CADBURY ADVERTISEMENTS

case study
• Cadbury is a British confectionery company, was
known as Cadbury Schwepps (from 1969 till 2008).
• It was acquired by Kraft Foods in 2010 after which
it became the largest confectionery company in
the world.
• In India, Cadbury was started in 1948 and it
initially imported chocolates before starting cocoa
production in 1965.
• Some of its main chocolate brands were Dairy
Milk, 5 Star, Perk, Celebrations, Eclairs and Gems.
Dairy Milk alone held 30% of the share of the
Indian chocolate market.  
• Cadbury Dairy Milk itself had many variants like
Fruit and Nut, Crackle, Roast Almond, Dessert,
Silk, Shots, Eclairs.
• Cadbury's main competitor in India was Nestlé
which had around 25% of the market share in
chocolates in 2011.
• Nestlé's products included Kit Kat, Munch, Bar-
One, Milky Bar, and Milky Bar Choco. There was
an ongoing battle between Cadbury and Nestlé,
with both of them engaging aggressively in
their advertisement campaigns. 
• Cadbury enjoys a value market share of over
70% - the highest Cadbury brand share in the
world! Their flagship brand Cadbury Dairy Milk
is considered the "gold standard" for
chocolates in India.
• Earlier, there was a perception that chocolates
were meant only for children.
• Cadbury wanted to change this perception
and thus it started various advertisement
campaigns meant to influence adults and add
them to its consumer segment.
• In 1990’s Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM) re-defined
chocolate “meant for kids” to “meant for the
child in every adult”
• In 1994 this ad was awarded as campaign of
year
• The campaign was built to increase social
acceptance of chocolates among adults
• Kuch meetha ho jaye”
• “Pappu Paas Ho Gaya”.The interactive
campaign for "Pappu Pass Ho Gaya" bagged a
Bronze Lion at the prestigious Cannes
Advertising Festival 2006.
• “Kuch meetha hai khana aaj pehli taareekh
hai”
• “Shubh Aarambh”Targeted to the youth who
have come of age but stillhave Indian values in
their heart
• “Meethe mein kya hai?”
• The Worm Controversy: October
2003
• “Festival of lights,” Diwali, was approaching
• Fresh stocks of chocolate bars were being
shipped out to 650,000 outlets across all of India
• Worms reported in Cadbury Dairy Milk
chocolate bars in Mumbai
• Media started their questioning
• FDA seized chocolate stocks, sent them for
sampling, and was investigating Cadbury.
• In 3 weeks, there were close to 1,000 adverse
newspaper articles and about 120 TV clips in
ten languages.
• The heat of negative publicity melted
Cadbury’s sales by 30 per cent, at a time when
it sees a festive rise of 15 per cent.
• In 2003, its net profit fell 37% to as compared
with a 21% increase in the previous year.
• The company saw its market share melt from
73% in October 2003 to 69.4% in January
2004.
• Strategy
• Dare greatly, act quickly,
• Consumer first, Truth always
• The day the crisis broke, the agency set up a media
desk to ensure that no media query went unanswered.
From Day 1 every story carried Cadbury’s point of
view. At the first media briefing organised by the
agency, the Cadbury’s Managing Director addressed
consumer concerns with the following key messages:
• Infestation was a storage problem.
• It was safe to eat Cadbury chocolates.
• Exercise same care in purchasing a chocolate as
buying any food item. Internal Response
• At a second media briefing about two weeks after
the first incident was reported, Cadbury
announced significant steps to restore consumer
confidence called Project Vishwas (Trust), this
entailed:
• A retail monitoring and education program
undertaken on a war footing to address storage
problems.
• Significant packaging changes to ‘reduce
dependency on storage conditions as much as
possible’ –to be launched within two months.
• Cadbury introduced “purity-sealed” packaging in
January 2004 Three-layer packaging
• The new ‘purity sealed’ packaging was launched in
January 2004. By investing up to Rs 15 crore (Rs
150 million) on imported machinery, Cadbury’s
revamped the packaging of Dairy Milk.
• Media Coverage: The media relationship effort
clearly helped in making media accept that the
infestation was genuinely caused by storage-linked
problems.
• From the start, all media reports carried the
Cadbury’s point-of-view. Bad news automatically
gets great coverage. However, the agency helped
Cadbury get a total of 378 clips in over 11
languages covering the new packaging, and its
benefits, in January 2004.