Good morning. Today, Hershey’s makes the case for simple chocolate amid trends favoring wild flavors; Rancho Gordo doesn’t want you to buy beans for their fiber; and General Motors is banned from selling driving behavior and location data for the next five years.

Hershey Co. wants its 125-year-old, flagship chocolate brand to work a little harder, the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Katie Deighton writes.

The candy and snacks maker has increased its marketing budget for Hershey’s by 20% to fund the brand’s first new ad campaign in eight years.

The push will span TV as well as less familiar territory for the staid brand, like deals with TikTok influencers and activity around the Winter Olympics.

Hershey’s can break out of the seasonal sales rhythms that depend on holidays like Valentine’s Day and Halloween, according to Stacy Taffet, chief growth officer at Hershey. “Our goal is to fill in the gaps,” she said.

But how does a classic, some might say basic, chocolate bar navigate trends like Gen Z’s appetite for strong flavors and surprising mashups?

Hershey has two answers, Katie reports:

• It will do more to stay on trend and in the public eye, as seen last month in a product drop of “Dubai-inspired” Hershey’s bars in Times Square.
• And it will stay in position to take advantage of any backlash against wild flavors. “There’s a sense of ‘If I’m going to spend my hard-earned dollar on a piece of chocolate, I know that Hershey’s is going to deliver what I want,’ ” Taffet said. “There’s power in that familiarity.”

There are different ways of capitalizing on trends, including taking the opportunity to build a business that can grow even when the hype fades. 

Heirloom bean seller Rancho Gordo has more than 30,000 people paying for quarterly shipments and nearly as many people on the wait list.

But founder Steve Sando didn’t get them by pitching fiber and protein, Ben Cohen writes in his Science of Success column for The Journal:

Of course, Sando didn’t just wish it.

• Since founding the company in 2001, he made a point of collecting the email addresses of customers to send them recipes for bean dishes. That trove became more useful for marketing as Americans warmed up to e-commerce. Today the list has 400,000 recipients.
• And when he heard about yet another vineyard starting a wine club in 2013, he decided to start a bean club.

Avoiding a reliance on trends could be Sando’s smartest investment.

“It might seem ungrateful that I don’t care about the health stuff,” he said, “but I just don’t think it lasts the way something really delicious would.”

Crossing the government’s line on consumer data has left GM with new limits on what it can do.

The Federal Trade Commission has finalized an order with General Motors and its OnStar unit to settle allegations that the companies collected and sold consumers’ precise location and driving behavior data without enough disclosure or consent, the Journal’s Katherine Hamilton writes.

The order concludes an FTC action begun under Biden administration Chair Lina Khan. It imposes a five-year ban on GM disclosing consumers’ geolocation and driving data to consumer reporting agencies, a result the FTC on Wednesday called “appropriate given GM’s egregious betrayal of consumers’ trust.”

And it requires GM for 20 years to obtain “affirmative express consent” before collecting or sharing most connected-vehicle data, create a way for customers to get a copy of their data and seek its deletion and give consumers the ability to disable data collection.

More auto business: Elon Musk said Tesla would stop selling a suite of advanced driver-assistance features for a one-time payment, instead offering them exclusively through a monthly subscription service. [WSJ]

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