VCCP, Carat and Mondelēz have been awarded the advertising industry’s top accolade, the prestigious IPA Effectiveness Awards Grand Prix, for rebuilding Cadbury’s brand and increasing annual revenue by £261m.
In addition to the Grand Prix, the Effectiveness paper entitled, “There’s a glass & a half in everyone” How intrinsic purpose can transform a brand’s fortunes took home the Special Prize for Best Demonstration of Purpose (For-Profit) and a Gold award.
After a turbulent few years for the company, during which two million British households had stopped buying Cadbury Dairy Milk, Mondelēz’s agencies, VCCP and Carat transformed the national treasure by rediscovering its intrinsic purpose – that of generosity. This was born of both the core feature of the product - that it generously contains a glass and a half of milk – and the roots of the organisation, founded on Quaker values.
By channelling this intrinsic purpose, Cadbury oriented strategy and comms activity around the belief that there’s a generous instinct within us and a wider purpose to inspire more generosity in the world. In short, by showing “there’s a glass and a half in everyone”, the paper outlines that “unlike ‘bolted-on’ versions of purpose sometimes deployed in marketing, this approach was not born of a contemporary issue, nor made with a ‘with us or against us’ stance on a divisive societal issue.” Instead, it explains, Cadbury set out to unite people and, in doing so, demonstrated how purpose that is overtly connected to brand and product can drive affinity, equity and sales.