Mars Have No Plans to Bring Back Marathon Bars
In 1990 I wrote a letter of complaint to Mars about their plans to rebrand the Marathon Bar to the Snickers Bar. I pointed out the dictionary defined snicker as “to laugh in a half-suppressed, indecorous or disrespectful manner, and the madness of using a plural as a singular. Incredibly, despite this, they went ahead with their plans anyway.
You can imagine my delight, therefore, when last week it was reported that, after an 18 year absence, Mars intended to bring back Marathons albeit for a short period.
I wrote to Mars again to confirm that this is the case and today received the following reply:
We can confirm that we have no current plans to bring back the original name in a three month trial and are sorry, if this has caused disappointment.
It seems to me that this was a case of the papers jumping the gun and reading too much into the fact that Mars had reregistered the “Marathon” trademark. I guess they were simply protecting the trademark so that no-one else could bring out a chocolate bar called Marathon.
On the other hand, how many times have we heard politicians announce “We have no current plans to…” and then do it a short while after?
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May 20th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
It could be that Mars uses the Marathon name in the United States for a line of energy-type protein bars. So maybe they’re planning on extending the brand into the UK and wanted protection.