Cadbury gets back to its roots to focus on taste-led marketing as it preps £15m campaign
Cadbury Dairy Milk has revived its famous glass and a half icon as it looks to get back to the roots of the brand and focus on the taste of its core product as it readies the roll out of a £15m campaign.
The Mondelez-owned brand last week announced a new 'Tastes Like This Feels' positioning as it rolled out a new campaign for its flagship Dairy Milk product. Two other ads will follow to launch two new Dairy Milk products; Dairy Milk Big Taste and Dairy Milk Medley bars.
It is the first time the brand has revived the glass and a half icon (which represents the glass and a half of full cream milk in its bars) since it was scrapped in 2010, and follows the consumer fallout from Cadbury’s decision to change the chocolate it used in Cadbury’s Crème Eggs, a move that reportedly lost the brand £6m in sales last year.
However, Cadbury global brand equity director, Nikhil Rao told The Drum that the decision to focus on taste in 2016 was driven by the fact that Dairy Milk’s popularity stems from its unique flavour in the chocolate brand market, though the brand will continue to use it’s current ‘Free the Joy’ positioning.
“We own a very unique signature taste and we just haven’t had it [front of mind] for the last few years, so we are just getting focussed on what is ours,” he said. “It’s not just in the UK: if you were to look at why we have such strong market shares in India or South Africa or Ireland it is this signature taste that people have grown up with and loved. From time to time brands do reassert what makes them famous and in our case it is our unique signature chocolatey taste.”
The campaign comprises three 30-second adverts, two of which show footage sourced from YouTube as Cadbury looks to push out the message in an “authentic” way. For example, in the ad launched last week viewers see a bear scratching its back on a tree, which was filmed by a hidden wildlife camera.
“We were quite precious about the authenticity of it, it was a very specific feeling, when we showed this clip to consumers they said, ‘ah that is exactly what Cadbury Dairy Milk feels like’. It’s intense and chocolatey and it feels like a release, there’s something primal about it,” said Rao.
The strapline bears a striking resemblance to Coca-Cola’s new brand positioning ‘Taste the Feeling’, which the drinks giant introduced in January this year to unify its product offering, a likeness that Rao said was “unfortunate” but insisted the campaigns are based on “entirely different ideas”.
“The Coke idea is purely the consequence of the consumption, they dramatise everyday moments and how Coke makes you feel as a result of the consumption,” he added. “Our campaign dramatises the true feeling of the taste of the different products and focuses on the actual consumption. So one is about the consequence, Coke, and the other is about the experience.”
Experiential activity will form the crux of the campaign with two events planned over the coming months for the new Medley and Big Taste products.