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.
Principal
Engaging your customers is at the heart of successful marketing programs. For more than 20 years, Cheryl has been building and executing content and thought leadership strategies designed to do just that. She is excited to be applying that well-honed skill to a help companies like Microsoft, Cisco, 3M, Intel, Capital One and Barclaycard tap into their stakeholder communities and build sophisticated content strategies.
Her experience base spans a range of industries – from technology and financial services to retail, travel, consumer products and healthcare. Cheryl has served as an integral member of her clients’ marketing teams, providing counsel on marketing and brand strategy, thought leadership, media relations, product introductions, and event management.
Prior to joining ComBlu, Cheryl spent 10 years leading corporate marketing for large, complex organizations.