CADBURY UNITY : CRACKING THE 4Ps of MARKETING

If you are in #India, I am sure you must have seen the new launch from #Mondelez India - Cadbury Unity Bar to celebrate India's 2019 Independence Day.

                              

To me, what was impressive was how #Cadbury was able to crack all the 4Ps of #Marketing in a brilliant way:

Product:

• The product is an interesting blend of milk, dark and white chocolate signifying the diversity of India and the relevance of the product to celebrate the occasion is perfect.
• The brand name chosen is apt for the occasion – Unity. Notice how the last three letters in the word Unity on the pack are the three colours of the three chocolates that have been put together.
• The packaging shows people of different religion, region and gender joining hands and it also looks like the letter ‘U’ of Unity. 

Price:

• The chocolate bar has been priced at an odd price point of INR 73. Why? Simply because it is the 73rd year of India’s independence so such an odd price point is justified.
• At a price point of INR 73 for a 130g bar, the chocolate is priced at INR 561 per kg, which is higher than the average price of chocolates in the country. This means that it gives a healthy margin to Cadbury with every bar that they sell.

Promotion:

•  Cadbury surprised everyone by taking the front page of The Economic Times editions and different cities and putting out the headline in a language that is not spoken in that city. So, the Delhi edition had a Telugu headline and the Bengaluru edition had a Marathi headline.
• For a few seconds the reader thought that the advertiser made a mistake, but if you read further, the ad said ‘The headline above is not a misprint. It is in Telugu (or whichever language the headline was in) and it says – Sweet things happen, when we unite.
• This unique approach led to a social media frenzy and people were talking about the ad, sharing it, commenting on it, thereby generating enough earned media for the launch.

Place:

• Cadbury Unity bars were being sold exclusively on Flipkart as limited editions. I am not surprised because blending three different chocolates in a single bar can be done only on a small scale and hence it is perfect to do Limited Editions.
• By calling out ‘Limited Edition’, Cadbury was driving the scarcity mindset and people who would want to experience this unique chocolate would not wait and rush to place their orders.
• By selling it only through an e-commerce player like Flipkart, Cadbury was able to achieve two things:
•  It did not have to incur the heavy logistics in distributing the chocolates across multiple retail outlets across the country. They could work this easily with a single partner – Flipkart.
• Pushing people to come to Flipkart to place orders was a great way to change purchase behaviour and get more people to become comfortable in buying chocolates online, which has a much lower penetration on e-commerce than other food categories.
• The product was sent out to consumers in a nicely gifted box along with a special letter, taking the consumer experience to the next level.

While the launch on its own isn’t going to shift the needle of the top line for Cadbury, but it surely will drive its brand equity and salience significantly and will have a much bigger impact on the mother brand Cadbury because of all the buzz, the PR and the earned media. I am contributing to that earned media as well by writing this article!

If you are a marketing student, you can easily put this one as a great case study in brands that have used the fundamentals of Marketing to their advantage and leveraged Philip Kotler’s 4Ps to their advantage. 

Oh, by the way, did I mention that I have had a love-hate relationship with Cadbury over the years. I did my summer internship with Cadbury back in 2003 and then when I was doing marketing for chocolates for Nestle, Cadbury was our competitor and arch rival 😊.

Let me know what you think of this analysis in the comments section.

INDEPENDENCE DAY - LIBERTY

This year, India celebrated its 73rd year of Independence on 15th August with the hope and promises of the nation progressing further and taking another step in becoming a super #economy. This means change for the better. A nation only changes when its people change and their mindset evolves. These can be small or big changes, verbal or non-verbal changes, behavioural or attitudinal changes. Here is a powerful ad by Liberty on this Independence Day that makes you pause and reflect. The voiceover by Piyush Mishra does justice to what is being said. I also like the wordplay and the use of the brand name to talk about Azadi - Liberty. The video will surely get buzz, eyeballs and earned media. It is already being shared on #socialmedia. Not sure how much of that would translate into #sales, but sometimes brands need #salience to come back into the consideration set.

#advertising #communications #kunalviews #brands #momentmarketing #contentmarketing #earnedmedia

Does your brand give the SPA benefit?

Marketing is not like mathematics. There is no set formula that will help you in arriving at a final answer and being able to prove that the theorem is right.

Marketing is a lot about trial and error, individual personalities, conviction and confidence, guts and gumption, risks and courage, fundamentals and basics and much more. 

There are enough and more books out there that promise you marketing gyaan and marketing knowledge with each one coming up with their own way of building brands. I have also read a few and I still intend to read a few more. There is no harm in getting to know different views and perspectives that exist out there for a subject as wide and as abstract as marketing. 

But over the years, I have also picked up my own understanding of brand building and what works. Instead of giving lot of theory and corporate jargon, if I could offer you one tip of how to build a brand, then my suggestion would be that your brand can only be successful if it offers the SPA benefit. 

Now stop scratching your head and wondering that if your brand has got nothing to do with salons or massage or SPAs, how can it offer the benefit of the SPA. This SPA benefit that I am talking about is not what you are thinking. 

SPA in this context means:

S – Salience

P – Performance

A – Advantage

Now that I have taken care of your doubt and you have stopped considering me to be talking like a lunatic, let me elaborate on what I mean.

A brand has to offer the SPA benefit to become successful and stay successful. Let us understand this a bit more in detail:

Salience – Irrespective of how big a brand may already be, the brand will lose traction with its consumers, if it does not spend enough and be visible and salient in the minds of consumers. People often ask me why big brands like Coca Cola or Nike need to advertise as everyone knows them and thinks about them when making a purchase. My answer to them is that, as brands stop advertising, they start losing share of mind and that is when the downfall of a brand begins. Share of Mind is a critical aspect as it plays a crucial role in the purchase decision at the store and salience helps in driving share of mind, which leads to share of the wallet of the consumer. 

Performance – You can spend millions of dollars on your brand across mediums, but all of that money is money down the drain if your brand does not perform in line with what it promises. Positioning of a brand has to be chosen after lot of consideration because this positioning that a brand takes, forms the barometer by which a consumer judges the performance of a brand. This combination of positioning and performance then helps in forming the perception of the brand in the minds of the consumers. So it is critical for brands to ensure that they perform what they promise. 

Advantage – It is a competitive world out there and market conditions like a monopoly do not exist anymore. Sectors, industries and categories that see great growth and profitability will always attract more and more new players. Amidst such clutter and din, it is absolutely critical that your brand has a competitive advantage over the other brands, and the consumers should be able to tangibly feel or see that advantage. This will allow you to stay ahead of competitors who will always try to pull you down and overtake you.

So brand building basically starts from identifying the advantage that your brand has over your competition. This advantage should then be converted into positioning of the brand and monies should be spent behind that, to drive the positioning in the minds of consumers and building salience of the brand. This would ideally lead to trials or repeat of your brand and over time, the performance of the brand will help in building the perception of the brand and thereby the brand itself. 

Once again, I would like to conclude by reiterating the fact that you can build a successful brand only if your brand offers the SPA benefit.