The Skittles Twitter Limit

Feel the fear and do the stupid thing anyway

Skittles are a chewy “fruit” candy - and by “fruit” I obviously mean that they are 76% pure sugar. These Weapons of Mass Dental Destruction were first sold in the UK in 1971 by a distributor of the all-powerful Mars Corporation. As far as I know, the Mars family are not Martian infiltrators sent to enfeeble the human race through obesity and replace us with dogs and cats (60% of their revenue is petfood).

In 2009, Mars undertook an experiment with the Skittles brand. This was probably the time of peak hype about social media as a marketing tool - "markets are conversations". It later turned out that actually markets are markets and that you (or rather your data) are the product to be bought and sold. But at the end of the 00s, eager social media gurus were urging marketers to throw away TV and radio and print and outdoor and go all in on social. And Skittles did. Working with their marketing agency (the now defunct agency.com* who back then was still part of the Omnicom agency empire), they replaced their website with their Twitter feed.

If you have ever been on Twitter, you will know that this was completely safe idea with no possible risks. Definitely not the chance that people might post “fuck skittles” on there. Needless to say that did happen and Skittles soon returned to a more normal web presence.

People with the opinions are constantly calling on people with the power to do something. Often this something is risky and perhaps even crazy. Generally the people with the power do not do the crazy thing because you don’t get and keep power by constantly doing crazy things. At some point, your luck will run out. And there is a reason that the people with the opinions do not also have the power.

However sometimes the people with power will do the crazy thing the people with opinions call for. The Skittles Twitter Incident is a relatively low stakes examples of this. Lots of people had been saying that brands should be given over to social media conversations and it was fascinating (although not surprising) to see what happened when someone actually did that. Most people were not negatively impacted in their consumption of Skittles (except that consuming fewer Skittles would probably be good for them). It did briefly impact brand managers and marketing agencies. And then everyone just went back to making ads.

I am reminded of another Chinese curse: “May All Your Wishes Come True”. It is good that eventually someone does actually try the crazy thing that others are calling for and we get to see if these others are full of shit or not. However it is generally best to try the crazy thing in a low stakes context rather than to go all in. Otherwise your Skittles might get stuck between your teeth.

*agency.com is such a 90s name. I’m amazed that it lasted until 2010 before finally being cannibalized by the Omnicom machine.