• by Nina Lentini  @Nina_Lentini, December 8, 2006

Candy-branding is burgeoning in Times Square, where Mars yesterday opened the 25,000-square-foot M&M World New York--right across the street from a Hershey's store.

"One of the ways we measure success is through brand exposure," said John Haugh, president of Mars Retail Group. "Here, we count the number of people who come through the door." Millions have come through similar doors in Las Vegas, he said, where Mars opened its first retail outlet in 1997. A second store opened in November 2005 in Orlando, Fla., and is still "ramping up," he said.

Haugh called it coincidental that the 25,000-square-foot M&M World opened across the street from Hershey's, light-heartedly referring to the area (48th and Broadway) as the Big Apple's "chocolate district" while mentioning that the iconic "M&M's are the number one candy brand and Mars is the number one chocolate company."

The company decided to build on its traditional advertising--national TV and print--with the New York store, where there are 4,000 M&M products with which the public can interact. "We took it to another level: total experience," said Haugh.

Unique to the store will be several of what the company calls "only in New York experiences," including the world's largest display of M&M's (more than 1 million), the character Blue in a homage pose to the disco beat of "Saturday Night Fever," a 21-foot Miss Green (M&M's version of Lady Liberty), and an M&M's color mood analyzer enabling visitors to see which color best suits their daily mood. (Note to grizzled urbanites: M&M's don't come in gray.)

To celebrate M&M's arrival in Times Square, New Yorkers donned bathing suits and immersed themselves in the iconic red, blue, green and yellow candy-coated colors to become "human M&M's" outside the store.

There was no comment from the folks across the way.

One retail expert sees the trend of branding stores (Nike has a Manhattan foothold) as an outgrowth of a marketing strategy that goes back to the 19th century, when the A&P supermarket and Brooks Brothers men's clothing opened stores to sell their own brands.

Marty Meloche, associate professor of food marketing at St. Joseph's University, said the difference is that today's marketers are combining brands with entertainment. "They're not just stores that sell stuff," he said. "People go there to be entertained."

Back when Wanamaker's and Sears opened stores to sell their brands, they did so, Meloche said, in order to guarantee the quality of the products sold. In the case of the modern branded store, "the quality is guaranteed by the product."