Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It!

(US Advertising slogan for Mars in the 1960s)

Every time you see a chocolate ad, hear a slogan, see a piece of chocolate cleverly placed in a film or catch a glimpse of a glossy wrapper out of the corner of your eye when at a theme park such as Disney World, you can be sure that months of planning and board meetings went into making it happen. Advertising and marketing are a science and the not-so-mad professors are paid massive amounts to come up with catchy slogans and think up ingenious ideas that will lure you in and get you emotionally hooked. Bill Suhring, ex-marketing man at Mars and creator of the slogan above, was paid a basic salary of $35,000 a year (back in 1968!) to head marketing at Mars’ arch-rivals Hershey. To put this in perspective, even the president of the chocolate giant Hershey didn’t make that sort of money back then. Marketing was, and is, taken very seriously and in the cut-throat Willy Wonka world of chocolate, anything goes.

SWEET FA – FALSE ADVERTISING

In the UK there is a body called the ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ (ASA), made up of individuals whose sole purpose is to make sure that the claims made in advertisements are true, accurate and not misleading in any way. With that in mind, doesn’t it make you wonder how slogans such as ‘… Makes You Work, Rest and Play’ or ‘Gives You A Boost’ pass the strict advertising rules, especially when in a recent advert I wrote for a juice extractor, I wasn’t allowed to use the word ‘healthy’ in it – and that was for fresh fruits and vegetables! Somebody did once take Mars to court over their ‘A Mars A Day …’ slogan, claiming it was completely false and that no one product can possibly help you work, rest and play. I suppose arguing that work and rest are two complete opposite situations and it would have to be some kind of miracle product to act as a relaxant one minute and a stimulant the next. A good argument I would have thought, but guess who won? Yep – Mars!

‘THINKING ABOUT YOUR CHOCOLATE … THINKING ABOUT YOUR TASTE’

One of the all-time chocolate mind-manipulation adverts has to be that of the 1988 advertising campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. The advert showed photographs of normal everyday images being transformed into Cadbury’s chocolate. The campaign was, according to Cadbury’s own literature,’ … built on the thought of chocolate becoming a compulsion, which a person cannot get out of their mind …’ They then explain that, ‘running through was the haunting slogan … “Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about your taste.’” As the campaign grew in momentum many different scenarios manifested. One showed a man in his convertible car and, in his mind, the badge on the front turns into Cadbury’s chocolate; another featured a photographer with a glamorous model whose shimmering purple gown turns into a bar of chocolate. The idea of the ad was to repeat the message ‘Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about the taste’ over and over again, until we actually did. They want you to have a ‘compulsion’ for their drug food and they want you to ‘not get it out of your mind’ – it is this which brings in sales. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point someone uses Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ and attaches it to their product or food. This type of ad not only manipulates the mind, but it also prays on our emotions. In fact, the biggest trick of all in advertising is to find a subtle way to link feel-good emotions to their products, and the chocolate industry really do reign supreme in this field.

TCI FRIDAY

Certain days of the week are synonymous with certain feelings, and none more so than Friday. Ever since we started school, Friday has had a different feeling to any other day – it has what can only be described as ‘That Friday Feeling’. It’s a feeling that was quickly exploited by the chocolate industry. So now you don’t have to thank that fact you’ve been paid, or that the week is over, or that you can let your hair down that it’s Friday – NO, now you can ‘Thank Crunchie It’s Friday’! Not only have they cleverly managed to link this sugar-infested, sorry, I mean ‘Honey-Combed’ product with a feeling that’s got not a jot to do with Crunchie at all, but they also managed to reinforce the message with the musical lyrics which accompanied the ad. If you can’t recall it, allow me:

‘I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know that I want you – want you.’

A Derren Brown moment if ever I heard one! And if one Friday afternoon you do find yourself feeling good and just happen to ‘spontaneously’ reach for a Crunchie – WHAM, they’ve got you! The minute your brain links that feeling with that product it will search for it again, perhaps on a cold, bleak, boring Tuesday afternoon, for example.

