What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of green M&Ms?

When I was growing up in the '70s, everyone "knew" that green M&Ms were an aphrodisiac. Even if we didn't know what the word meant, we sure knew what it led to! Or what we believed it led to. Where the urban legend started, no one knows for sure. But what a great marketing idea! For years, Mars, the company that makes M&MS, denied the green M&M story. Then they decided to capitalize on it.

Here's the Valentine's Day story from a few years ago, excerpted from blogger David Emery's fine post. Mars dubbed green "the new color of love" for Valentine's Day. Special all-green packages of M&Ms were available through the holiday marked with a "disclaimer" that read, "Consumption of The Green Ones® may result in elevated romance levels. If you experience this effect, contact your significant other immediately." The idea was to stand out "amidst a sea of traditional red and pink products." And they did.

Mars was putting into action my favorite marketing axiom: If you can't fix it, feature it! They recognized how widespread the myth was, probably thought it was harmless, and figured out how to uniquely market what they then called "the Green One" while simultaneously positioning the brand to appeal more to teens and even adults.

Since then, "Miss Green" (the only female M&M) has done a racy Sports Illustrated swimsuit video commentary, a strip tease video, and a music video with Adam Lambert that has parental warnings for sexually provocative content and nudity (a naked Miss Green, not Adam!).

Can we create and capitalize upon harmless myths to promote health and social good... a pro-social placebo? Hey, maybe CDC will make asparagus the new green aphrodisiac!

I just saw (again) the happy UPS song-ad targeting international business, which reminded me how much I admire their We Love Logistics campaign (Ogilvy). Check it out! (And don't blame me if the song gets stuck in your head!).

After almost a decade of What Can Brown Do For You (Martin Agency), last fall UPS launched their new campaign, which is squarely aligned with their global growth strategy. Here's how UPS explains it:

Everybody loves something. We love logistics. We love its precision, its epic scale, its ability to make life better for billions of people. Each day, our customers count on us to choreograph a ballet of infinite complexity played across skies, oceans and borders. And we do. What's not to love?

Here are six key branding and identity-building lessons from this highly successful and viral campaign:

1. Creating a new category: By branding logistics as "The New Logistics," UPS is creating a new and much broader category, one which compels us (as "new" often does!) to want to know more, and one which they aim to own!

2. Think/Feel/Do: They are changing what people think about logistics, then associating those thoughts with good feelings, and then connecting those good feelings with UPS. The classic hierarchy of effects.

3. Capturing emotion: There aren't many business topics that are more left-brain sounding - and potentially boring - than logistics. Yet, UPS takes a lighthearted, fun, and strategic approach to bring feeling and life to logistics. (Even my teenager said "I love that ad!" and starting singing the song. He even knew lots of the words!). UPS doesn't just do logistics, they love logistics. (In all your spare time, count all the hearts in their cross-platform communications).

4. Focus on benefits: It's not really about logistics, it's about the benefits their global logistics network enables for small and medium size businesses. Check out their time and money savings calculator here.

5. Brand identity: And it's not just a branding campaign. It's recrafting their identity - their organizational soul - by expanding from shipping to logistics (more here in this Supply Chain Digital article). They manage to memorably convey everything they do, which is - dare I say "logistically!" - pretty complex, in a 30 second ad.

6. Operations-communications-sales alignment: Over the last several years, UPS has acquired dozens of companies to create their worldwide logistics network. They focus more on supply chain execs and CAOs, rather than just on shipping managers (more here). And their campaign brings it all to life in a personally relevant and highly engaging way!

Well done UPS (again)!