her job as a television presenter after the slagging off she got in the press, thus causing her to fall out of favour with the ‘we love Anthea’ British public. Never mind, though – OK got their picture and Cadbury was laughing all the way to the bank with one of the biggest product placement scoops in recent British history.
KIND ‘ER’ NO SURPRISE REALLY
I think it’s fair to say then that when it comes to marketing, the chocolate big guns will do just about anything to help sell their wares, and in an industry not renowned for its scruples, it’s no surprise that their main marketing focus seems to be aimed at those whose brains are most susceptible to the emotional hook – children! Unlike the tobacco companies, who at least had to pretend they weren’t targeting kids (although that’s hard to believe when you see Joe Camel), the chocolate industry can do it with impunity.
Research carried out by the Foods Standards Agency found a direct link between overweight children and TV advertising. This may be pretty obvious to you and me, especially when you think that food is by far the most commonly advertised product category and given the four ‘food’ products dominating this advertising are ‘soft’ drinks, pre-sugared cereals, confectionery snacks (including chocolate) and fast-foods, but the FDA needed a full study to see what was happening. As of October 2003 the top two food products advertised to children were for chocolate, the number one spot being held by Kinder chocolate – a brand which makes the extremely popular children’s ‘Kinder Surprise’ chocolate egg. The Kinder Surprise Egg, in terms of marketing to children, is quite ingenious. Young children love surprises and they love toys. The people at Kinder managed to link the intense feelings of anticipation and pleasure with chocolate in one easy hit. This kind ‘er’ direct advertising aimed at children is bad enough, but not only do mass-market chocolate companies use ‘fun’ and ‘happiness’ as an emotional pull to lure children in and put toys in chocolate eggs, they also deliberately place their products at the height of the average ten-year-old, and link chocolate to feel-good films and Disney characters, and make sure their bars are on sale in all major children’s theme parks, and, and, and … Be under no illusion that whenever you see chocolate, crisp, sweet or fast-food companies raising money to promote ‘Books for Schools’ or ‘Get Active’ or such like, that they are doing your kids a favour, the main reason why chocolate companies sponsor schools is:
THEY WANT THEM AS LIFELONG CUSTOMERS!
To achieve this not only will they have posters up in schools and sometimes provide ‘free’ football strips for the kids with their product plastered all over it (how kind!), but also they often arrange ‘exclusive contacts’ to put chocolate vending machines in the schools. That way the good feeling of ‘having a break’ from class gets linked to a chocolate bar. This message is then reinforced as the children go through life with several Derren Brown moments, such as ‘Have A Break, Have A Kit Kat’, and in no time at all a strong relationship with the product has been established.
WHAT A BUNCH OF WONKERS!
There are even supervised school trips to places such as Cadbury World and Chocolate World. I wish I was kidding, but we actually pay for children to get ‘educated’ about the history of chocolate at this modern-day Willy Wonka fantasy land. This would be fine as the history of anything can be quite educational, but what we are actually paying for is Cadbury’s advertising and emotional hook. The whole tour is one huge marketing ploy aimed at children.
As soon as you enter the make-believe chocolate world everyone is given a couple of ‘free’ Cadbury chocolate bars and halfway round you get another two. On top of that there are plenty of ‘free’ chocolate ‘shots’ throughout the journey. As you continue along the 2–3 hour tour, advert after advert is being beamed into your conscious and subconscious mind – there is even an ‘advert’ stop. This is a place where you can sit and view on large screen, with superb sound effects, the many Cadbury ads that have been shown throughout the decades. One ad which particularly caught my attention was an old Cadbury’s Buttons ad. The picture showed a young mother feeding a child, probably less than one-year old, a Button. Such is the power of conditioning, this may seem perfectly OK in your eyes, but by the time you reach the end of this book you will see just how outrageous it is. The Cadbury World tour also has a kiddie’s ride taking you on a playful journey through ‘Cadabra’ – a chocolate wonderland – in a ‘beanmobile’. On this journey there is an automatic photomaker (similar to the rides at Alton Towers) on which, as you stare at the camera, a caption reads, instead of ‘Say Cheese’, ‘More Chocolate Please’.
The tour is littered with mind-control Derren Brown moments like this and it naturally ends with you arriving at the largest Cadbury chocolate shop in the world! Cadbury World estimated it would have 250,000 visitors during the first 12 months from opening in August 1991 – the actual figure was 400,000! That’s nearly half a million people in a country of only 60 million. Chocolate World in the US saw a massive 2 million visitors in 1996 with each child receiving at least one free bar of chocolate on their tour. As you now know, it’s all about the lifetime value of the customer and the Willy Wonka world of recruiting new punters remains the same as it ever was – get them when they’re young.
IT’S GOOD TO CALL … EVEN BETTER TO TEXT!
The biggest threat to this ‘get them when they’re young’ policy has been the unprecedented increase in children using mobile phones. Teenagers now spend a whopping £100,000 a day on text messages and, because they only have a certain amount of pocket money, ‘top-up cards’ are often gaining preference over chocolate bars. However, the sinister world of chocolate is not about to let that get in its way and is now joining in the text revolution as a means of helping recruit new customers. Cadbury launched a Text ‘n’ Win campaign, in which children who bought Crunchie, Caramel, Dairy Milk or Fuse bars were invited to text in order to win prizes of up to £5,000. The mobile marketing company Flytxt, who carried out the campaign for Cadbury, were happy to boast: ‘The products became the talk of the playground’ and they were happy to announce that it produced ‘five million participations’.
The chief executive of Cadbury Schweppes, John Sunderland said, ‘It gave sales a big lift at a time when the UK confectionery market was pretty flat.’ In fact, the campaign was so successful that Cadbury followed up with another texting campaign during the Commonwealth games (and there’s me thinking gambling for children was illegal!)
CHOCOLATES R US
Chocolate placement aimed at children couldn’t be more obvious than at ‘Toys R Us’. Now I thought ‘Toys R Us’ were simply a toy store. My wild – stab in the dark – suspicions were due to the fact the stores called Toys R Us. However, the first thing children see when they enter the warehouse of fun is – chocolate! Not just little bars, no – huge bucket loads of the stuff. Just like a KFC family meal, you can now have your chocolate by the bucket load. The first bucket I saw was for Smarties which had the strap line, ‘A Riot Full of Fun’ down its side. How on earth can a load of sugar, fat and powder in an artificially coloured case be a ‘riot of fun’? Riot, yes – after all, get a load of kids ‘sugared up’ and that’s precisely what you have on your hands – but fun, no. I then saw mini-buckets of virtually all the most common chocolates, once again conveniently placed at ‘child height’.
ADVERTISING DOESN’T EFFECT ME
You may feel that all the advertising, brainwashing, conditioning, trips around Chocolate World and text campaigns have got nothing to do with why you eat chocolate. You may simply believe that the only reason you eat it is because it’s sooooooo blooming lovely. You may also feel that it is fair game for Cadbury and the rest of the chocolate gang to aim their adverts at children. You may strongly think: ‘We’re not talking cigarettes here Jason, it’s only a bit of chocolate’. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t think you’re on your own there; after all, it takes a very open mind to be alive to the possibility that we could