Cadbury Chocobakes : Cadbury inside

Brand: Cadbury Chocobakes

Company: Mondolez

Brand Analysis Count: 596

Ever since Mondolez International took over Cadbury, the brand has been on a roll, coming out with variants and new products. From a corporate umbrella brand, Cadbury had become an umbrella brand for all chocolate related products under Mondolez.

For a confectionary brand, brand architecture can be tricky and often confusing. This is because, one has the tendency to leverage the equity of a powerful brand at the same time, give enough room for various sub-brands to grow. We have seen that in the case of Diary Milk, where this brand has now become a family brand endorsing sub-brand- Silk and an innovative co-branding product with Oreo.

Mondolez in 2019 forayed into the biscuit market using Cadbury. The new cookie brand was named Cadbury Chocobakes which in a way is a new journey for the Cadbury brand. The Chocobakes brand was launched in the chocolate-filled cookie category which was pioneered by Sunfeast's Dark Fantasy Chocofills brand. 

The success of Dark Fantasy may have motivated Mondolez to extend the Cadbury brand into cookies since the chocolate inside made a perfect case for the extension of the Cadbury brand into biscuits. 

In 2020, Mondolez made another surprising move to enter the Rs 2000 crore packaged cake category with the Chocobakes brand. The brand has launched a choco-layered cake in 2020. Thus from a single product brand, Chocobakes within one year became an umbrella brand and in line to come a category brand endorsing further products in the cookies and cakes category. 

Both the products are positioned using the proposition " Cadbury (chocolate) inside" where these products derive their equity from the parent brand Cadbury. It makes perfect sense since Cadbury has such strong equity and connection with chocolates. 

This brings into the concept of products as platforms. Gone are the days where products are treated as a standalone entity with limited extensions and variants. The rising costs and lesser product-lifecycles are forcing firms to look at faster ways to bring the products to the mind of the customers. When a brand becomes successful, marketers are trying to leverage the equity by extending it to multiple categories. Products and brands are becoming more like platforms that facilitate multiple product- launches. The downside of this is the confusing brand architecture and often forgetting to strengthen the parent brand whose equity is being milked by a number of products across various categories. 

Consumer expectation and Repurchase Intention : What firms must know

Brand Update : Neutrogena drops its fairness range

In an interesting move, Johnson&Johnson decided to drop the fairness product range from the Neutrogena brand line. Launched in 2005, Neutrogena wanted its share in the $450 mn fairness market in India but failed to catch up to the market leader HUL. The brand relied heavily on celebrity endorsements to gain traction in the market. 

According to news reports, J&J's decision to drop the fairness range is due to the growing pressure from the activist groups which consider fairness products as unethical products trying to exploit colour-based discrimination. The fairness product category has always been on the wrong side of marketing ethics. Activists feel that these products embed the seeds of colour-based discrimination and thus be banned. However, marketers feel that they are fulfilling a need of the consumers to look fairer and there is nothing unethical in that. This debate has become more prominent among the mainstream media with the recent racial discrimination issues that happened in the USA. The debate forced many marketers to relook their personal care portfolio through the lens of discrimination. 

Recently HUL also decided to remove the mention of fairness on their flagship brand Fair and Lovely. 

Marketers cannot be fully believed in what they say. The current actions can be another marketing move aimed to project the ethical side of these brands and owners. However, it is good to know that marketers are responding positively to the ethical issues raised by activists and reinforces the fact that the impact of society and activists group have a greater impact on marketing than ever before.