A chocolate-coated happy ending to Carlton's off-season of embarrassment has not softened the AFL club's resolve to eradicate drunken antics.

The Blues on Tuesday announced a three-year multi-million dollar sponsorship deal with confectionery company Mars.

Chief executive Greg Swann said the contract contained no special disciplinary clauses, despite negotiations having been put on hold because of shabby player behaviour at a pre-Christmas boat cruise.

The club has since suspended Ryan Houlihan, Andrew Walker and Eddie Betts from playing in the pre-season competition and fined them each $5000 for their misbehaviour during and after the late December outing.

That followed the trading away of star forward Brendan Fevola to Brisbane, after his drunken indiscretions at last September's Brownlow Medal night.

"(The cruise incident) didn't help at that stage (of negotiations), but we weren't way down the path at that stage, so everybody went away and took a deep breath," Swann said on Tuesday.

"We had to as a club make some improvements and put some things in place to make sure the club was an attractive proposition for Mars.

"Once that happened we started renegotiating and here we are."

But he said despite the lack of any non-standard clauses in the sponsorship deal, the club and players knew there was no room for further incidents.

"The clauses are almost irrelevant, we know what we have to do, we know what our partnership obligations are," Swann said.

"... We've put things in place that we're really confident that the club and everybody in it will adhere to."

Swann said it did not take a "rocket scientist" to realise the club would deal harshly with future player indiscretions.

Similarly, captain Chris Judd said it should not need a threat from Mars to sharpen their standards.

"We don't want to behave well because there's a clause in the Mars contract, we want to behave well because that's how we want to be perceived in the community and that's how we want to be ourselves," Judd said.

Mars Snackfood general manager Peter West said the new deal partly stemmed from the impact of their memorable 1997 launch of blue M and Ms, when Carlton made a one-off departure from their traditional navy blue guernsey for the first time in their history.

West labelled that attention-grabbing ploy the "most successful sponsorship in our history in Australia".

He said Mars representatives met with the player leadership group and were reassured by the commitments given about behavioural standards.

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