Martin Terwilliger ’08, VP of chocolate marketing for Mars Wrigley NA, wants to convince you to buy chocolate.
By Robyn Rime
Did you ever sort your Halloween candy haul into piles, maybe trading with your friends for the brands you secretly liked best? Perhaps you fondly remember sharing a single candy bar with your siblings on a road trip, or receiving a well-timed gift of chocolate from a co-worker after a terrible day.
You’re not alone. After almost a decade at Mars corporation, Martin Terwilliger ’08, MBA, understands that people have personal relationships with candy.
“In the world of consumer packaged goods,” he says, “food is one of the most intimate decisions you can make.”
Terwilliger, a first-generation student who majored in business administration at Geneseo, is now vice president of chocolate marketing for Mars Wrigley North America, the world’s leading chocolate, chewing gum, mints, and fruity confections manufacturer. As head of the chocolate business’s marketing efforts, he helps bring brands like Snickers, Twix, and Milky Way to a candy-loving public.
Terwilliger says that the job is more than just placing chocolate bars on store shelves. As a student of human behavior—a field he discovered in classes with professor Avan Jassawalla—he’s trained to ask bigger questions, all with an eye to understanding who buys what and why, and ultimately, how to influence those behaviors.
“When developing a marketing strategy, we ask, ‘Who are we trying to reach?’” he says. “What role do we want to play in their lives? How can we better meet their needs? How do we get our message in front of them, and what do we say?”
Mars Wrigley is notably successful at getting its messages to the public in memorable ways. Ad campaigns become part of the American vocabulary with slogans like “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand” and “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” Commercial characters like the Doublemint Twins and M&M’s “spokescandies” stick around for decades, as do sponsorships with global organizations such as the Olympics and the World Cup.
A long-standing partnership between Snickers and the NFL is a particular point of pride for Terwilliger, who has been with Mars Wrigley since 2015. “Part of our success is understanding why fans do the things they do, where they spend their time, what teams they’re passionate about,” he says.
Terwilliger cites a recent NFL ad that recreated a popular commercial from 1996. The new ad shows a dedicated worker painstakingly painting the lines of a football field end zone. Up comes Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid, who claps him on the shoulder and says, “Hey, that’s great. But who are the Chefs?” Rookie mistake? Maybe you just need a Snickers, suggests the ad, as the camera pulls back to reveal the hapless painter’s spelling error.
Casting Reid, whose team won the Super Bowl, is a way to keep the Snickers brand relevant, says Terwilliger. “Ten years ago, NFL fans would go to the store, pick up their snacks for the week, sit down on Sunday, and watch everything on TV, and that would be it,” he says. “Today you have gaming, you have sports betting, fantasy football, streaming games, live games. I’m personally proud of how we evolve with the fan and the game and continue to find new ways to make a longstanding relationship exciting.”
Keeping brands exciting is essential when marketing food products that aren’t … well, essential. Candy isn’t a requirement. It’s a treat. It and other sweets live at the tip-top of the nutritional pyramid, grouped with other items that we’re sternly told to “eat sparingly.”
But, says Terwilliger, Mars creates brands that inspire moments of everyday happiness. “Candy might not always be at the center of a person’s story,” he says, “but it’s a nice complement to lots of great life experiences—birthday parties, Halloween, road trips, Christmas morning stocking stuffers.” Creating memories for people and having an impact on their lives is one of his favorite parts of the job.
People feel emotionally attached to and nostalgic about candy brands that have been around for generations. As a marketer for a century-old company, Terwilliger honors that emotional tradition, focusing not just on the candy-rack consumers of today but also on the next-generation candy buyers of tomorrow.
“The brands I’m working on today have a very, very rich history in the past,” he says. “I do feel a sense of responsibility and pride about stewarding them into the future. I want to make sure they’re part of meaningful experiences for the next generation.”
If Terwilliger has his way, kids will be sorting their Halloween Milky Way bars into the good pile for a long time to come.