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M&M’s® confectionary status has moved from little colored candies sold in store aisles to an internationally recognized brand with dedicated stores. M&M’s World® New York, in Times Square, has joined two other branded stores in Las Vegas and Orlando, FL.

Chute Gerdeman Retail (Columbus, OH), a retail-design firm that specializes in transforming a brand into a visualmerchandising adventure, created and managed the initial sign design and execution of the Orlando and Times Square stores.

Brian Shafley, Chute Gerdeman’s president and creative director, and Steve Boreman, its senior designer, brand communications, explain how the two stores utilize branded signage, graphics, murals and dimensional aspects to inspire customers to explore the rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of chocolate.”

Sweet signs of success
Location – Orlando’s Florida Mall and NYC’s Times Square – defines the M&M’s World stores’ distinct personalities. Chute Gerdeman was challenged to represent the same product in two different locations that demanded distinct visual approaches.

“Our use of signage was based on two considerations,” Shafley said. “One was functional, such as wayfinding and store identification. The other consideration was aesthetic: What would a sign look like in an M&M’s world?

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“To answer that, we thoroughly researched the brand and talked with BBDO, the advertising agency that’s represented M&M’s for many years. Thus, for the sign content in each store, we made sure we were in sync with the language of the BBDO M&M’s TV and print advertising. Our signage and brand challenge was to duplicate the ‘color’ and humor that represents the M&M’s brand.”

“We were going for an iconic look in both stores to tell the story of the brand,” Boreman said, “rather than rely on an abundance of signage to tell visitors what they were looking at. An M&M’s World store is more of a ‘discovery’ retail experience that encourages browsing, rather than a department store with various M&M’s departments.

“Our development of each store’s interior and signage was more in the realm of fun and the opportunity to surprise store visitors as they wandered through each space.

“That, in turn, informed the floor plan, the shaping of each retail space and its merchandising look.”

The stores’ signage programs include dimensional representations of the M&M’s characters, murals, posters and conventional signage, which direct customer traffic around the stores.

Boreman said, “Color, shape and scale were our design criteria in both stores. The brand message is the merchandise, which is the star of the retail stores.”

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M&M’s World® Orlando
M&M’s World Orlando’s “colorful chocolate fun” decorates a single-story retail space in the Florida Mall. The design firm emphasized the brand as, according to Boreman, a “modern expression” in Orlando, rather than as the M&M’s® Brand character-driven strategy in Times Square.

M&M’s World Orlando interior space is illuminated by an LED, color-changing ceiling wash, which continually cycles. The LEDs illuminate a series of rounded, frosted-acrylic fins. Below the fins, a ceiling-hung, aluminum channel letter forms a lower-case “m,” with a white, acrylic sign face, and white, fluorescent lighting hovers over the floor like a giant stylized M.

Chute Gerdeman utilized the internationally recognized M&M’s candy shape and colors in larger-than-life scale in the two locations. In the Orlando store, the store fixtures morph into M&M’s signs that direct customers to nearby products. Giant, freestanding M&M’s fiberglass shells display merchandise and serve as colorful M&M’s-branded beacons.

In a nod to the store’s overall visual look, the Institute of Store Planners and VM+SD, ST’s sister publication, awarded the Orlando store its 2006 Store of the Year in its International Store Design Competition.

M&M’s World New York
To expand retail contact with the public, MARS Inc. opened a second M&M’s World store in the frenetic whirl of Times Square, with its roughly 700,000 daily visitors.

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“Times Square is the media capital of the world,” Shafley said. “With the multi-storied building, we had a much stronger signage presence here, which was emphasized with a dynamic exterior accompanied by LED videoscreens, a blade sign and wall sign spectaculars.” (See ST, August 2007, page 90).

The Times Square store’s retail space, which runs across the entire block from Broadway to Seventh Ave., extends two-and-a-half stories, with three exterior glass walls. Two floors and a mezzanine vertically divide the interior space.

