Storm the Norm

by Anisha Motwani

  1The branch of physics that deals with the deformation and flow of matter, especially the non-Newtonian flow of liquids and the plastic flow of solids.

  Legacy

  HOW A FOREIGN CHOCOLATE WON INDIAN HEARTS

  We have all savoured both the chocolate and its ground-breaking campaigns for many years. The remarkable story of the brand that was able to pull off the near-impossible challenge of integrating itself into the food habits of a nation strongly habituated to eating indigenous sweets is recounted here.

  It is a behind-the-scenes look at the Cadbury Dairy Milk journey in India over the last six decades. It shows how strategy and perseverance can overcome prolonged periods of stagnation; warns that a large potential target group can turn into a roadblock to future business and that you can go only so far if brand codes are not in sync with culture and category codes; demonstrates how it is possible for a foreign brand to become part of the cultural fabric without localizing the taste; and finally conveys that improving market share is not the only path to growth.

  It all started in 1948

  Cadbury milk chocolate arrived on Indian shores exactly a year after the nation turned independent. In the early decades, the brand catered exclusively to westernized Indians but before long, it realized the need to look beyond this niche in order to grow. Efforts continued slowly and steadily until the year 1984 when a big turnaround took place. Operation Flood, a nationwide effort by the government to boost milk production and consumption in the country had become a spectacular success. Cadbury sought to leverage the easy availability of fresh milk by replacing powder-based milk chocolate with actual ‘dairy milk’ chocolate.

  The product became more delicious, more natural and more of an indulgence than ever before. It wasn’t enough to improve the product, this improvement had to be visible to the consumer. Thus the packaging underwent a makeover to reflect milk as a vital ingredient in chocolate making. Cadbury also revamped its distribution to boost product visibility by launching its first-ever open display unit, the sheet-metal dispenser that we now take for granted in retail counters. Advertising too took a new form. Colour television had just arrived in India. Advertisements took full advantage of this new medium in order to turn the message of ‘fresh milk’ into a powerful consumption motivator. Needless to say, these company-wide efforts paid off. The rather sedate growth of the past got turbo-charged, with sales trebling for the next six years.

  Turbulent 1980s: When one segment jammed another

  However, by the late 1980s, business began to stagnate again. The brand had focused its marketing efforts on children, thinking that it would be easier to develop a new taste with them than try to change habituated, tradition-bound adults. As a result, Cadbury chocolates were part of sweet childhood memories of millions of Indians; but this approach also created an unexpected roadblock to further growth. As children grew up, they outgrew the category. Even for kids, the brand was seen as an occasional ‘foreign treat’. Efforts to up-age chocolate consumption naturally followed but it was not until the mid-1990s that any serious headway was made.

  Halcyon 1990s: From ‘just for kids’ to ‘the kid in all of us’

  The revival of the brand’s fortunes coincided with the rise of the Indian economy. In 1992, India made a shift from its socialist past and embraced a market economy. The liberalization of the economy had a transformational effect on the larger consumer culture. Until then, advertising in India suffered from an English hangover and, not surprisingly, lacked mass appeal. Cadbury recognized this and gave its creative agency Ogilvy a clear mandate to appeal to the masses by going beyond the English advertising prototype.

  The result was some game-changing advertising that connected with mass Indian sensibility. Known as ‘The real taste of life’ (Asli swad zindagi ka), the campaign captured moments when people shook off convention and broke free, revealing their real selves, and demonstrating that Cadbury Dairy Milk (CDM) was not only for kids but for the kid in all of us. The brand soon became associated with spontaneity and happiness for people.

  The most memorable in the series was the cricket advertisement where a girl jumps on to the cricket pitch and dances when her boyfriend scores a six. It was awarded India’s advertising campaign of the century by Ad Club of India.

  Further, aided by initiatives such as a cheaper ₹5 pack which made the brand more accessible to the masses, the launch of variants (ensuring consumer choice was ‘which Cadbury’ rather than ‘Cadbury or something else’) and an expanded sales coverage—over a million stores— the Cadbury India business trebled again between 1994 and 1999.

  Trouble in chocolaty paradise: Circa 2004

  While the 1990s were kind to Cadbury, by the early 2000s, growth began to dry up.

  The brand’s growth rate dropped by 78 per cent over the four-year period from 1996 to 2000 and sales flattened between 2000 and 2004.

  Dropping sales volumes

  Clearly, the brand was running out of fuel. New triggers to fuel growth had to be found. However, given CDM’s importance to the company’s bottomline, this had to be managed without compromising profits.

  Since the market share of all Cadbury brands put together was already 65 per cent, playing a market share game would inevitably entail cannibalizing one’s own brands. On the other side, the brand’s competition came from value-for-money offerings1 (chocolate-coated wafer biscuits which had lower chocolate content or used chocolate substitute, which allowed them to offer more for less). These were discernibly bigger bars than what CDM offered at the same price. Clashing with them for share was bound to prove unprofitable.

