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Mars reveals its creative risk framework, L'Oréal doubles down on serialised entertainment, and Mondelez sues Joyride over Sour Patch Kids trade dress.
How does Mars greenlight bold creative without burning brand equity? And why is Mondelez filing lawsuits in two markets at once? Three stories every FMCG marketer needs today.
In this episode:
The FMCG Marketing Daily is a concise briefing for FMCG and CPG marketers, brand managers and CMOs, hosted by Marco & Klara. New episode every day.
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Also from Marco & Klara: The Digital Commerce Daily · The Health Marketing Daily
The essential morning briefing for brand leaders in fast-moving consumer goods. Hosted by Marco and Klara — two senior strategists with decades of experience inside global CPG companies and consultancies. Every episode covers retail media and distribution shifts, brand and competitor moves from Unilever, Coke, Nestlé, and challenger brands, and the macro and regulatory forces reshaping the category. Authoritative. Analytical. No noise. Built for brand managers, trade marketers, CMOs, and agency directors who need to stay ahead.
Marco: Three stories on the desk this morning — all worth leaning in for.
Klara: We've got a rare look inside how Mars decides which big creative swings are actually worth taking.
Marco: Then L'Oréal, and why it's quietly putting product messaging in the back seat.
Klara: And Mondelez is back in court — this time over Sour Patch Kids.
Marco: Let's go.
Marco: Mars has opened up about how it decides which bold creative ideas are worth backing — and the thinking behind it is unusually honest for a company this size.
Klara: Most big FMCG companies treat their internal decision-making like a trade secret. You rarely get a window into how a major brand actually green-lights risky creative work — or kills it before it does damage.
Marco: That's the context here. Mars is a company with enormous brands — Snickers, Pedigree, Dove chocolate — and enormous amounts to lose if a campaign goes wrong. The question every brand team inside a company like that faces is: how do you stay bold without burning the brand down?
Klara: So what did they actually say at Brandweek?
Marco: Mars marketing leader Rankin Carroll laid out their framework at Brandweek 2026. The core of it is what they call a 'Why' test. Before any major idea goes to market, they put it through a simple filter: why are we doing this? Not in a vague way — in a specific, defensible way. If the team can't answer that clearly, the idea doesn't move forward.
Klara: Which sounds obvious. But I think the honest truth is most brand teams skip that step, or they answer it with something woolly like "it'll drive awareness." Mars is saying the answer has to be sharp enough to justify the creative risk.
Marco: Exactly. And they're presenting this discipline as the reason they can afford to take bigger swings. The 'Why' test isn't a brake — it's what gives them permission to accelerate.
Klara: My only hesitation is that frameworks like this can look cleaner from the outside than they actually are inside a large organisation. Culture does the real work. A checklist doesn't save a bad call.
Marco: Fair challenge. But a shared language for creative decisions is still worth something, even if it's imperfect.
Klara: Agreed on that.
Marco: Right — let's move to our next story.
Marco: L'Oréal is quietly repositioning itself from an advertiser into something closer to a content studio — and the approach is worth examining closely.
Klara: For years, the default FMCG content format was pretty simple. You show the product. You show someone using it. You say why it's good. L'Oréal is walking away from that model — not gradually, but deliberately.
Marco: What they've built is a microdrama strategy. Short, serialised stories — the kind of thing you'd binge in five-minute chunks on your phone — where L'Oréal products exist in the background rather than at the centre. The whole bet is that entertainment builds the brand connection that a thirty-second ad can't.
Klara: And this isn't experimental anymore. They're calling it a maturing strategy. That means infrastructure, editorial thinking, and ongoing investment — not a pilot that might get cut in the next budget round.
Marco: The strategic logic is clear to me. Brand equity — the emotional connection and trust people have with a brand over time — doesn't come from product shots. It comes from repeated, positive contact with something you actually enjoy. If people associate L'Oréal with content they want to watch, that's genuinely valuable.
Klara: I'd push back slightly on the confidence around that, though. The honest problem is measurement. With a traditional ad, you can track reach, conversion, sales uplift. With entertainment content, the feedback loop is much slower and murkier. How does L'Oréal know the story content is building the brand rather than just building an audience for the content itself?
Marco: That's the unresolved question at the centre of this whole move. And I think every brand manager watching L'Oréal do this needs to ask it before they copy the playbook.
Klara: Entertainment without a measurement framework is just expensive storytelling.
Marco: Our final story for today is up next.
Marco: Mondelēz — the company behind Sour Patch Kids — has launched legal action against a US candy challenger brand called Joyride, alleging it copied the look and identity of one of its biggest confectionery brands.
Klara: To understand why this matters, you need to know what trade dress means. It's not just a logo or a name — it's the overall visual identity of a product. The colours, the shapes, the packaging style. Courts treat it as protectable intellectual property, just like a trademark. And in candy, where shoppers make fast decisions based on how something looks on the shelf, that visual identity is worth serious money.
Marco: Mondelēz is arguing that Joyride has copied the distinctive look of Sour Patch Kids closely enough to confuse shoppers. At the same time — and this is the detail that caught my attention — Mondelēz is also pursuing separate trademark pressure against a UK brand called Moo Free, a vegan confectionery company. Two separate actions, two different markets, happening at the same time. That's not coincidence. That's a coordinated posture.
Klara: So your read is that this is less about Joyride specifically and more about Mondelēz sending a message across the board?
Marco: Largely, yes. Challenger brands in confectionery have been proliferating fast. If you're Mondelēz, you can either watch that happen or you draw a hard line and enforce it in public. Litigation is expensive, but it's also a deterrent. One court win and ten smaller brands rethink their packaging strategy overnight.
Klara: I'd frame it slightly differently. This is also defensive. Mondelēz has had a difficult couple of years commercially, and protecting brand assets aggressively might be the clearest lever it can pull when volume growth is under pressure.
Marco: Both things can be true. When brand strength is your most valuable asset, you protect it like one.
Marco: Today's clearest signal — knowing *why* you're doing something bold is the only thing that separates a brave decision from a careless one.
Klara: So look at your brand this week and ask: if someone copied your identity tomorrow, would they even know what they were stealing?