“Melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”
The sweetest advertising slogan of all time.
There’s nothing that will ruin a sweet-tooth quicker than melted chocolate.
It leaves your fingers feeling sticky and your palette craving the delightful bite of breaking off a piece of candy before letting it go warm in your mouth like butter on hot sourdough bread.
That’s the interesting thing about chocolate… it’s whimsical when it melts in your mouth, not in your hands.
A sticky situation.
M&M’s were introduced commercially in 1941 sometime during the Spanish Civil War.
Forrest Mars, also responsible for the creation of the Milky Way, got the idea after watching soldiers eating chocolates coated with a hard candy shell that could easily be transported without causing a sticky chocolatey mess.
(If you think chocolate-covered fingers are a pain in the ass on any ordinary day, imagine fussing with the stickiness while trying to operate a gun in the middle of a war).
Anyway, long story longer, Mars created his own take on the pellet-sized candy-coated chocolate, dubbed them M&Ms and then sold the suckers exclusively to the United States military during World War II.
But, like all good brands, M&M’s needed a tagline to appeal to the masses commercially… and so it created one out of the need it was solving for the military.
Melt’s in your mouth, not in your hands.
Even though M&M’s tagline was created decades ago, it is still incredibly well received.
Back in 2014, there was a study done at Texas Tech where researchers asked 595 people to name their favorite taglines from a list of 150.
The ones that were most liked ranged from… California Milk Processing Board’s “Got Milk?”, Subway’s “Eat Fresh”, Taco Bell’s “Think outside the bun” and… M&M’s “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands”.
It’s a bit of an anomaly. While most slogans fall between 2–5 words, M&M’s clocks in at a gargantuan 8.
Yet, despite this, it’s massively effective for a handful of reasons…
For one, it’s ridiculously catchy. For two, it tells the consumer exactly what the product does. And, three, it works like a mini ad that advertises it’s unique strength…
This being that folks can enjoy chocolate that melts in their mouth without any sticky mess leftover on their fingers.
If you’re looking for some other tagline inspiration, a little while back I curated 77 tagline examples that I consider to be absolute advertising gold.
By Cole Schafer.
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