Mumbrella360: Small acts of kindness have a sweet return for Cadbury
They’re some of the most stirring advertisements on television. An old shopkeeper accepts a few small trinkets from a child in exchange for a chocolate for her mother. A teenage girl, tear-stained on the bus, is offered a square of chocolate from a kind kid who takes pity on her. A dad visits her daughter at a servo and buys her a bar of chocolate to help her through the shift.
The Cadbury ‘there’s a glass and a half in everyone’ campaign is poignant and affecting, a demonstration of the power of small acts of kindness. And the power of the campaign has transcended the television to give Cadbury a well-needed shot in the arm, after a period where global sales slowed, and brand penetration declined.
Ben Wicks – VP Confectionery for Mondelēz Europe and former Global Director of Cadbury – started working on Cadbury in 2011, and was tasked with following the iconic Cadbury Gorilla campaign.
The gorilla was, as Wicks points out, one of the first truly viral advertising campaigns. It heralded a decade of messaging that he summarises as “chocolate brings you joy.” It was a great piece of television, but the link to Cadbury was tenuous at best. “The translation to sales, not so great,” Wicks notes.
“We were losing connection with consumers and we were also losing communication with our product”, he said, pointing out that this tactic often involved not showing the actual product.
“The thing that made us famous was absent from our communication,” he said, and sales declined, brand penetration was dropping, and the company was in flux.
After a stranger berated Wicks for Cadbury closing factories and changing the recipe, among other criticisms, he realised the company had lost its way in the eyes of the public.
It was time to bring the heart back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecsnLeH4Zvc
Cadbury was started in 1824 by a family of Quakers, who sold hot chocolate as an antidote to the public drunkenness seizing Birmingham, England, at the time. Wicks notes the Quaker philosophy “to use commerce to do good in the world, and to elevate society” drove most of the company’s earliest decisions, culminating in the famous Dairy Milk bar, with more milk in the recipe than any other chocolate. This was the first mass-produced milk chocolate bar in the UK and, again, Wicks points out how the extra half-glass of milk was a sign of generosity.
Focusing on this generosity would be a great thing to return to, but simply pointing out Cadbury’s own generosity wasn’t a very generous thing to do.
Wicks and his team soon hit on focusing on the small acts of generosity and kindness that fuel every day interactions, citing a study that found that every bad act done by people is matched by ten acts of kindness.
“Little acts can make a big difference”, Wicks reminds us.
The timing was also important. This was 2017, when Donald Trump was running for President, and anger and amplification ruled the airwaves. Into that fractured world entered the gentle, slow-burning ‘there’s a glass and a half in everyone’ campaign.
“There’s this moment of quiet and human intimacy”, said Wicks.
International campaigns spawned from this one idea, with a global virtual Easter egg hunt during the pandemic allowing for a moment of kindness between loved ones during a time when in-person communication was difficult, while a heart-rending UK campaign focused on a sad statistic on elder loneliness that found over 220,000 older UK citizens go a week at a time without exchanging a single word with another.
Through a partnership with Manchester United, Cadbury brought a dozen 90-year-olds onto the pitch to exchange words with the players as they run onto the field – usually a task reserved for young kids. They also removed all the wording from their packaging, the idea being to instead give your words to the elderly.
Starting locally and building globally is a much more effective way to reach people than the other way around, Wicks feels. Small moments make for a big impact.
“Colours, cast, creed, setting, race, all don’t matter if you focus on the story first.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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These are beautifully written ads. But it’s a pity, I feel they are ruined by the overdubbing into Australian accents for our local market. Can’t we cope with the original versions?
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