Cadbury Case Study

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Cadbury introduced three key messages after they decided to accept the truth about the infestation. The three key messages which are:

1. Infestation was a storage problem.

2. It was safe to eat Cadbury chocolates.

3. Consumers must exercise the same care in purchasing a chocolate as they would when buying any food item.

There have the internal response and external response to handle this crisis. For internal response, there have the three guiding principles to direct Cadbury when handling this crisis. The principles are “Consumer first”, “Truth always” and “Dare greatly, act quickly”. Cadbury took steps to reinstate and win back the trust of its employees. Bharat Puri, Managing Director of Cadbury, sent out letters to each employee to remove the doubts regarding their quality and brand. Sales persons can buy Cadbury’s chocolate bar from supermarket to check if any they are infested and no one found there have infested chocolate bars. The company held town-hall meetings with senior managers addressing employees to ensure they were updated on the proactive actions being taken to handle the crisis and ensure non-occurrence of such incidents in the future.

Changing the packaging of Cadbury Dairy Milk’s is the first action taken by Cadbury. It introduced and reinforced ‘purity-sealed’ packaging with heat-sealed polyfoil to complete protection and it created and displayed the purity-sealed logo on every wrappers and advertisements. Cadbury also invested GBP 1.5 million to import machine for revamping the packaging but it did not hike the price of the products.

Next, Cadbury launched a campaign, which is “Project Vishwas’. “Facts about Cadbury” was released in fifty-five publications in eleven languages to inform retailers and consumers about the manufacturing and storage and highlighting corrective steps taken by the company.

Furthermore, Cadbury chose a legendary Indian film star, Amitabh Bachchan as a brand ambassador. He announced and demonstrated the new packaging in the advertisements. He said he visited the factory to ensure the quality of the Cadbury chocolates before he decided to endorse the brand.

Lastly, metal dispensers and coolers were distributed by Cadbury to its retailers to ensure they have a good storage condition. A toll free number and an email id were created for consumers to contact the company directly in case of any complaints. These actions will get back the confidence from consumer due to it storage condition and commitment from Cadbury (Buri and Clark).

In conclusion, I find that Cadbury done a very good job in this crisis due to their communication strategies are brilliant.