  The rising trend of commodity prices (cocoa) was only adding to the pressure on sales volumes and testing the brand’s price elasticity. While prices had fluctuated, they had nearly doubled in four years.2

  Possibility of share gain through promotions was bound to be expensive and unlikely to sustain long-term growth. Moreover, the inevitable competition response, compounded by price pressures, would further erode profitability. All these factors appeared to suggest that raising market share may not be the most profitable growth avenue for CDM.

  A new growth path: 2005 and beyond

  Consumption among teens and adults was still very low when compared to global benchmarks. Understanding why was the key to growth.

  As the world is now discovering, India is not one country but two countries in one.

  Modernists, who are Indian in appearance but western in thought and lifestyle, dominated affluent India. Greater exposure to western (English) media and rising disposable income had meant that they were more open to experimentation and indulgence. Most of Cadbury’s growth had come from this market.

  However, it was in the other India that untapped potential resided.

  Traditionalists, conservative in mindset and in lifestyle, constituted this other India—the largest chunk of the population. In comparison with the modernists they were tradition-bound and resistant to change. Their incomes too rose at a slow pace. Money was not exactly plentiful, so indulgence was limited. Though most of them were familiar with chocolate and had eaten it at least once, chocolate had little relevance in their lives and was seen at best as an occasional indulgence for kids. While they had made tea, potato and of course cricket their own, chocolate had got a cold shoulder from them.

  But it was not as though they lacked a sweet tooth. The size of the traditional meetha (sweets) market was more than nineteen times that of chocolate, valued at approximately US$4.2 billion, while chocolate was a merely US$215 million market.3

  The brand’s growth strategy thus became to grow chocolate consumption by making it part of the Indian meetha consumption behaviour.

  The transition from ‘chocolate’ to ‘meetha’

  In the case of India, a country with a vast, centuries-old indigenous sweet tradition, chocolate was a culturally antagonistic product. It was foreign sweet-treat trying to change age-old consumption habits.

  The CDM team mo
unted an extensive ethnographic study to understand sweet consumption behaviours and how chocolate could enter this stronghold of traditional meetha occasions.

  The team discovered that the answer lay in the significant difference in the cultural perspective on happiness between East and West. It was this difference that shaped the respective sweet consumption behaviours of these societies. And in this lay the strategic insight that shaped the brand’s journey hereon.

  Decoding the insight

  The West has a strong belief in the independence and autonomy of the self (individualism). The self is believed to be the centre of thought, action and motivation; and happiness is to be found in personal striving and fulfilment of desires. Chocolate was mostly a private craving in the West, a means to individual gratification. A lot of chocolate advertising reflected this individualistic cultural perspective on happiness.

  Sharply in contrast, happiness in India is ‘collective’. In East Asian cultures, the self-in-relationship-with-others (collectivism) is the locus of thought, action and motivation. Consequently, happiness tends to be defined in terms of interpersonal connectedness and realization of social harmony.

  This connects strongly to sweet consumption behaviour and occasions in India. Most happy occasions tend to be collective and are ritually accompanied by meetha consumption. Festivals, celebrations, and traditions or cultural markers of anticipated happiness (childbirth, success in exams, starting a new business, etc.) are never in short supply!

  One could argue that it is not as if people in the West do not celebrate such happy occasions together, but the answer to that is that in the West there is no ritual mandating sweet consumption. Only in India does sweet consumption perform the role of a happiness ritual.

  Chocolate=self-indulgence

  Meetha=shared happiness ritual

  In hindsight, the brand team realized that as a consequence of its western heritage, much of CDM’s communication in India before 2004 reflected these western, individualistic happiness codes and was, hence, not considered on meetha-consumption occasions. This understanding of how ‘meetha’ was different from ‘chocolate’ was at the heart of its new strategy.

  Repurposing ‘chocolate’ as ‘meetha’ to gain a share of India’s abundant meetha occasions

  How was this done? If CDM had to become synonymous with meetha, the word ‘meetha’ needed to become synonymous with the brand. Traditionally, people sweeten other people’s mouths when something good happens to them or when they want to wish others happiness. This practice is popularly captured by the Indian/Hindi phrase ‘muh meetha karna’. The team made this more actionable by reinventing it. CDM advertising signed off with ‘Kuch meetha ho jaaye!’—a call to have something sweet.

  Early slip-ups before hitting the sweet spot

  But this did not happen without a few initial mis-steps that could have potentially derailed everything. The marketing team could well have come to the conclusion that the strategy wasn’t working and abandoned it. But, thankfully, it persisted, understood what had gone wrong and course corrected.

  One of the earliest ‘Kuch meetha’ campaigns focused on small joys. Joys that should, but do not often, get celebrated. The thinking was these were occasions where Cadbury wouldn’t have to compete with traditional sweets, occasions that it could own.

  The small joys campaign, however, did not work. In hindsight, it became obvious that ‘small joys’ were often too personal or not worthy of sharing, hence not actionable. People did not share and celebrate them with others hence the role of meetha was not strong enough on these occasions.

  The transition from small joys to big joys (occasions on which meetha was inevitably consumed) proved to be the game changer.

