It’s been a big year for the Cadbury’s brand and the marketing team behind it. This year, the iconic chocolate brand celebrated its 100^th year of manufacturing in Hobart, Tasmania.

Seeing the FMCG’s total Australian leadership and commercial team come back together for the first time in two years to celebrate proved a golden moment for its marketing chief, Paul Chatfield.

“It was an incredible moment of pride and connection as we came back together for such a significant occasion,” he comments. “This same feeling of pride and connection was replayed to us from consumers across Australia, as they shared generational stories of Cadbury in their own communities and families.”

Innovative marketing

While many brands celebrate ‘birthdays’ predictably, Chatfield says the manufacturing milestone carried particular gravitas with parent company, Mondelez International, and its multi-generational employee base. It was equally a poignant milestone for consumers increasingly reflecting on simpler days given global complexity, instability and associated anxiety. From this insight, ‘Cadbury 100’ was born.

“A critical strategic element underpinning the program was demonstrating core brand initiatives can deliver growth as strongly as product innovation,” Chatfield says. “Given this, significant people and financial resources were invested, requiring considerable buy-in to the insights, approach and investment. Therefore, Cadbury 100 needed a clear intent and pathway to growth through impacting consumer behaviour.”

The team landed specifically on leveraging strong brand connection to shift penetration and average weight of product (AWOP) lift over the year to deliver profitable revenue and share. This was the ambition even off the back of three years of winning in terms of Australian chocolate category share.

For Chatfield, the resulting program was the “epitome of marketing craft”, with all elements seamlessly integrated. These included a dedicated brand campaign achieving ‘breakthrough’ effectiveness featuring Cadbury Hobart colleagues, the FMCG’s Tasmanian dairy farmers and Australian Wallabies captain, Michael Hooper. An integrated TV and digital partnership with Channel Nine drove earned and owned media results, while brand PR delivered further earned media via deep storytelling.

In addition, 10, limited edition Cadbury Dairy Milk pack designs, each featuring a key moment in the last 10 decades, were created. In all, 15 million packs were printed for maximum impact. Also in the mix were brand partnerships with retailers, including a limited-edition Curtis Stone Caramel Slice Block. This well exceeded forecasts and won Coles’ ‘New Product of the Year.’ And employees were hands-on too, coming up with their own designed Chocolate Makers Mint Chip Block.

Overall, Cadbury’s grew share and sales. “The scale and integration of this program is demonstrative of the leadership marketing has in Mondelez – putting consumers at the heart of plans and delivering growth via brand investment,” Chatfield says.

Business smarts

A great year and well-established brand doesn’t mean you stand still, however, and Chatfield has an eye firmly on growth opportunities for the future.

“The business has achieved record-breaking growth, however it became necessary to ensure we were clear on the drivers to ensure continued acceleration,” he explains. “With a strong share position across multiple snacking categories, a critical assessment, powered by insights and advanced analytics, demonstrated some of our categories had more headroom for profitable growth than others.”

Outcomes from the strategic review included sharpened focus on the growth agenda around prioritised categories, segments and brands, along with concentrated investment anchored in higher profitable growth.

The outcomes developed into business priorities to 2025, endorsed across business functions and with accountabilities assigned. To ensure continued cross-functional alignment, Chatfield is leading development of frameworks and principles around how Mondelez grows and invests.

It’s changed the shape of total business investment. And the keys to success? “Ruthless focus, removing unnecessary complexity and driving individual accountability and responsibility,” Chatfield says.

Data-driven maturity

It’s already clear Chatfield is a big believer in brand. While many businesses reduced brand investment during Covid, he strongly advocated to strengthen investment plus simultaneously created a ‘slingshot-effect’ via transforming digital communication effectiveness. 

“The leadership challenge was clear - how do we inspire the team and our partners to drive ‘RAPID’ improvement in digital communication effectiveness [ROI + strengthened equity]?” he asked.

A multi-disciplinary team of internal talent plus agency and media partners was created. The team then partnered with data science teams from Google, Facebook and Nielsen to better understand the impact different creative and media variables could have on ROI and effectiveness. From there, a mix of data sources were employed to create a series of agile experiments allowing Mondelez to test different drivers of effectiveness in live campaigns.

The project delivered 15 test-and-learn experiments across seven Mondelez brands, within three digital platforms. These delivered two global firsts in internal effectiveness measurement. Experiments ran in parallel on an accelerated timeline of six months from start to finish.

