Children of Hen

While I fully appreciate the reasoning behind marketing eggs as a healthy, natural product produced by happy, free-to-roam hens in liberal, carefree communes powered by renewable energy, surely this approach can only appeal to certain demographics?

Producing a new egg brand using bleak, dystopian themes would pull in the remaining percentage of consumers who have been turned off by the existing fluffy farmyard image of the egg. TV adverts could show the harsh reality of battery hens crammed into tiny wire enclosures beneath stormy black skies, the hens' shrivelled featherless bodies shuddering out tiny, anaemic and bloodied eggs. Newspaper or magazine adverts showing a pile of gray, almost translucent eggs with a hen nailed to a crucifix above them. An unrelenting internet campaign showing looping Flash banner ads of hens being pushed beak-first into clanking Victorian machinery interspersed by the strobed message 'BUY SOME EGGS' in 72pt Comic Sans.

On a per-egg basis each egg could have a 'fascinating fact' printed onto it, perhaps relating to chicken mortality rates or salmonella infection statistics.