gonna make M&M's be for a big success coming back to America.
• ▶ 2:09:45 David Rosenthal So the story is, as sales are not going well, Forrest orders Bruce to produce a daily report of the past day's sales of M&Ms in a written form to him every morning in the office.
• ▶ 2:10:49 David Rosenthal He's trying to push him out because he wants to own M&Ms, a hundred percent.
• ▶ 2:10:53 David Rosenthal So in 1949, four years after the end of the war and middling sales at best of M&Ms, Forrest finally succeeds in pushing Bruce out.
• ▶ 2:11:45 David Rosenthal So they're valuing the M&M's business at five million dollars, which, you know, this is 1949, so if you adjust for inflation in 2024 dollars, that would be like valuing the business at sixty five million and buying Bruce out for thirteen…
• ▶ 2:12:25 David Rosenthal Certainly M&Ms were not yet M&Ms, but...
• ▶ 2:14:54 David Rosenthal They do this product study, market study of who do M&Ms appeal to.
• ▶ 2:15:01 David Rosenthal And they find that actually M&Ms are super appealing to kids.
• ▶ 2:15:19 David Rosenthal And M&Ms and Smarties, et cetera, this had started as food for soldiers.
• ▶ 2:17:36 David Rosenthal By 1956, so they start this campaign and call it fifty-fifty-one, so five years later, M&M's have become the biggest selling candy in all of America, doing over forty million dollars in annual sales and growing super fast.
• ▶ 2:18:35 David Rosenthal And of course, today, I say as I pop some M&Ms into my mouth, M&Ms are not just a kid's candy.
• ▶ 2:18:45 David Rosenthal Like, everybody today who is an adult eating M&Ms grew up eating them as kids.
• ▶ 2:18:51 Ben Gilbert 1954, there's the first TV commercial featuring the animated M&M's characters.
• ▶ 2:19:08 Ben Gilbert The personalities changed a little bit, but these personified M&M's that have witty stuff to say is, they're pretty early.
• ▶ 2:19:16 Ben Gilbert Speaking of copycats, M&Ms were so successful that Hershey's really was getting worried.
• ▶ 2:19:23 Ben Gilbert David, as you said, it became the better selling candy than Hershey's bars.
• ▶ 2:19:40 Ben Gilbert And in order to say what it is, you had to say they're like M&Ms, which that's a tough marketing position to be in.
• ▶ 2:19:47 Ben Gilbert I mean, you nailed it earlier when you said being first to market is really important, and in markets where it is important to be first to market, getting scale quickly so you become the product of record or of reference when people are…
• ▶ 2:21:59 David Rosenthal In the US, obviously he's got M&Ms, which are now the number one candy in the US.
• ▶ 2:22:56 Ben Gilbert Right, because if Hershey's cut him off, M&M's would be screwed.
• ▶ 2:24:25 David Rosenthal As we get on into the 19 fifties, and Forrest has now turned M&Ms into a big success, he starts turning his attention to Chicago Mars.
• ▶ 2:29:21 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's just because he owns M&Ms and Uncle Ben's Rice and the UK businesses,
• ▶ 2:44:03 David Rosenthal He is not only going to increase his advertising and blitz the nation with M&Ms and Mars products, he's also gonna increase the size of his bars while keeping price the same.
• ▶ 2:45:04 David Rosenthal And as a result, in 1973, the combined Mars, which is all of the legacy Mars Inc. products, Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, et cetera, plus M&M's, passes all of Hershey to become the number one candy company in America.
• ▶ 2:48:33 David Rosenthal End of 1973, he's built up this whole empire, gone to Europe, built the Europe business, built the pep business, come back to America, built M&Ms, retaken over Mars Inc., battled Hershey, beat them at their own game.
• ▶ 3:23:07 David Rosenthal So in the late 19 seventies, early 19 eighties, when Spielberg is making E.T., the movie E.T., he's written into the script that E.T. is going to be lured into the house by a trail of M&M's, and anybody who remembers the details of the…
• ▶ 3:23:30 Ben Gilbert And M&M's passed on the opportunity, because it had to come with a guaranteed million dollars of co-marketing, consumer promotion, trade promotions, displays, featuring E.T.
• ▶ 3:24:56 Ben Gilbert Everyone knows Reese's Pieces are not M&Ms.
• ▶ 3:24:58 Ben Gilbert They're good, but they're never going to be competitive with M&Ms.
• ▶ 3:25:16 Ben Gilbert So, maybe the takeaway is actually M&Ms are a better product, and Reese's Pieces are sort of this specialty niche product, and that's why they don't have the market share, and maybe that this whole postulate is wrong, that
• ▶ 3:25:29 Ben Gilbert Marketing can create durable brands, and the reason why all these Snickers and Milky Way and M&Ms are victorious is because they're just better products.
• ▶ 3:26:27 Ben Gilbert That M&M's has run.
• ▶ 3:26:29 Ben Gilbert In fact, they operate a M&M's store in Disney World or in Disneyland.
• ▶ 3:26:37 Ben Gilbert They've got that commercial where the two M&M's characters come in the house.
• ▶ 3:27:16 Ben Gilbert In fact, NASA, they went up on
• ▶ 3:27:21 Ben Gilbert NASA can't obviously endorse because it's a government agency, but it's on the menu, and it's a part of all the astronaut videos you watch where they're popping M&Ms up and having fun trying to chase them around the cabin in zero gravity.
• ▶ 3:27:48 Ben Gilbert Another one, just like the innovation on commercials, think about how long they've had those computer-generated M&M's characters.
• ▶ 3:28:32 Ben Gilbert My last one around this is, in this sort of marketing world, do you remember in 1995 when they said they were gonna do away with the tan M&Ms?
• ▶ 3:29:47 David Rosenthal I'm sure you read, too, Mars is constantly rebalancing the ratios of colors in M&M bags to suit current tastes.
• ▶ 3:31:13 Ben Gilbert In fact, I feel pretty crappy after eating all these M&Ms and Snickers.
• ▶ 3:31:48 David Rosenthal All that said, no matter what happens, I don't think M&Ms and Snickers, they're not going anywhere.
• ▶ 3:39:59 David Rosenthal I mean, God, the market research and the positioning that they did with M&Ms, taking what essentially was a failed product and then doing the research to understand who the target consumers were and who the target buyers were and how that…