Posts Tagged ‘palm oil’

1. Corporate communications fact number one – perception is reality

   Published on Friday, August 28th, 2009

   You can’t change reality with facts even if your facts are more pertinent than the other persons.  To their own detriment too many people have ignored public opinion on the basis that it’s just plain wrong thinking, and all that’s required is to state the facts. I am not talking about the smacking law – that ship has sailed and can be visited in another blog another day.  
    
   I am talking about consumers relationships and experiences with products and brands, and how changes imposed on the consumer by companies need to be thought through carefully.  Now you’re with me – Cadbury of course took a wee while to realise this, but they did eventually acknowledge the error of their ways and reverted to their original recipe.  But only when they recognised the power of public opinion. 

   Never mind the results of any blind taste testing or solid reasons of corporate social responsibility, people genuinely believed the new palm oil-containing product tasted inferior to the original recipe.

   But now that the heat is off, I wonder if people are complaining about the taste of the very same chocolate still available in supermarkets at a discount as we wait for the new original stock to arrive. And now the campaign is over I dare anyone to swap the packaging at home and see if anyone notices the difference.

   Recently I have been eating a whole lot more chocolate than usual.  Our household’s normal adult intake of zero has rapidly increased because my children’s school (which I won’t name for fear of the critics coming down on us) has been selling Cadbury product by the box-load in one of its annual fundraising drives. 

   Not one person I have spoken to has rejected the product on the basis that it contains palm oil.  In fact, we are all complaining that the neighbourhood is overrun with chocolate and there are competing stalls on the road in the weekend as enterprising kids try to convince me that their chocolate is nicer than the box my son brought home.

   Of course, ours is nicer because it is his chocolate – and are there no calories in school fundraising chocolate either? Okay I am joking, except in this respect: we can all find ways to justify our actions, and those perceptions are real.  At their own peril communicators will forget that perception is reality.

    

   

2. Consumers show their muscle and Cadbury fesses up to mistake

   Published on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

   

   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.