Cadbury Dairy Milk's Advertising Campaigns in India

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"Cadbury has been very aggressive in finding new ways to engage the consumer. The brand has developed over a period of time. With the classic lyrics, "Kuch khaas hai hum sabhi mein", it sent across the message that even adults can have chocolates because there is a kid in everybody. It also brought in a warm emotion to the brand. Over the years, the market is changed, no one is ashamed of having a chocolate now. So we find more ways to engage people. Whether it was with 'pappu paas ho gaya' or with the 'pehli tareekh', campaign, we have always tried to engage consumer with the brand." ¹

-Anup Chitnis, Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy & Mather, South Asia in 2011

Introduction In 2011, Cadbury Dairy Milk (Diary Milk) was the market leader in the chocolate confectionery market in India with a market share of around 70%. The company had come a long way since the 1990s when Indian consumers considered Diary Milk as a product meant for children. Adults were thus, not its major consumers. To change this perception, Cadbury came up with a series of campaigns targeting the adult group and consumers in the age group 15-35. It tried to engage the customers in various ways. Starting with the 'Real taste of life' campaign, the company encouraged people to bring out the child in them. Then it moved on to the social acceptance theme with the line - 'Those who want to eat, will find a reason for it'.

Through this, Dairy Milk was able to gain acceptance for chocolates among the adult audiences. The company then sought to capture the market for sweets and to make Dairy Milk a substitute for the traditional Indian sweets. With this in mind, Cadbury ran two parallel campaigns - 'Shubh Aarambh' (Auspicious beginning) and 'Meethe mein kuch meetha ho jaye' (Let's have something sweet for dessert). Along the way, however, the company also had to face and overcome certain issues. Live worms were found in a few packs of the Diary Milk in 2003. ²

Dairy Milk however remained a popular brand and it also came out as the number one most trusted brand in Mumbai in the 2005 edition of Brand Equity's³ survey of most trusted brands.⁴ In the following years, though it remained on the list of most trusted brands, its position wasn’t too high. In 2011, it was ranked 45^th.

Cadbury ran major television campaigns backed up by other media, even as the second big player and Cadbury's rival, Nestlé⁵, engaged in aggressive promotions, taking on Cadbury's campaigns directly in some cases. Diary Milk's 'Meethe mein kuch meetha ho jaye' went a notch higher than the earlier campaigns and sought to promote the brand as a dessert. Though the campaigns were generally well received and appreciated, there were some industry observers who wondered how effective Cadbury's efforts would be and whether its chocolates could really replace the traditional sweets and dessert items which were well entrenched in the Indian way of life. They were of the opinion that it would be a difficult task to do so, considering the long tradition such sweets and desserts had. Changing this mindset of the consumer would prove to be a major challenge for the marketing team for Diary Milk, they said.

Background Note - Next Page >>

1] Shephali Bhatt, "The Delicious Chocostatic War," www.4psbusinessandmarketing.com, February 6, 2011.
2] Cadbury had to take immediate steps which included huge investments on imported machinery, improving the packaging, and having leading Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan as the brand ambassador to vouch for the quality of its products to win back consumers' trust.
3] Brand Equity is a weekly color supplement that appears every Wednesday with Economic Times, which covers marketing, advertising, media, and market research. Its survey is conducted by Nielsen and is the largest of its kind in India, with a design sample of 8,160 for the 'Trusted Brands' - distributed across socio-economic classifications, age, income, and geography.
4] "Cadbury Dairy Milk," www.cadburyindia.com
5] Nestlé S.A. is the world's largest food and nutrition company.

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