Cadbury has grown ahead of the market: Prashant Peres

Mondelez India recently launched a marketing campaign to support the launch of yet another product innovation in the premium chocolate category – Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo. The new campaign highlights the ‘crunchy’ Silk experience and includes a new TVC, extensive sampling activities and Digital & OOH initiatives. 

The playful TVC, conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather, starts with a woman sitting on a hospital bed with a fractured hand, indulging in the smooth Silk chocolate melted off her fingers. Her friend smiles at her and just when he is about to write a message on her fractured hand, we hear a loud ‘crunch’. While he is still wondering what transpired, the girl pulls out Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo from under her blanket, takes a ‘crunchy’ bite while looking at her boyfriend mischievously. This is followed by the ‘Kiss me, close your eyes’ Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk signature jingle as the couple share a hearty laughter. 

Prashant Peres, Director – Marketing (Chocolates), Mondelez India, commented, “With the launch of Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo, we’re taking innovation one notch higher, by bringing our much-loved biscuit brand – Cadbury Oreo & much-love premium Chocolate brand – Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk, under one product. What’s special about Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo is its unique product format with smooth, creamy, Silk on the outside and crunchy Oreo cookie & vanilla cream on the inside, which melt in your mouth to give you an indulgent yet crunchy Silk experience. The new TVC also aims at capturing the ‘crunchy’ side of Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo.” 

Speaking about the creative thought behind the TVC, Zenobia Pithawalla, Executive Creative Directors, Ogilvy & Mather, said, “Every time we launch a new variant of Silk, our aim is to bring alive the ‘new variant’ story. We do so by creating an element of surprise for the protagonist and the viewer. For Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo, we used the ‘crunch’ of the Oreo to create that surprise.” 

In conversation with Adgully, Prashant Peres speaks at length about Cadbury’s marketing and distribution strategy. 

What is the genesis behind launching Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo. Bringing together the biscuit and chocolate categories – how did this innovation happen?
For a couple of years we have been introducing new formats into the market, especially at the premium end under the brand like Silk because a lot of consumers in that segment are looking for new things, things that they could maybe get when they travel abroad, and those things sometimes inspire us to bring those platforms to the country. And if you look at it, we have quite a good record at it. We have Caramello, Bubbly and now we have launched Silk Oreo. It is one of our most successful platforms globally. More importantly, when we brought it here, I think we made it probably the best Cadbury Oreo you can get anywhere in the world. It also brings together a very different taste experience from the regular Silk. The regular Silk, of course, is indulgent and creamy, but Silk Oreo has the crunch of Oreo as well as vanilla cream. We have got a new technology, something called a ‘ball mill’, which refines the cream to a point where it is very creamy to taste. It’s a first-time technology in India. 

What is your marketing and distribution strategy for Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk Oreo?
Silk, like all our other products, has to be sold in visi-coolers to keep the quality of the product intact even in the higher temperatures that we have here. So, distribution is limited to visi-coolers, but that’s a fairly high distribution number and will be distributed in all the big cities and urban centres that definitely have access to Silk Oreo. 

Our marketing strategy around Silk Oreo is to tell people about the taste of Silk in a way that consumers themselves have described to us – which is ‘Silk with a crunch’. So that was the real surprise and, therefore, everywhere we have marketed it as #SilkWithACrunch. It is supported with a beautiful TVC which is already on air, and a fantastic digital campaign. We have done a lot of tie-ups, including with Book My Show to say ‘New release with Silk Oreo’, as well as various digital tie-ups. The outdoor campaign is currently on all over Mumbai and in many other cities of India. 

How has the performance of the Cadbury Dairy Milk Silk range been? What is the share of the premium chocolate market in India?
Silk is really the brand that created premium chocolates in the market. All other brands in the premium segment are relatively smaller compared to Silk. Silk has done very well over the years. Since its launch in 2010, it is probably already close in size to the competitor company in the market. So that is really significant. The brand does best at this time of the year when the weather permits. Its contribution to the overall market has been very. Today, it is the dominant player in the premium segment. 

What has been the overall growth of Cadbury in India in 2016? What have been the key growth drivers?
2016 has been a year where Cadbury kept pace with the market, and as market leaders our growth will always be closest to the market average. With a 65 per cent share of the market, we have grown with the market. We are looking at 2017 to be a year for better growths for us. 

What are your plans to expand Cadbury’s chocolate footprint within the country going forward?
I think this is something we have been doing for many years. Our footprint expansion happens in 2 or 3 ways. One is we keep expanding our footprint of visi-coolers, because we want to get high quality chocolate accessible to more and more people in the country and every year we keep adding a fair number of visi-coolers. The other thing we do is that increasing the overall number of outlets. For this, we have a rural thrust where we go to more and more villages, outlets in smaller towns. These have helped us stay and grow ahead of the market, which is really what we aim to do. 

What does the outlook for the chocolate industry in India look like in 2017?
First of all, what keeps me excited about 2017 is everything what we have already done in 2016. We have come up with some fantastic launches. If I go back, there’s Marvellous creations that we did around August last year, Silk Minis, Gift packs, then we launched Cadbury Fuse and now we have launched Silk Oreo. So we have already got four fantastic products which we want to take to more and more people. We have got more things that will surely come up. There is no shortage of excitement in a category like chocolates. There is so much you can do with it. It’s always fun working on it. 

Watch the TVC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjQJ_lYdsdo 

Campaign credits:

Agency:  Ogilvy & Mather, Mumbai

Executive Creative Director: Zenobia Pithawalla

Creative team: Mihir Chanchani, Rahul Arcot

Account management: Prakash Nair, Smita Padmanabhan, Shruti Paranjpe

Account Planning: Ganapathy Balagopalan, Jasmeeta Agarwal, Shriya Sengupta

Production house: Curious Films

Director (film): Vivek Kakkad

Producer: Shahzad Bhagwagar

Director of photography: KU Mohanan