“The store is essentially a giant fish bowl that passersby can see into, and customers inside can look out into Times Square,” Shafley said. “We designed for two sightlines, one at eye level for shoppers inside and the other at a much higher level for those looking up from street level.”

The entire interior space offers M&M’s varieties and branded products, including posters, T-shirts and plush toys. Boreman said the signage serves as merchandise locators and piques pedestrians’ curiosities.

How do you use signage to inspire impulse buying? Use M&M’s® Characters, who act out their highly impulsive personalities. M&M’s® Brand Spokescandies are represented as oversized, dimensional fiberglass characters, caught up in dramatic, NYC moments and waiting to be “discovered” by shoppers; the 17.5-ft.-tall Green Lady Liberty, decked out in robes, holds high the torch of freedom. The Saturday Night Fever-inspired Blue Fever strikes John Travolta’s classic disco pose. The ultimate M&M’s® Brand Spokescandy, Green, pushes her skirt down a la Marilyn Monroe. Symmetry Products Group (Providence, RI) designed and fabricated the sculptured characters.

Several murals, strategically placed around the store, reinforce the M&M’s® Brand Characters’ presences in spreading the good word that chocolate is better served in color.

M&M’s signage treat-ment
M&M’s World New York fully exhibits Times Square’s media saturation. Dixon Entertainment Arts (Las Vegas) coordinated a strong, audiovisual and electronic sign presence. NYC-based Dynamic Digital Displays (known as D3) manufactured the 32 x 32-ft., exterior, 12mm-pitch LED videoscreen and the 50 x 60-ft. LED cabinet, and NYC-based Landmark Signs installed them. Color Kinetics (Boston) contributed the dynamic interior, LED lighting and the interactive, electronic display with its Colorblast 12 Powercore technology.

The interior columns that face the glass are dressed up with internally illuminated fabrics that change color in sync with the show, giving the exterior of the building a colorful, pulsating glow.

Control of the store’s multimedia environment fell to NYC-based Show & Tell, a creative design company involved with broadcast, theatrical and multimedia design and production. The company specializes in electronic display systems for large-scale LED and multi-device audiovisual installations, and audiovisual-content design and production.

The company also created all the computer-graphic, dimensional-character and logo animations that appear on the LED videoscreens.

Company president Phil Lenger said, “Our big design challenge was translating all the iconic M&M’s imagery and tying it directly to the M&M’s World® retail store, and doing it with a wink to New York City.”

Video vignettes include the M&M’s® Brand Spokescandies running around NYC. Also, each M&M’s® Brand Character approaches a video display to stare out into Times Square as if to watch people watching it. The M&M’s® Brand Characters pay homage to King Kong, Marilyn Monroe, Lady Liberty and the Naked Cowboy in brief, NYC-related videos.

Chute Gerdeman Retail designed much of the M&M’s World store signage, which was fabricated and installed by subcontractors.

A crowd pleaser, the Color Mood Analyzer, allows customers to stand under a showerhead-type device that “scans” their personality to read their “mood,” which corresponds to an M&M’s color(s). To help achieve a fun and dynamic look that represents the brand, Chute Gerdeman Retail created the analyzer with the Confetti pattern from the Sterling Collection of CYRO Industries’ Acrylite® acrylic sheet. The Confetti pattern features a reflective metallic surface that refracts light and color, and it changes appearance according to viewing-angle and movement shifts.

In another store space, a giant, “Make A Mix” sign holds up to 72 M&M’s tube dispensers. Customers can make their own, personalized M&M’s munching mix.

The final frosting
M&M’s World’s store signage is layered in entertaining ways to display the M&M’s Brand Characters, who are at their best when creating mayhem and mischief (maybe that’s what M and M signify).

The Times Square store closes at midnight. At the last calls for purchasing M&M’s branded products, customer cash-wrap lines snake around the store. Shoppers clutch their favorite plush toys, T-shirts or other souvenirs under the watchful gaze of M&M’s posters, murals and dimensional characters. Who would have thought that chocolate could have such power?

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