Ok, I love M&M’s. Who doesn’t. My two year old daughter really loves M&M’s. To her, it’s a food group. Me, if I was trapped on a desert island and could only take one candy, it would be M&M’s.
I doubt I will ever be put in a position to make this kind of critical decision. Although I sort of wonder what kind of creepy reality would force me to have to do this…but that’s another blog post. Indulge me, it’s Friday.
I saw a tweet come through from a friend of mine, Virginia Miracle (veedub to her friends) about the M&M Mbassador program. This factoid will be important later (veedub, not the program).
Being the good student of community, I followed the link to the Mbassador home page. I immediately dove into the comments…before I even read the post.
There were about a half a dozen comments which oozed affinity and brand loyalty. All sorts of love. Several craved more interaction. They essentially said, ‘”Hey M&M, here I am. Involve me! Work with me! Tap me as a resource! I’ll do anything, just don’t shut me out.”
I dove a little deeper. Lots of comments and stories about the love people have for the melt in your mouth, not in your hand chocolate crack.
When I Googled M&M Mbassador program, there it was on the top of the list. But there is a problem (can you find Waldo?) .
If you look carefully, I was dropped on VeeDub’s page straight from Google. The page his hosted by SatMetrix. C’mon guys, this sort of thing is bad form!
Here is how I got to it:
I finally went back to read the original post that was prompted by Virginia’s tweet. Here’s how it reads:
I feel for Emma. She sounds pretty down and out. Reading between the lines, I’d bet that you don’t see any form of direct consumer engagement coming back anytime soon. I hope it does. Engaged and excited consumers who love the brand are a great way to extend understanding and product adoption and use. Heck, just look at all of the UGC people have created on their own.
A friend and colleague of mine, Pauline Ores has a great line…”Community is like gravity’. It is the same for everything or everyone.” Or at least it should be. Good community works the same for Apple as it should for M&M. That is to some degree if management gets it or understands its value.
My guess is the folks at M&M are making a short term P&L decision. Understand it. Too bad. If I see more commercials of un-dead, man-sized candies playing good cop/bad cop on TV, I’ll be even more disappointed. That means the brand chose the easy generic impression rather than an integrated customer engagement path.
What a bummer.
