Most Creative Marketers: Cadbury

Seven years after Mondelēz International’s controversial purchase of Cadbury, the ‘Joy’ had gone out of the brand (after it ditched its 'Free the Joy' positioning). It needed a new focus, and a new agency. Enter VCCP.

Creative Salon spoke to Cadbury marketing activation director, Benazir Barlet-Batada and Colin O’Toole, associate director of marketing of Cadbury Equity to talk about the nation's favourite chocolate brand, its refresh in recent years and its relationship with VCCP.

“We’d only met three times,” says Barlet-Batada, “but they had condensed months of our research, pages of our new ‘Generosity’ strategy, our need-scope, our brand-health trackers, our consumer insights… and they read this beautiful script, which encapsulated everything. I remember the lump in my throat. I remember saying, ‘I want to make that advert’.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In 'Mum’s birthday', a child goes into a shop to buy a bar of Dairy Milk for her stressed-out mum. The girl is without money, but offers the gruff shopkeeper a handful of pocket trinkets, including buttons and a toy unicorn. After a slightly tense standoff, he accepts the deal, handing her the unicorn back as change.

The new positioning, 'There's a glass and a half in everyone', was about showcasing the kindness and generosity in society every day. Taking Cadbury back to its roots - a family brand founded on generous principles.

The ad not only created strong emotional connections but increased sales and brand awareness.

It also elicited an approving letter from a member of the Cadbury family, reveals Barlet-Batada.

The quiet, emotive film was a bold creative play because at the time, chocolate ads were full of brash moves. But the best thing about the creativity of being a marketer, says O’Toole, is that you’re one conversation away from excitement, and the gut feeling of “this is gonna be great”.

“Even that bloody gorilla didn't exist at one point, until someone walked into a room and said, ‘I've got an idea, stay with me here: it's about a gorilla.’ So we have to ask, what would you do with the brand if you weren't afraid?”.

Openness, energy and trust

Both O’Toole and Barlet-Batada agree it’s important to cultivate an agency relationship where each side is pushed. Part of the beauty of the relationship with VCCP, they explain, is that the openness, energy, trust and attitude of the Cadbury X VCCP team has been there “right from the start”.

“There's no problem that can't be solved. As long as you can find the right perspective, once you start, someone builds on it. And then it's endless development, like song writing, or Lego. The first bit of creativity says: ‘here's something different’. And then the next piece goes: ‘yeah, but I can make it better’,” explains O’Toole. “VCCP don't take it too seriously so that it feels weighty. There’s a lightness to the work that says it's not about changing the world, it's just about changing someone's world.”

Barlet-Batada, who’s read Purple Reign at least twice, has been reading Roald Dahl’s Cadbury-inspired stories to her two young sons. She believes her work on the brand is about making great work that consumers will love, and ensuring the brand’s in great shape for generations to come.

“The Cadbury family’s Quaker heritage held the ethos that everybody’s equal, everybody deserves a better life. They had that spirit of generosity ingrained in their thinking, and I'm so happy that's where the brand’s gone back to.”

“A different lens”

This thinking also informed Cadbury’s sponsorship of the Premier League, for which it created premiership club partnerships and community outreach programmes for grassroots football. “Instead of doing a major TV ad announcing the sponsorship, we flipped it and looked at it with a different lens,” says O’Toole.

And using new perspectives is one of his favourite routes to creativity, he says, explaining “fresh consistency”, a phrase he’s borrowed from The Brand Gym.

“You're willing to go on the journey because you liked the first story, but you want to see how it's told this time. And every time we go again; we know what the structure of the story is, but we need to find a new way to make it fresh.”

For Barlet-Batada, creativity is all about storytelling, and not just Dahl’s.

She’s also been inspired by Uncommon’s B&Q ads, featuring home videos captured over the years by 69 real families, following how homes have transformed over time. ‘You don't buy a life. You build one.’ which she describes as “visually arresting” has made her stop and think.

The next chapter of Cadbury creativity, says Barlet-Batada, will shine a light on acts of human kindness, by finding ways to express generosity in culturally relevant and meaningful ways. Let’s hope it finds the sweet spot.