M&M’s candies settle on 6 principal colors…and characters

What’s your favorite M&M’s candy color? Today, the six standard colors are red, yellow, green, brown, orange and blue. 

The colorful chocolates with a “hard confectioner shell” are supposed to have the same milk chocolatey taste inside, but many M&M’s fans aren’t so sure about that.

 

One fellow who was vocal on the subject is Bill Haslam, former governor of Tennessee (2011-19). Gov. Haslam visited the Mars Incorporated manufacturing plant in Cleveland, Tenn., in 2013, to applaud the company’s $67 million investment to expand the facility in order to produce more M&M’s. 

James Harrison was there reporting for the Chattanooga Today online news service. Harrison said that Gov. Haslam described himself as an “interested user of Mars products, eating M&M’s almost every day.” 

“I’ve always been a green M&M’s guy,” Gov. Haslam said. 

Green is one of the five “original” M&M’s colors along with purple, brown, red and yellow. 

For some reason, purple was bumped from the mix in 1949, replaced with tan.

 

Red was “suspended” in 1976, when there were scientific studies linking red dyes to cancer. Mars voluntarily removed red M&M’s from the bag, adding orange as a replacement.

 

The red dyes were “cleared” in 1987, and Mars reintroduced red M&M’s, while opting to keep orange in the bag as well. 

For some other reason in 1995, the company decided to boot tan out of the lineup. It conducted a contest, inviting voters to decide whether to reinstate purple or go with blue or pink. The public picked blue. 

Lara O’Reilly, senior business correspondent for Business Insider.com, said that “momentum flatlined” after blue was added to the M&M’s family…for some reason. Mars tasked advertising agency BBDO Worldwide (based in New York City) to revitalize the brand. 

Susan Credle, BBDO’s creative director at the time, told Business Insider: “They’d become just candy. An aisle store candy brand versus an icon brand.” 

BBDO set about changing that, O’Reilly said, “by taking the colors of the candies in the bag and developing each into a character to make a comedic ensemble.” 

“Mars didn’t have a great reputation creatively,” Credle said. “M&M’s had established (in the mid-1950s) two sickly sweet characters who shilled for the company.” 

They were known simply as Red and Yellow. Red, a “blustery schemer,” was a regular round M&M’s guy, and Yellow, a “lovable dullard,” was bigger and lumpy, since he was a Peanut M&M’s representative. 

“When we started to think about how to evolve these two characters, we kept coming back to the fact that there were six colors in the bag. Six. A comedic ensemble.” 

Credle said it “seemed obvious” to have Blue “be the confident, unflappable cool character, like Snoopy, Bugs Bunny, Sam from ‘Cheers’ and Hawkeye from’ M*A*S*H.’” 

“There was an urban legend about the green M&M’s. They were supposedly an aphrodisiac.” So, in 1996, “Green would be the first female character – the sexy, confident, in-control femme fatale. Like Candice Bergen from ‘Murphy Brown’ and Dixie Carter from ‘Designing Women.’” 

Rounding out the field are Orange, an anxious, paranoid, shy little fellow, and Brown, a bespectacled, intellectual, boss lady-type figure.

 

“As the team established and developed each of the M&M’s characters,” Credle said, “we were always guided by one goal: to make people believe that the characters were real. In fact, we even wrote a Christmas spot in which Santa Claus and the M&M’s characters meet and can’t believe either actually exists.”

Red and Santa fainted upon sight of one another.

 

Moving forward, M&M’s characters redefine their roles

Green, the first female M&M’s candy character to emerge in 1996, became the favorite of Susan Credle the creative director of the team that brought the comedic ensemble to life for Mars Incorporated. 

“We put Green in a pair of white go-go boots because we couldn’t figure out how to give her ankles,” Credle said. “All the early drawings made Green look as though she had shapeless, tree trunk legs – not in-fitting with her seductress character.” Go-go boots definitely were “in fashion” in the mid-1990s.

 

Brown, the other female character, would appear wearing a pair of high heels. (Green was seen occasionally slipping into a pair of heels, too – the strap would hide the lack of ankle, Credle said.)

 

Students at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., who enroll in the course “Chocolate, Culture and the Politics of Food,” learn about “the sociohistorical legacy of chocolate, with a delicious emphasis on the eating and appreciation of the so-called ‘food of the gods.’” 

The instructor is Dr. Carla D. Martin, a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests that include history, agronomy, ethnomusicology and linguistics. In 2016, one of her students posted research online about Green M&M’s adventures, while appearing as the “back cover girl” for Sports Illustrated magazine’s annual swimsuit editions from 2009-14.

 

Hence, it came as big and shocking news in January 2022 when M&M’s “anthropomorphized chocolate characters” underwent a makeover, wrote Danielle Wiener-Bronner of CNN Business. 

“The most noticeable change to the six M&M’s characters: new shoes,” Wiener-Bronner said. 

“Green has swapped her go-go boots for sneakers. Brown is sporting lower, more sensible heels. Red’s and Yellow’s shoes now have laces. Orange’s shoes laces are no longer untied.”

Blue’s shoes now resemble what a high-ranking Mars’ executive – Anton Vincent – described as “a bad version of Uggs” – a brand of Australian sheepskin boots.

 

Vincent said that M&M’s is trying to make the characters – particularly the two female ones – more “current” and “representative of our consumer.” 

The changes may be subtle, but even small shifts can help brands avoid falling out of fashion, said David Camp, co-founder and managing partner of Metaforce, a marketing company based in New York City. 

“Every brand has to continuously reinvent itself to remain relevant,” he said.

So, here we go: 

The new Red still comes across as being a bit brash and conceited. He tells his fans that his best qualities are “my charisma and my smarts. And, of course, my humility.” 

The new Yellow is still a big, huggable goofball with his happy-go-lucky, one-day-at-a-time, live-life attitude. 

The new Blue, who see’s himself as a “cool dude” in his Peanut M&M’s costume, is also a jokester. A fan asked: “Do you suffer from sleep walking?” Blue replied: “I’m not big on multi-tasking, so when I sleep, I sleep.” 

The new Orange continues to try to overcome his natural instincts to panic when he steps out of his comfort zone. But it’s a constant struggle, for Orange believes “something will go wrong at any moment.” The other colors form his support group. 

The new Green is toning down her sexuality and lightening up on the eye makeup and lipstick. She’s trying to reach out to Brown and grow their woman-to-woman bonding relationship. 

The new Brown is trying to maintain her professional woman image, but she is approaching the “fine line” between female assertiveness and aggressiveness. Her mantra is: “Not bossy. Just the boss.”