A few short months ago Readers Digest declared Cadbury the No 1 trusted New Zealand brand. The coverage was extensive…accolades galore for the “iconic Kiwi brand”.
Before the chocolate was set on that announcement, we learned that Cadbury had re-sized its chocolate blocks and substituted palm oil for cocoa butter. Apparently this was all for our own good, that is the continued affordability of Cadbury’s chocolate.
The initial protests to these developments seemed quite muted and even confused, perhaps because a competitor attempted to stir the chocolate. When that intervention was over, chocolate lovers really got to work via Facebook, Twitter and old-fashioned email.
We’ve now seen the results, an apology from Cadbury NZ managing director: we got it wrong.
You have to expect that a brand like Cadbury would have done a crisis assessment before embarking on its product changes, no matter how seemingly sensible.
In the event, once on the back foot, its messages became too complex to articulate and consumers were not interested in listening. Perhaps another factor in this issue has the determination of consumers to remind Cadbury exactly who determines brand leadership. Consumers create brands, companies are the guardians.
This has been a hard-earned lesson for the chocolate maker, but one that every FMCG company should have ears for.