Market research has repeatedly shown a diverse and inclusive corporate culture is just good business. It increases employee satisfaction, retention and performance.
It allows for newer ideas, thus helping businesses avoid stagnation. It's good for sales!
As such, corporations have been leaning in to the idea of inclusion where they once resisted. The thing about leaning, though, is that sometimes you fall.
Mars Inc. may have just proverbially faceplanted.
The company announced it will be making changes to the M&M characters in order to be more "inclusive." Public response has been ... tepid, shall we say?
The top comment on this YouTube video ad at the time of this writing is:
"You guys are lucky YouTube got rid of the down-vote counter."
It's a sentiment echoed repeatedly in the comment section.
While the dislike counter may not be active anymore, the video has over 115k views and still isn't close to getting a thousand likes.
That ratio speaks pretty loudly.
It's not the idea of inclusivity itself that people have an issue with. It's the way it was handled.
The "inclusive" changes Mars Inc. made to the M&M characters included changing the green M&M's shoes to sneakers, lowering the heels on the brown M&M, making the red M&M a little nicer and allowing the orange M&M to “acknowledge his anxiety.”
The green and brown M&Ms will stop being catty towards each other and team up for girl power. The candies arms and legs will be a light shade of whatever their candy coating is.
They were all a peachy-beige color before.
Finally, Mars announced the M&Ms will no longer have prefixes—something that was pretty much never used anyway.
The public seems unconvinced when it comes to this sort of "inclusivity."
The character changes themselves weren't a hit either.
Mars announced a lot of changes, but most of them were to the backstory and personalities of the characters. Very few of them impacted the design aside from changing the shoes on the green and brown candies.
The "inclusive" changes are almost non-existent from a design standpoint.
The art changed so minimally it likely could have been done without many people noticing—and certainly without an announcement that many say felt like pandering.
Twitter had some thoughts.
Mars Inc. is aware of the conversation happening online right now.
They tweeted about it—but not by addressing any of the actual feedback.
They opted to let the green m&m and "her effortless confidence" take the lead.
The invisible changes nobody asked for will go into effect immediately.
@joehas/X