Heroes
may seem like an odd name for one of Cadbury India's newest products.
What's so heroic about a box of miniature versions of Cadbury products?
Perhaps the logic is that these are Cadbury's top sellers, and thus
heroes in the marketing sense.
If
so, that's typical brand-manager thinking, assuming your products are
hugely important to consumers.
But
as Bharat Puri, MD (South Asia), Cadbury's, says, these mini-bars do
have remarkable qualities, perhaps even heroic in a marketing company's
context.
For
one, he notes, they may be small, but are tricky to produce. Each type
of chocolate means a different run on machi-nes. Packing and putting
the right assortment in each container was another challenge. “Logistically
it's quite a complex product,” he says.
Heroes
is also achieving some marketing feats. Mr Puri says the product is
proving successful because it achieves two things. First, the small
size reduces the guilt factor. People don't mind popping in a mini bar.
(At the same time, because these mini bars only come in an assortment,
they presumably avoid the problems Cadbury faced with small bars, where
people substitute them for larger ones, cutting into volumes). Second,
you get the whole product range from its flagship Cadbury Dairy Milk
(CDM) to variants like Fruit & Nut and Bournville, and bars like
Five Star and Perk. It's good publicity for the whole range.
There's
a third benefit too, which Mr Puri says they discovered while testing
the idea (Heroes is an international product concept) for India. “We
took 200 boxes of Heroes and just put them in different houses, from
different socio-economic groups. The results were amazing — the products
just disappeared, with everyone in the house having their own favourites.”
The company realised that Heroes could be another potent weapon in combating
their long-term problem in India. The fact that chocolate is mostly
seen as a children's product, significantly limiting the market scope.
That was the reason for the major push behind CDM with the “Real Taste
of Life” campaign, and Heroes was another way to do it.
Heroes
is just one of a number of products Cadbury has been coming out with
recently where it's been playing with the way its core chocolate experience
is delivered. If Heroes offers variety, Cadbury's Chunky offers intensity.
“It's an interesting example of how just changing size and shape can
make a basic product taste different,” Mr Puri says.
Both
Heroes and Chunky though are variants of existing products. In the long
term, perhaps, the more important of these recent innovations are two
products that take Cadbury into quite different areas. Mr Puri readily
concedes that one of them, the very low-priced tube of liquid chocolate
targeted at children called Chocki, was an idea the company picked up
(along with Nestle) from the South-East Asian market. The beauty of
the product, he says, was that it delivered an intriguing and inexpensive
new consumption experience for children, while at the same time taking
care of the Cadbury India's perennial problem of how to keep chocolates
from melting in a hot country.
Cadbury's
second big innovation, and this time entirely from the Indian company,
takes it into entirely uncharted waters — in the snack food market.
Mr Puri says the idea came from observing people were increasingly prone
to munching on something snacky while on the move, or doing something,
like watching TV. “The challenge was to deliver our chocolate in a light,
easy to eat snack form,” Mr Puri says. The company's solution is a tiny
envelope of cereal filled with chocolate. Dubbed Cadbury Bytes, it's
being test marketed and Mr Puri says initial feedback has been good.
Part of the reason for this interest is that like Chocki, Bytes seems
to be well suited for a hot climate. “Let's face it, most of Cadbury's
product innovating happens for cold countries, so they are concerned
with chocolate at -5° temperature. If we want products for climates
like ours, we'll have to create them ourselves.”
Snack
and low-priced foods takes Cadbury into quite new marketing territory,
not in terms of positioning and communication, but distribution. Snacks
mean pushing into the paan and cigarette shops, into high-turnover outlets
like stations, into events like film shows and concerts. Low priced
means they can now tackle opportunities in low income areas like slums.
Cadbury
has already made steps in this direction, freeing up its distribution
system, sometimes even appointing different distributors for the same
geographical area, just targeting different types of outlets. “You have
to realise that a metro like Bombay doesn't just consist of A &
B type outlets, but A, B, C, D and E, often right up next to each other,”
Mr Puri says. “You can't tackle D & E class outlets the same way
you deal with others.”
Past
experience shows Cadbury is up to this sort of challenge. It has gone
into entirely new product categories like biscuits, soft drinks, premium
chocolates and ice-cream, creating production and distribution systems
for them — very different from its basic confectionery business. But
here's a question: in all these areas, Cadbury's established fairly
successful businesses and created significant brands. Mention Dollops
ice-cream and the Appela soft drink and, with people of a certain age
at least, you'll still get strong recognition. These brands still have
equity, so why aren't they still around today?
Of
course, it's true that all companies that innovate must also have their
share of failures, but with Cadbury's, something else seems involved.
The company seems to alternate a talent for creating brands with spasms
of uncertainty about whether it wants them at all. Its overwhel-ming
focus on chocolate could be both a strength and a trap. Every thrust
into a new area seems to be followed by the feeling that perhaps they're
better off stick-ing to what they know best — with the result that for
all its evident marketing strengths, the company's still relatively
small in India. This time round, the innovation merry-go-round though
there is one difference. Mr Puri and his team have been careful to keep
the innovations within an overall chocolate framework. There are new
forms, new ways of getting them to consumers, but it's still about chocolates
and that why this time Cadbury's might able to stay on track.
VIKRAM
DOCTOR
TIMES
NEWS NETWORK
[ TUESDAY, APRIL
01, 2003 04:40:34 AM ]