“Through deep collaboration with partners, we unlocked a new way of working that is driving significantly improved operational efficiency,” Chatfield says. “We quantified drivers of media effectiveness for our teams to action now being deployed globally.

“While Mondelez Australia has TV and digital media ROIs significantly higher than Australian FMCG benchmarks, I believe there is still room for growth in both media ROI and communication effectiveness as audiences continue shifting. These advances are only possible in a dynamic culture of continuous improvement that is grounded in insight and analytics, which I have championed as CMO over the past four years.”

Customer-led thinking

Tackling sustainability challenges and reducing impact on the planet is critical for both the Mondelez business and its brands. Insights show Australian consumers’ sustainability expectations have accelerated and it’s increasingly an expectation brands embrace more sustainable practices.

Leveraging strong cross-functional relationships with research and development, packaging, corporate affairs, procurement, finance and supply chain, plus external relationship with suppliers and government, has enabled Chatfield and his team to deliver two signature initiatives.

One was partnering with a group of Victorian businesses to become the cornerstone participant – in this case, the largest power user – on a power purchase agreement to source renewable, wind energy. The shift reduced total carbon emissions across Australia and New Zealand by more than 50 per cent.

At a brand level, it means The Natural Confectionery Company lollies are made with 100 per cent renewable electricity with on-pack and digital comms amplifying the fact, Chatfield says. Equity brand tracking saw increase in brand power in 2021, increasing meaningful scores and resulted in the TNCC brand growing 11 per cent last year.

In another cross-functional collaboration, Cadbury Dairy Milk Blocks will soon be among the first food products globally to be wrapped in recycled soft plastic packaging. This has traditionally been difficult to collect and recycle, Chatfield says.

“While we accessed the latest technology from overseas to source this recycled material, the Cadbury brand took a stand and leveraged the milestone to show industry and government the future demand for locally made recycled soft plastic, which we hope aids government investment confidence in this area,” he says. “This is an important initiative from the Cadbury brand given its leading position amongst peer brands in social responsibility, as well as being voted the Most Trusted Brand in its category for the last 16 out of 17 years.”

Commercial acumen

As to other commercial wins, Chatfield points to the challenge of being a market leader within an established and highly developed category to continue growing snacking occasions.

“This is critical to ensure the long-term health of the category and Mondelez brands within,” he says. “A key lever used is platform innovation, and Cadbury Caramilk has become one of the most locally and globally significant platforms for Mondelez over the past five years.

“Cadbury Caramilk started as a Kiwi favourite of past times; however, we quickly saw there was a much more significant opportunity for growth.”

Going beyond milk, dark and white chocolate, Caramilk was the new chocolate type Australians and Kiwis couldn’t get enough of, Chatfield says. Over the last three years, the total Caramilk brand has grown to $83 million RSV.

Building on the pioneering success of Australia and New Zealand, Cadbury Caramilk launched in the United Kingdom in 2021 and is now a major growth platform. Further rollouts are being explored.

Leadership impact

Chatfield, who has been working at Mondelez for more than 10 years and across the Cadbury’s brand for many years, is proud to be working with a talented team across Australia and globally. Development, culture and purpose are key to engagement and remained front and centre throughout the Covid pandemic.

Chatfield notes an annual talent review covering every marketer, with dedicated development plans and pathways developed, discussed and supported. Frequent reviews by leaders ensures marketers grow, develop and receive feedback. Additionally, a marketing excellence lead delivers programs that build strategy and craft and responds to development interests.

“Culture has become a dynamic area for us Melburnians after extended lockdowns. With low turnover, we leveraged our strong team equity to remain connected,” Chatfield continues. “As we’ve returned to the office, reconnection through purposeful contact ensures we rebuild our community and communication – making the office a place everyone wants to be.

“Finally, purpose manifests itself by ensuring our company and consumer values are reflected in our marketing. Our rich brand history gives us permission to be authentically grounded in purpose.”

In addition to its sustainability progress, Mondelez has a Reconciliation Action Plan, which Chatfield is the lead team sponsor for, and he’s engaged Indigenous artists for Cadbury Roses pack designs for the past three years and confirmed OREO as World Pride and Sydney Mardi Gras partner.

“Importantly, my team can see our progressive organisational values are being reflected in the consumer-first marketing created,” he adds.