The new Cadbury Dairy Milk commercial targets smaller markets where the company hopes to replace traditional sweets with the chocolate brand.
Cadbury, the country’s top confectioner, has launched another campaign for its flagship chocolate brand, Cadbury Dairy Milk. The 50-second film opens in an old office where the cashier gives the protagonist his salary for the month. The young man breaks into a dance and the rest of the office joins him in no time. The man proceeds to pay the milkman and doctor on his way out. He then sees a young child and hands him a Cadbury Dairy Milk.
The scene shifts to his house where his wife is all dressed up to go out for the evening. Again, amidst song and dance, they leave the house in a taxi. In the musical interlude, we see the wings and hood of the taxi open and the car begins to fly.
Cut to a movie theatre with a house-full board. Two men, obviously black ticket marketers, come out singing and offer the couple tickets for the movie. Inside the cinema hall, the man presents his wife with a bar of the chocolate. The final shot shows the entire set with everyone jumping, singing and dancing. All this to the background score of “meetha hain khana, aaj pehli taarikh hain”(Let’s eat something sweet, today’s the first day of the month).
The positioning is clear. Cadbury Dairy Milk is an inalienable part of any celebration and adults need not shy away from it. The ambience is middle class and the set could belong to any town in India. Its attempt at mass appeal is unmistakable.
Leader of the pack
The stakes for Cadbury, to be sure, are high. It is the undisputed leader in the Rs 2,000-crore per annum chocolate market and Cadbury Dairy Milk is its warhorse. Though it is strong in bars (Five Star) and tablets (Cadbury Dairy Milk), Nestle has made inroads with its light offerings like KitKat and Munch. The improved health awareness, according to industry experts, has pushed consumers towards lighter chocolates — a trend that will only get stronger in the days to come.
Cadbury, on its part, has worked on its flagship brand for 15 years now. It all began in 1994 when the Cadbury Dairy Milk communication first tried to establish a connection with celebration. The then-famous ad showed a girl dancing in gay abandon across a cricket field eating a Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate to celebrate the victory of her favoured team.
Following the huge success of that campaign, Cadbury decided to address consumers in small towns and from lower socio-economic categories, while sticking to the core promise of joy. In 2003, the company aimed to position the brand as not just an occasion-based chocolate but as more of a casual consumption habit with the “Khush hoon khamakha” (Am happy just like that) commercial.
Then there was a mid-course correction after the worm controversy caught up with the confectioner. Overnight, its market share slid from 73 per cent to 69.4 per cent. Amitabh Bachchan, the country’s most trusted brand ambassador at that time, was brought in to assuage the frayed nerves of consumers. At the same time, it did some improvisation in packaging to ensure that the chocolates remain safe. Luckily for Cadbury, the move worked and the company was able to halt the fall in its market share.
Bachchan stayed on even after the controversy died. And the company returned to the celebration story board. The next campaign showed the resident flunky finally clearing his 12th standard exams. The tagline “Kuch meetha ho jaye” (Let’s have something sweet) underscored the promise. Another campaign showed a group of people celebrating in spite of India’s loss in cricket to less-known Kenya. Since then, the company has only built on this concept.
The new meetha
“For several years we have strived to make Cadbury Dairy Milk a permissible product among adults, which was earlier seen as children’s indulgence. Now we are trying to plug the meetha aspect of the chocolate and how it is a suitable replacement to a sweet,” explains Cadbury’s sales and marketing director, Sanjay Purohit. “With each of our advertisements, we try to break barriers for more and more people to experience the brand.”
Purohit claims that the brand campaign has met with success so far. “Where earlier a box of pedas was seen as celebratory, today a few bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk are seen as a substitute,” says he. Studies conducted by the company indicate that Cadbury Dairy Milk’s popularity as celebratory indulgence has grown from near zero in 2003 to 13 per cent in 2007. Thus, it has decided to stick to the same theme in the latest campaign.
No doubt, the intention here is to grow Cadbury Dairy Milk’s market share. It is the largest-selling chocolate in the country with a market share of 34.3 per cent. However, consumer insight studies carried out by Cadbury revealed that though it had done a lot around the “kuch meetha ho jaaye” premise that involved large-scale celebrations, small groups and small towns had been kept out. Thus, the brief given to the confectioner’s creative agency, Ogilvy and Mather, was to include middle class people from smaller cities in the campaign. “The middle class celebrate their happiness on salary day in a very private manner,” says Purohit.
“The idea behind this campaign was to capture moments of happiness and nothing does that better than salary day. We want Cadbury to own this particular concept,” says Ogilvy & Mather Senior Creative Director Mahesh Gharath.
As it has become a trademark with most advertisements today, Cadbury’s TV commercial will be supported by a 360-degree campaign through print, radio and on-ground efforts. Further, the company has tied up with HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank to send out text messages to account holders on pay day. The ad is scheduled to run for eight weeks.
