By celebrating payday in its latest campaign, Cadbury hopes to increase its formidable 70% market share in the Rs 1,900-cr chocolate market
On August 1, Manoj Yadav, a watchman at a housing society in Mumbai’s Santacruz, bought three packs of Cadbury Dairy Milk Shots for Rs 2 each. That’s Yadav’s way of celebrating payday – something he intends to repeat next month, too. His inspiration: the brand new Cadbury commercial where a clerk in a government office sings meetha hai khana, aj pehli tareekh hai (let’s have sweets; it’s pay day today).
Yadav’s three children are thrilled. No less thrilled is Cadbury Marketing Director Sanjay Purohit. For, Yadav’s celebrations mean Purohit and his team at India’s number one chocolate maker have hit the jackpot. Like Yadav, half of India’s 1.2 billion people have never tasted chocolates and Cadbury has been wooing them hard to increase its already-formidable 70 per cent market share in the Rs 1,900 crore Indian chocolate market.
Pricing is one part of the game that the Rs 1,500 crore Cadbury is playing – its products range from Rs 2 (Milk Shots) to Rs 75 (Bournville dark choclolates) a pack. That’s the reason why the company’s revenue is growing at 25 per cent every year.
But the other big reason for the success is Cadbury’s product positioning – an alternative to traditional Indian sweets which are an inclusive part of all celebrations in the country. That’s quite a journey from the days when the brand was considered an outsider. Eating chocolates was considered to be a Western concept – a choice of the affluent or elite consumers and the penetration was limited to the metros.
What caused this change? “The story is like a movie, with plots, sub plots and a twist,” says Purohit. And it came alive through the creative lens of Ogilvy and Mather’s Piyush Pandey and his nephew Abhijit Awasthi.
Part One of the story is from 1994 to 1998 when the brand’s reach was just the metros. Awasthi says the first task was to make sure that adults don’t feel embarrassed to have Cadbury. “Piyush did that with ease with his famous “The Real Taste of Life” campaign”, Awasthi says.
Part Two started in 1998 when the ad agency felt it was time to move from India to Bharat if the company wanted to seriously expand its reach. So for the first time, Cadbury opted for Hindi in its campaign kya swad hai zindagi ka campaigns between 1998 and 2002 made Cadbury a household name in the country. Remember the iconic ad where a young lady rushes into the ground with a Cadbury in her hand when her boyfriend hits a six? As viewers fell in love with the jiving lady, sales of the brand skyrocketed.
Purohit says that was the period when “the brand broke all age barriers”, prompting Cadbury to introduce the Rs 5 Dairy Milk and increase its distribution to the smaller towns.
Part 3 of Cadbury’s India story revolved around crisis management. Sales crashed over 20 per cent in 2003 after reports of Cadbury chocolates being infested with worms surfaced. The company, Purohit says, responded with a “new bullet proof packaging that is the most expensive for any Cadbury Dairy Milk product anywhere in the world and a new advertising strategy that saw actor Amitabh Bachhan taking charge.”
The year also marked the brand’s transformation from just a chocolate to an alternative to sweets. O&M’s Awasthi says the concept of the famous kuch meetha jo jaaye ads (the latest campaign is a part of that series) was born during a conversation in office when somebody asked for meetha after a meeting. Awasthi’s brainwave worked and how – look at the success of the ads on Miss Palampur, Pappu Pass ho gaya etc.
Cadbury is busy capitalising on that success. It’s making a bigger push for market expansion in villages with just 100,000 population each. “The Rs 2 Dairy Milk shots are currently available in 300,000 outlets and we plan to increase it to at least a million outlets. The reach of other Cadbury products will be also be increased to over 1.5 million outlets in the next three to four years,” Purohit says. The move makes sense as over a third of Cadbury’s total sales come from the Rs 5 price points and around one-fourth from the Rs 10 price points.
So the next time your companion gifts you a Cadbury in a theatre, check out the date. It must be the pehli tareekh. The protagonist in the latest Cadbury ads does just that.