From the first moment your brain makes a positive connection between chocolate and emotion you’re in trouble … and they know it.

This is why Mars has recently gone one better than the Crunchie gang by creating a slogan and a £2 million ad campaign that manages to link the product to just about any wonderful and joyous emotion. Yes, gone are the days where ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’, now we have a product which produces ‘Pleasure You Can’t Measure’. Yep, somehow this little mind-twister slipped past the people at trading standards. Billboard after billboard depict pictures and captions of moments in our life where the pleasure just cannot be measured. ‘Your First Kiss’ reads one, ‘Weekends’ says another. Ad after ad depicting some silly and many wonderful moments that you truly want to recapture, especially when you’re lonely or having a bad day. This is why there’s hardly a person on the planet who, when they’re feeling down says, ‘Bugger it, I’m having a grape!’, but there are thousands of people who say, ‘Sod it, life’s too short’ and reach for some chocolate. People don’t reach for grapes for one reason – the British grape industry hasn’t conditioned them to eat grapes as a response to emotion – and, oh yes, grapes aren’t full of unnatural drug-like substances!

REAL CHOCOLATE – FALSE FEELINGS

In an advert for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, one of the bestselling chocolate bars in Britain, we see a young boy playing Saturday morning football. The picture shows all the dads cheering on their boys, and one woman, his mother, doing her best to join in. As the game ends we see the boy looking sadly at all the dads. Then his mum hands him some Dairy Milk and as she does so, the caption appears, ‘You’re a great striker son’. His sad face turns into a loving smile and as he looks up to her the caption reads, ‘You’re a great Dad, Mum’. The ad then finishes with the slogan, ‘Real Chocolate – Real Feelings’. How’s that for pulling on your emotional heart strings? How’s that for linking massive feelings to their product. How they get away with this blatant hogwash is a mystery to one and all. I suppose the biggest irony of this ad is that the combination of drug-like ingredients which go into making a chocolate bar like this creates false chocolate – false feelings.

AND ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES …

Then, of course, you have the ads for chocolate which focus on another couple of our most powerful emotions – love and gratitude, often linking the two beautifully. When it comes to gratitude, Cadbury once again get star billing with their incredibly successful ‘Thank You Very, Very Much’ Cadbury’s Roses campaign. When it comes to love, they’re all at it, jumping on the back of history. Back in the days when it was believed chocolate was a ‘cure all’, drinking chocolate was known as a ‘potion of love’. The Aztecs regarded chocolate as an aphrodisiac and Emperor Montezuma was said to down a golden goblet full of the rich, brown liquid each time he entered his harem of 500 beautiful women. Call me Mr Cynical, but somehow I think his sexual ability just might have had something to do with 500 naked women in his room and not so much the drinking chocolate! But despite chocolate doing absolutely nothing for your sexual prowess and being gooey, sticky and often sickly, chocolates in general are now an accepted way of saying, ‘I love you’.

Do you remember ‘All because the Lady Loves Milk Tray’ or ‘Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ or how about, ‘See the face you love light up with Terry’s All Gold’. Now call me Mr Party Pooper, but this is hardly a good way to express your love is it? ‘Happy Valentines my sweet, here’s something that will cause you to feel fat and hate yourself – well, cheers! I wonder if the advert would have had the same pull if the slogan ran, ‘See the face you love blow up with Terry’s All Gold’. Perhaps not!

