Magnosticism

In about the time it takes to down a bag of Sour Skittles, a handful of nitwits hijacked the redesigned Skittles.com website, which Mars Snackfood relaunched over the weekend as an aggregator of user-generated Skittles content.  The new home page features the deep, Skittles-related insights of Twitter nation, and a few morons quickly figured out this was a cool way to post random obscenities on a company’s public website. Even better if that brand sells candy to kids! 

The new Skittles site also pulls in content from Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook. That’s it – nothing from the company except a feedback form and its video ads (via YouTube). In other words, Mars has turned over its Skittles brand strategy to the unwashed masses. Bad idea. The point is that social media should inform marketing strategy – it shouldn’t be the strategy. This is a nice gimmick, but I doubt it will have any staying power – and it won’t do much good for the Skittles brand.