Mars announces new direction for familiar M&M's

As part of a bold new marketing strategy, Mars Incorporated will take it's highly successful M&M's brand in a direction no one expected. You'll be getting a lot less candy for a lot more money.

"Our target retail price will be around $12.50 per 5 ounce bag," said a Mars spokeswoman. She continued, "The bigger price tag is accompined by a quantum leap in product quality."

Apparently, Mars Inc plans include deploying the world's foremost "chocolatologists" to the four corners of the world searching for "only the finest raw ingredients" from countries willing "to explore business models including uncompensated human resources."

"The third world's finest chocolatiers will process the raw ingredients in countries without trade-restricting and price-increasing regulations. We've already struck agreements with several sympathetic and invested governments," added a second spokeswoman.

You won't believe how they'll market them.

The next change you notice will be the abrupt phasing out of the familiar M&M's packaging in favor of a simpler more stand out design. (See picture.) Packaging isn't the only thing being thrown out with the bath water. There also won't be any cartoon characters, contests, or commercials. The newly wrapped candies will only be advertised in stark black and white high end magazine ads. Magazines such as GQ, Cosmopolitan, Effete Living, Silver Spoon, and Playboy have already agreed to participate.

"We believe the world is ready for a new super premium candy and M&M's wants to be first to penetrate this emerging market."

Don't forget the side effects.

In the initial test marketing of the product about ten percent of the participants became "hysterical and violent". Researchers affectionately referred to this reaction as "Kukoo for Cocoa". Researchers believe the dangers of "kukoo" to be insignificant. Researchers were also quick to point out that no one "actually" died during the test marketing.

In the plan outlined by Mars Incorporated the familiar M&M's will be completely gone by early 2008. If you like your M&M's just the way they are, you'd better start buying in bulk.