By Ravi Balakrishnan
THE PAST
Piyush Pandey, chairman and creative director, O&M South Asia has a challenge for all ad strategists: “I would like the best planner to write me a strategy document on the target audience for a laddu. I believe the target audience for a chocolate or a laddu is every human being with an urge for a moment of joy.” And that’s the core group for Cadbury Dairy Milk at least over the last 20 years, through which it’s moved from a product aimed at children to one that reaches out to everyone.
Prior to 1994’s ‘The Real Taste of Life’ campaign, Cadbury Dairy Milk aka CDM aka “Cadbury” , the generic word for chocolate in large parts of the country, was already a well recognised brand. Early commercials saw indulgent parents bestow CDM on kids after trips out of town or for the tots lacing their own boots unassisted.
Around the late 80s, the pressure of stagnation set in. Cadbury’s India realised it needed to widen its base. There were adults who ate chocolate but in a furtive manner, guilty about such a childish indulgence. Cadbury and Ogilvy made tentative attempts at reaching out: a film from the late 80s showed a father wolfing down a bar of chocolate under the pretext of telling his children a story. But the brand remained reluctant to make a clean break from its primary target audience.
In 1993, the account went up for a pitch, sending panic through O&M. Mr Pandey, then on a vacation in Hawaii, rushed back to India. While miffed at having to cut short a long awaited break, he had an idea for a new direction: “One of our relatives who’d just had a bypass drove 150 km to pick us from the airport.
While talking to him, we found he’d been on a ride at Disney which was specifically forbidden to people with heart conditions. He said ‘I wanted to check if the doctor had done a good job.’ I thought that was a great mindset.”
Further inspiration hit Mr Pandey at a toy store in San Francisco filled with signs that said ‘By order of the management, you are obliged to play’. He spied an elderly couple crawling out from beneath a table in hot pursuit of a toy. Says Mr Pandey, “I wrote the jingle to ‘The Real Taste of Life’ on the back of a boarding pass.”
The ad was presented and the account retained. Mr Pandey recalls, “Rajeev Bakshi who was on the brand at the time decided not to research it. He said, ‘Let’s make it first and research it later.’”
The first film was a montage featuring several of O&M’s staffers at the time among others since the agency wanted people who looked “real” as opposed to models. Next up was the iconic cricket commercial featuring first time model Shimona breaking out into a spontaneous jig at a match. It’s an ad that Mr Pandey claims still gets applause even when played to an audience too young to have seen it the first time around.
Says Siddharth Mukherjee, director – chocolate category & media, Mondelez India, “The ads very consciously showed adults consuming the chocolate in a very public setting. It was the first major leap forward to make the category acceptable for adult consumption.”
Distribution was expanded and smaller packs introduced at more affordable prices. Mr Mukherjee says, “It led to 20% plus growth for 3 to 4 straight years. The category doubled in size.” The campaign continued with several variations, the most significant of which was ‘Khaane Waalon Ko Khaane Ka Bahana Chahiye’ featuring Cyrus Brocha distributing CDM at a wedding.
Says Mr Mukherjee, “The challenge was to get a functional message across in what’s not a functional category.” There were also a couple of campaigns that died a quick death. Mr Pandey says, “We followed research which is a mistake I don’t make very often. People said they get perked up by a chocolate when they feel low. So we had two commercials about how to accept defeat with the line ‘saat rahe har pal’. We soon discovered that whatever people said in research, they didn’t want to see it on air.”
In 2003, however, CDM itself was on the defensive after a controversy about worms in the chocolates gained traction. Celebrity spokesperson Amitabh Bachchan was roped in to give it a clean chit.
Mr Pandey recalls, “Instead of arguing about who was right and wrong they looked at the brand and its responsibility. The speed at which they brought in new machinery on the back of a few stray incidents was testament to their belief in a relationship with consumers. The other great learning is when a consumer loves a brand, he gives it a chance and is forgiving.”
It was a transitional time, with Cadbury dabbling with taglines like ‘Kush Hoon Khamaka’ (Happy for the heck of it) and a world cup special campaign called ‘Maza Aa Gaya’, none of which lasted. The time was right for a big change.
THE PRESENT
The current phase has been built around ‘Kuch Meetha Ho Jaaye’, marking a strategic shift for CDM. The brand tried to crack the larger market for sweets as far back as the late 1980s. Then in client servicing, Mr Pandey remembers going to Varanasi to research if Cadbury had a role in mithai; only to conclude it didn’t. But by 1999, the brand was starting to revisit the idea.
Mr Mukherjee says, “Indians consume as much sweet as anyone else if not more. And meetha is such a strong part of tradition. Can we see the relevance of chocolate in occasions where people eat mithai?” The initial campaigns like ‘Pappu Paas Ho Gaya’ were about introducing CDM as a substitute for traditional sweets like pedas. This has been followed by ‘Pehli Tareek’ and ‘Shubh Aarambh’.
Explaining the rationale, Mr Mukherjee says, “We are making the transition from once in a while celebratory occasions to more everyday events.” CDM has in the meantime worked out an exemplary collaboration between creative and media.
Says Shekhar Banerjee, senior VP & head of Madison Media-Pinnacle, a division that works exclusively on Cadbury, “The core focus is actually about business goals led planning rather than media planning.” An early highlight was a tie up with Reliance and the education board in 2006 where people who sent an SMS inquiring after their exam results got the information and a branded message which said “Pappu paas ho gaya.Kuch meetha ho jaye.”
Banerjee says with a laugh, “We made sure the message only reached people who had passed.” The agency has tied ‘Shubh Aarambh‘ with unlikely partners like jobsite naukri.com. Or placed ads immediately after a commercial for a car or bike, recommending people who buy something new also have a bar of CDM to mark a fresh start.
‘Kuch meetha ho jaaye’ has been taken to sweet shops in Kolkata convincing them to include variants of chocolate with traditional mishti. It calls for an evolved style of working. Says Banerjee, “We’d list the occasions for ‘Shubh Aarambh’ and which media maps best. Ogilvy’s Abhijit Avasthi and Manoj Shetty would immediately take those and come up with creatives on each of them. It would be impossible to pull off without creative and media working together.”
So where does the latest campaign featuring a couple romancing in a snow fight fit into this? According to Mr Pandey, “When a brand is this big and it’s succeeding in expanding the market, it should not forget its larger role of greater joy. So parallel to the activities you do in terms of increasing consumption, there’s the aura of a leader, the larger picture.
THE FUTURE
Mr Mukherjee sees meetha holding fort for a while: “We think of what the marketing task is at hand and if the line needs to be changed to achieve that, so be it. But a timeless line like kuch meetha ho jaaye may just need to be modified or refreshed.”
Marketing consultant Harish Bijoor believes the brand is the taste of India in chocolate pretty much like Amul is in butter. It’s a brand that’s received a high degree of creative inputs both from the agency and the management team. However it’s not immune to the challenge every leader faces: “Each new entrant pecks at your share. The first task is preserving share and the second remaining relevant to an adult audience.”
Mr Bijoor opines that apart from the social sanctions against adults eating chocolates which are still in place, there’s the functional idea of chocolates being a sugar rich category and therefore not good for health. He says, “This problem cannot be tackled by advertising and only by other offerings that may or may not do equally well.”
By playing in the meetha space, the brand has perhaps set itself up for a tough slog. “When you say thanda matlab Coca-Cola you are competing with seven brands of soft drink. But when you say kuch meetha ho jaaye you are competing with thousands of traditional sweets including regional favourites. It’s a good piece of strategy, but whether it’s effective is the question.”
Source:The Economic Times
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