Today our Director of Closeness, Anna Eggleton, comments in Marketing Week on the recent Cadbury’s / Kraft potential merger news. See her comments here.

Co-RE-creation

At the recent Cello Conference on Creating Consumer Chemistry, Andrew Needham, Founding Partner of Face presented a paper on the practice of Co- Creation. It is a trend that could be relabeled “the rise of Pro-Ams” with amateur consumers helping out us professional marketers.

This made me think about the re-launch of Wispa and I wondered whether this could be called an example of co-RE-creation.

Via their blogs, chat and on-line communication, organised collaboration and subtle Guerrilla marketing (which included storming the stage at Glastonbury with a banner crying “Bring back Wispa!”) and the pledges of free assistance from cheerleaders, knights in armour, a barber shop quartet and a panda, the Great British public expressed their love of an 80s nostalgic brand and ‘forced’ Cadbury to bring back the brand.

‘Responding to four years of on-line hype from 93 ‘Bring Back Wispa’ Facebook groups and hundreds of similar blogging campaigns on MySpace and Bebo, Cadbury will produce around 23 million Wispa Classic limited edition bars. The chocolate will appear in its original blue wrapper, designed by Cadbury’s in-house design team V4′, wrote Design Week at the time.

Cadbury spokesman Tony Bilsborough explained ‘We have noticed the Web interest for some time and the consumer passion has undeniably swayed our opinion to re-launch the Wispa. This is the first time the Internet has played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury’s brand’ he adds.

For me however it represents another first – the first Co-RE-created brand!

Onto the design – the return of a bold classic but one that, for me, missed the opportunity to use the unique texture and name more distinctively.

Having said that, when Cadbury’s Wispa was back on the shelves with a nifty ‘Pro-am’ ad to boot, I for one was out there buying one or two. POWER TO THE PEOPLE !

Green & Blacks are really pushing their recently launched NEW 30% cocoa ‘Creamy Milk’ bar – apparently aimed at those people who find ordinary milk chocolate too bitter, but white chocolate too light…

Is this a great example of a brand seeking to innovate by forcing a market in the gap rather than the other way around? The accompanying press ads (crawling all over a broadsheet near you now) do lead with the message that this is a whole new chocolate market sub-category.

Or is it just a tactical move to re-cite the brand as a mainstream competitor to the likes of Galaxy and Cadbury? Indeed a recent article in Marketing Magazine takes the view that the brand may be struggling in its premium positioning: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/898351/Green—Blacks-targets-mainstream-chocolate-market

Or maybe it does neither – if I’m a Galaxy lover surely I’m addicted to the specific, unique taste of Galaxy (not the fact it’s “creamy”) and therefore won’t be swayed in my loyalty by a pretender… And if I’m a Green & Blacks lover who simply wants something creamier, I’d be looking for more of a ‘reason to believe’  around creaminess (rather than the simple 30% cocoa message) to help me make the switch.

Or maybe I’m over-intellectualising it and actually it’s just chocolate… who knows.