About
Cadbury is a British multinational confectionery company wholly owned by American company Mondelez International (originally Kraft Foods) since 2010. It is the second largest confectionery brand in the world after Wrigley’s. Cadbury is headquartered in Uxbridge, Greater London and operates in more than fifty countries worldwide. It is famous for its Dairy Milk chocolate, the Creme Egg and Roses selection box, and many other confectionery products.
Objective
Cadbury’s objective is to become the world’s biggest and best confectionery company. Cadbury has always believed in inventing, inspiring and investing for chocolate lovers across the world nearly for 200 years now. At the same time, Cadbury aims to consistently achieve a revenue growth of 20% per year, increase earnings by 15% annually and dividends per share by 7% per year.
Approach
A brand with a rich history and products enjoyed by millions, Cadbury has enjoyed great returns from its investment in social marketing. Cadbury not only utilizes common social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, but its marketing strategies on other networks such as Instagram, Youtube and Google+ are equally as innovative and successful.
Cadbury’s presence on Facebook and Twitter
It is no surprise that Cadbury has established separate Facebook pages for each of its most popular products, including Dairy Milk, Wispa, Crème Egg, Bourneville and Hot Chocolate. The first thing to note is that all the pages are updated on a daily basis with brand-related content, ranging from straightforward product promotions to recipe ideas. In general, each post attracts thousands of likes and comments, which the social media team does a good job of responding to.
Cadbury has established separate Twitter feeds for its different products. It has been observed that most of the tweets are either re-posted from Facebook or are re-tweets of other users that have mentioned the brand. However, the 25% increase in engagement on Twitter while re-launching their Wispa chocolate bar during the London 2012 Olympics is worth a mention.
Cadbury’s use of Instagram
One of the first big brands in the UK to use Instagram sponsored ads (along with Waitrose, Channel 4 and Rimmel) Cadbury has a clear strategy for marketing its brand and products on the social network. Cadbury posts to Instagram sporadically. The posts are a mix of videos and images that are highly polished and professional, often showing Cadbury products being used in recipes or arranged into creative pictures and patterns. These posts are accompanied by hashtags taken from Cadbury’s marketing campaigns such as #FreeTheJoy and hashtags used more generally such as #Friday and #Dance. The videos shared by Cadbury’s Instagram account are taken from their various advertising campaigns and are shared from the Cadbury Youtube account.
Cadbury’s presence on Youtube
Cadbury’s use of Youtube is highly structured and is very successful. The content posted on YouTube is a mixture between advertisements that are shared across all social media platforms and other marketing channels, along with content created specifically for the YouTube account. Thanks to Cadbury’s use of the playlists feature which has been used to segment videos into specific campaigns and features such as ‘CDM What’s the Choc? #FreeTheJoy’ and ‘Its Friday Lets Dance #FreeTheJoy’
Cadbury also has a YouTube specific campaign called ‘The Week Unwrapped’, a collection of videos billed as “Our weekly round-up of joyful news”. These videos are a compilation of humorous and happy videos collected from around the internet and presented in the form of Cadbury’s news program.
YouTube is also used in conjunction with Google+ by the Cadbury marketing team as there is a section on the YouTube profile where viewers can re-watch previous Google hangouts.
Cadbury and Google+
Cadbury is one of the only brands to really adopt a clear marketing strategy for use on Google+ instead of simply sharing repurposing content from other platforms. In fact, Cadbury’s use of Google+ was so impressive that Google decided to produce a case study to show others how to make best use of the social network for digital marketing.
One of the key things that have led to Cadbury’s success on Google+ is the way the brand listens to its audience and incorporates this feedback into its strategy. Cadbury quickly realized that its Google+ followers wanted more than content copied from its other social networks and worked hard creating unique content for the network.
In particular, Cadbury employed the unique Google Hangouts feature as a way to generate different content for its profile on the site. The Hangouts feature on Google+ means that a brand can interact with its fans on a much more personal level and it has proved to be incredibly effective for Cadbury.
Cadbury’s Google Hangout campaign around the London 2012 Olympics attracted over 150,000 new followers on the platform alone and consisted of video chats with Olympic athletes, chocolate connoisseurs and fans of the brand.
Results
- Cadbury’s strategy of re-launching their Wispa chocolate bar during the London 2012 Olympics got amazing results on Twitter with 25% increase in engagement
- So far Cadbury has recorded 2,89,000+ followers on Twitter and 47,800+ tweets, over 45,000+ subscribers following the channel on YouTube and 83,900+ followers on Instagram
Learning
Cadbury’s strategic move of shifting from traditional media to social media channels in 2012 witnessed visible results. Cadbury ran campaigns on Facebook and Google+ in order to build up awareness and engage with its fans. Cadbury’s most famous and successful campaign was its celebration of reaching the milestone of one million fans on its UK Facebook page and YouTube.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
