Recipe for brand disaster or clever slight of hand?
As a small business you often look to the big companies to see what they have done to get where they are. But do these larger businesses really look outside their structure for better ways of doing things? I realise for a large corporate to change their systems, or services, that this could open a big can (and expensive) can of worms, but is it really safe to keep your head in the sand, no matter the size of that head?
Then there is the other end of the scale, a big corporate like Cadbury decides to change the recipe of their core product to ‘improve it’. Knowing that change is a costly and daring undertaking, one would think they would arm themselves to the hilt with due diligence. The best example of changing a recipe of a core product is Cola Cola. As a totally reactive measure to the ‘Pepsi Taste Challenge’ the changed their recipe. Unfortunately they didn’t realise that though 9 out of 10 preferred the taste of Pepsi (or whatever the Pepsi-researched stats were) their consumers still went out and bought a Coke. This was met with great protest from Coca Cola fans (lesson one, don’t p*ss off your core followers to please the so-called masses) resulting in the Coke recipe being brought back, and the new recipe becoming New Coke.
Following Coke’s recipe changing disaster, which become the favourite story of branding gurus everywhere, surely Cadbury could have seen the writing on the wall should they decide to change their recipe ‘for the better’. Or do the big companies look at other large corporate failures and think they can do it better? Whatever the reasoning, Cadbury changed their recipe to contain less cocoa butter (what makes the chocolate, chocolate) and more palm oil, to stop it melting as quickly. Bundled with this they changed the look of the chocolate (wider, flatter squares), the wrapper (now cardboard, no more satisfying slicing open the foil with your thumb nail, now it’s like opening a box of anything other than chocolate) and it’s now a smaller size!
Surely changing the recipe to one that is less inclined to melt in transit is a lot harder than changing your supply system? Or if it is easier, you’re now asking the consumer to swallow (ha ha) the change, the one that really matters in the transaction.
This story has ended with Cadbury reverting to it’s original recipe, and doing a lot of brand repair. Though when I think about it, the other changes have not made as much as a stir with consumers. Which leads me to think that maybe Cadbury has had a slight of hand and distracted it’s consumers with the recipe fiasco in order to have these other changes go unnoticed (remember people, they now have smaller blocks, which is harder to spot with a change in the visual presentation of the way it’s pressed into pieces). If we’d noticed the price go up, rather than the size go down, hard times may tempt us to choose an alternative to our Cadbury choc fix.
But that’s ok, because we, the people, were heard, and changes were made…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 and is filed under In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0.
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Recipe for brand disaster or clever slight of hand?
As a small business you often look to the big companies to see what they have done to get where they are. But do these larger businesses really look outside their structure for better ways of doing things? I realise for a large corporate to change their systems, or services, that this could open a big can (and expensive) can of worms, but is it really safe to keep your head in the sand, no matter the size of that head?
Then there is the other end of the scale, a big corporate like Cadbury decides to change the recipe of their core product to ‘improve it’. Knowing that change is a costly and daring undertaking, one would think they would arm themselves to the hilt with due diligence. The best example of changing a recipe of a core product is Cola Cola. As a totally reactive measure to the ‘Pepsi Taste Challenge’ the changed their recipe. Unfortunately they didn’t realise that though 9 out of 10 preferred the taste of Pepsi (or whatever the Pepsi-researched stats were) their consumers still went out and bought a Coke. This was met with great protest from Coca Cola fans (lesson one, don’t p*ss off your core followers to please the so-called masses) resulting in the Coke recipe being brought back, and the new recipe becoming New Coke.
Following Coke’s recipe changing disaster, which become the favourite story of branding gurus everywhere, surely Cadbury could have seen the writing on the wall should they decide to change their recipe ‘for the better’. Or do the big companies look at other large corporate failures and think they can do it better? Whatever the reasoning, Cadbury changed their recipe to contain less cocoa butter (what makes the chocolate, chocolate) and more palm oil, to stop it melting as quickly. Bundled with this they changed the look of the chocolate (wider, flatter squares), the wrapper (now cardboard, no more satisfying slicing open the foil with your thumb nail, now it’s like opening a box of anything other than chocolate) and it’s now a smaller size!
Surely changing the recipe to one that is less inclined to melt in transit is a lot harder than changing your supply system? Or if it is easier, you’re now asking the consumer to swallow (ha ha) the change, the one that really matters in the transaction.
This story has ended with Cadbury reverting to it’s original recipe, and doing a lot of brand repair. Though when I think about it, the other changes have not made as much as a stir with consumers. Which leads me to think that maybe Cadbury has had a slight of hand and distracted it’s consumers with the recipe fiasco in order to have these other changes go unnoticed (remember people, they now have smaller blocks, which is harder to spot with a change in the visual presentation of the way it’s pressed into pieces). If we’d noticed the price go up, rather than the size go down, hard times may tempt us to choose an alternative to our Cadbury choc fix.
But that’s ok, because we, the people, were heard, and changes were made…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 and is filed under In the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.