By Shephali Bhatt
Hamilton Holt was right after all – nothing worthwhile comes easily. Which is why if you wanted a Cadbury Bournville back in 2008, you couldn’t just buy it, you had to ‘earn it’.
It was the campaign that spurred the first big relaunch for the brand which had spent years as a niche product. Some even attributed its continued existence to sentimental reasons: Bournville is named after the site of the first large Cadbury factory and model village. In its revamped avatar, it aimed to appeal to sophisticated adults craving a premium dark chocolate experience. Set in an idyllic European milieu, the launch spot had a quintessentially British journalist bragging about owning a bar of Bournville who gets abducted by a giant bird because he hadn’t “earned” it. With 85% of the marketing spend on TV and the rest on print and OOH, the launch campaign ran for 15-16 weeks a year for three years until it was time to focus on the ingredients that went into making a Bournville.
The focus of the campaign turned to all those cocoa beans that never became a Bournville, because that was a prerogative of ‘Original Ghana Cocoa beans’ only. “The idea was to build awareness and generate trials for the brand. These campaigns helped establish Bournville as a premium chocolate with an international appeal and a distinct proposition,” says Anil Viswanathan, VP – chocolates category, Cadbury India.
It was around 2011-12 that the brand started exploring the digital platform and allocated 30% of its marketing budget to the medium. This was followed by a tie-up with Warner Bros around the release of The Dark Knight Rises. “While movie promotions don’t last more than 10 days, conversations around a movie start a month in advance,” notes Shekhar Banerjee, Senior VP and head of Pinnacle at Madison (the media agency that handles Cadbury). Capitalizing on the conversation around the biggest release of last year, the agency created an augmented reality based motion sensing game – The Bean Hunt. The winner won a free trip for two to Warner Bros Movie World in Australia. This was coupled with activity on YouTube (videos with trivia around the Batman franchise) and Facebook. It led to an addition of 6.5 lakh users on the social networking site within a month and the interaction figures soared by 4000%. It was enough to convince the brand to take a huge punt on the medium.
Starting 2013, Bournville has set digital as its lead, accounting for 60% of its annual budget. TV remains the second with close to 30% with the rest allocated to OOH. Viswanathan explains that Bournville’s current TG (SEC A, between the age group of 19-30) is an audience that uses social media as the primary vehicle to maintain and extend their networks. The shift will help the brand by being present where its target audience is, and will help the brand building exercise by riding on leading trends.
In March this year, Bournville launched a Cranberry variant, only on digital, and reached out to 26 million unique users. The campaign involved multiple videos created by Ogilvy India, the creative agency on the brand, which were only run online. “Today, Cranberry has a recall of 23% which is higher than the other variants of Bournville that existed in the market for years,” asserts Banerjee.
Bournville’s current campaign ‘not so sweet’ (NSS) is an attempt to retire ‘have you earned it’. It’s tongue-in-cheek, it’s cheeky and aspires to align the brand with young adults who like their not so sweet dark chocolate. The exclusive launch of this campaign on digital media has led to an increase in brand conversation by 800%. Along with the ad film that shuns the overtly sweet, there’s a Twitter campaign called ‘Tape a Tweet’ that allows users to throw overtly sweet situations at the brand on Twitter where they promptly get converted into one minute videos. The 9-person strong digital team at Pinnacle has built analytics that quantify the ROI of social media on its two brand metrics for digital-engagement levels and conversation association of NSS. They like to call them social GRP.
In addition, they’ve classified their target audience into digital clusters to help draft a better content strategy for the brand. Experts say that 60% of the brand’s marketing budget would be close to Rs 12 crore. “With that kind of money and a significant reach, Bournville will stand out,” Harshil Karia, co-founder and online strategist at Foxymoron points out. Since no other brand in the category is that prevalent in the medium, it gives Bournville the maximum share of voice, he adds. Normally, it takes a period of three years for advertising on this medium to reflect on sales. It will be interesting to see how Bournville’s transition from traditional to digital pays off in the long run.
Source:The Economic Times
Copyright © 2013, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved
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As the countdown to Christopher Nolan’s epic conclusion of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, kicks off around the world, Cadbury Bournville has partnered with Warner Bros to celebrate the release of the most anticipated Hollywood blockbuster of 2012.