  Over the years, CDM communication has spanned all traditional meetha occasions: celebrations, shubh aarambh (new beginnings of all kinds—journeys, new jobs, new purchases, forming new relationships); all typically Indian collective sweet-consumption occasions. The meetha consumption ritual is an inevitable part of these occasions.

  Remaining loyal to the Kuch meetha ho jaaye (KMHJ) positioning over the last seven years has helped CDM become ‘meetha’.

  Summing up the strategic communication shifts that reinvented CDM

  •From ‘for kids’ to ‘the kid in all of us’

  •From modernists to traditionalists

  •From chocolate to meetha

  •From ‘individual’ to ‘collective’ moments of happiness

  •From ‘occasional treat’ to ‘casual’ consumption to ‘ritualistic meetha’ moment

  Brand learnings:

  Look beyond the existing category users to grow both width and depth of consumption.

  •Width: Price point and distribution

  •Depth: Target both habitual and impulse consumers from five to sixty years

  Do not re-engineer the product for the local palate. Position the product in a locally relevant way that reinvents the very essence of the product and anchor it in existing sweet consumption occasions.

  •Consumers were subliminally given the message that it’s best to substitute an Indian sweet with a Cadbury chocolate at an auspicious consumption moment

  •Gifting and stocking of chocolate took over traditional ‘sweet’ occasions

  Maintain image leadership by striking a deep emotional chord and smart marketing mix.

  CDM growth4 zoomed

  This innovative strategy popularized the brand as meetha and chocolate started being considered on occasions when indigenous meetha was the traditional choice.

  And the impact showed up in the tracking studies too. By 2011, penetration of chocolate increased by over 50 percentage points for both the teens and adult segments.5

  CDM became the biggest brand to capitalize on this explosive growth in the chocolate category.

  Moreover, despite being the biggest brand in the category (and therefore having a larger base compared to others), CDM managed to grow faster than every competitor brand.6

  Clearly, the shift in strategy and the Kuch meetha ho jaaye campaign had not only reversed the flattening growth rate, but also super-charged CDM growth!

  Note: Figures indexed at 100 for 2004 sales volume figures respectively.

  Cover all bases: Driving occasion-led consumption brand extensions

  CDM still had a long way to go, as the mass meetha market in India was and will remain humongous. But a solid start had been made and to build on this momentum, three new initiatives were launched in recent years.

  Home Stocking of CDM

  While chocolate had begun to find its way into many meetha consumption occasions from celebrations to Shubh Aarambh, the frequency of chocolate consumption was still eclipsed by that of meetha and the reason was chocolate consumption was still occasion centric, while meetha was part of habit. Mithai was stocked at home; chocolate was not!

  So the objective became to get consumers to stock chocolate (CDM) at home.

  Having something sweet after a meal (dessert) is common to many cultures. But to most Indians, it is inconceivable to end a meal without meetha! Research showed it is the single most frequent meetha-consumption occasion. From this came the idea of making every meal better, sweeter, happier, complete; and the ‘meethe mein kuch meetha ho jaaye’ campaign was born. It has provided the elusive regular/frequent consumption occasion for chocolate that the brand has, for nearly two decades, been looking for. The initial results of this initiative have been hugely encouraging.

  CDM Silk

  This is the other big initiative. In chasing the large cappuccino opportunity in India, the brand hasn’t forgotten the coconut Indian. As India is developing, more and more coconut Indians are getting minted. They are a growing young breed. These consumers are giving in to indulgence a lot more often and they have the means to indulge. To cover this segment, CDM Silk has been introduced. CDM Silk takes the taste of CDM that India has grown to love, but makes it more special and premium. The result is a fine, silky,
creamy chocolate experience, suited to a discerning palate. CDM Silk is positioned as an intimate indulgence and the results so far have been nothing short of dramatic.

  CDM Shots

  Last but not the least, CDM Shots have been developed to make chocolate consumption more frequent and accessible to the cappuccinos. Price after all continues to be a barrier in an economy like India and the results for this initiative too have been hugely encouraging. In fact the Shots success story has been exported to other markets internationally and is featured in Professor Philip Kotler’s latest edition of his seminal Marketing Management.

  As a result of these three efforts, together with the cultural anchoring done in all CDM work, the brand is poised to grow in popularity and in business for many more years to come.

  A little story sums it up:

  About 300 years ago, the Parsis fled Persia (today’s Iran) fearing religious persecution and arrived in India seeking asylum. The king of the land, however, told them that his family (subjects) was already very big and its members may not accept foreigners in their midst and feared a culture clash. The leader of the Parsis responded by taking some sugar and putting it in a glass full of milk and gently stirring it. The milk did not overflow, but became sweet. He pleaded with the king that their presence would be like sugar in milk. It would only sweeten their land.

  Cadbury Dairy Milk and India have come together like milk and sugar.

  Valuable Lessons from Cadbury’s Meetha Journey

  The difference between the East and West is much debated in many forums. Arguable proof abounds on the difference between cultures and their worldview and most of us agree there are indeed such differences. Clearly their significance for marketing is huge; yet often, despite all the literature and understanding on the subject, it goes unrecognized and un-utilized in practice.