ONLY THE CRUMBLIEST …

There is, however, one human drive which is perhaps stronger than any other – SEX! Whether it’s politically correct or not to say so, the fact remains that sex sells, it always has done and always will. Now there’s a fine line between sex and love, but unlike Milk Tray, Rolo or Terry’s All Gold, Cadbury’s Flake cannot fool us into thinking it’s all about love. No, if we put our honest heads on for a second, Flake equals sex, or DIY sex if we’re really getting to the nitty-gritty. One of the first ever ads to feature Flake ran the advertising slogan, ‘By Yourself? Enjoy Yourself – and that, was in the 1950s! Yes, it’s all about coming home, running a bath, getting naked and blocking out the stresses of the world by simulating oral sex with a chocolate bar. This isn’t my imagination either; it was more than a little deliberate. Thomas Krygier, one of the advertising gurus in charge of the Flake ad campaign, says they deliberately looked for innocent-looking women to front their ads. In his words, ‘You wouldn’t expect her to give a blow job!’ The idea, of course, was to illustrate that even innocent-looking people can be naughty and that chocolate had always been seen as ‘naughty but nice’. This idea perhaps reached its climax when the soul singer Joss Stone became the first famous person ever to advertise Flake.

The emotional hook is what they want – what they need – and it is what keeps them turning over billions. In business terms, they want what is known as ‘the lifetime value of a customer’. That’s why they can spend millions advertising something which costs about 30p. It’s the repetition they want and what better way to guarantee that than the emotional hook. This is why pop bands, which already have an emotional hook with their huge child fan base, are paid millions of pounds by companies such as Cadbury. The priceless emotional hook has already been established. What’s more, the children also trust the band, so if the pop group eats or drinks it, the children believe it must not only be cool but also good. This is why getting Harry Potter signed up was such an incredible coup for our friends at Mars and Coca-Cola. Harry Potter is a modern day phenomenon and if they can get Harry to eat a Mars and drink a Coke … that really would be magic!

As I’m sure you’re starting to realize, the chocolate industry will use just about any emotion, any situation to give the impression that their particular chocolate will help in some way. They are trying, very successfully, to build a relationship between you and the product. The bond ends up being so great that even a simple name change, let alone giving it up, can cause people to get a little touchy.

‘It’s a Marathon, for Christ’s Sake!’

See what I mean? Uniformed branding is extremely important to the big players in the chocolate world, and it means they can achieve global sponsorship and brand familiarity worldwide. This was the problem Mars had sponsoring in the 1984 Olympics, they quickly realized they didn’t have uniformity. It was then they set out to make sure that all chocolate bars in the US would be instantly recognizable across the globe. Hence Marathon becoming Snickers, Treets becoming M&Ms, etc. Once they have uniformity they know their job will be made much, much easier in the future.

The loyalty to brands is so strong that instead of bringing out brand-new chocolate bars, which can involve incredible risk, years from idea to birth, and millions in cash building a new relationship, they simply add different ingredients and produce a different version of an already named brand. This is why we get many different versions of M&Ms and products such as Milky Way Dark and Snow Flake.

Generating a following and brand loyalty is something the chocolate industry seemingly will go to any lengths to achieve. Not long after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Mars used huge amounts of emotional advertising to achieve what the press called ‘the Snickerization of Russia’. Months prior to introducing the Russians to their first ‘hit’ of this legal drug food, they carefully manipulated their minds, not just by erecting massive billboards showing their glossy packaged products, but also dangling the emotional hook by throwing a Christmas party for disadvantaged children – sounds generous, until you understand the motives behind the move. The party included a rock party for 4,000 teens, which attracted large TV coverage. TV coverage in a country with only one or two channels does nothing other than link the Mars brand to ‘party mood’ and generosity. On top of this they ran an advertising campaign which used the theme:

‘All the World Loves M&Ms’

A statement which is untrue, but it was still allowed to be used. The combination of the advertising and ‘generosity’ meant that the Russians had been mentally teased on a massive scale. So much so that on 4 January 1990, a quarter of a mile of Russians, pockets stuffed with roubles, police at the ready, queued to get their first taste of the West. Mars sold more than 20 tons of chocolate in just two days, and this was with a restriction on how much each person could buy! In a very short space of time Mars had achieved its objectives – to create an emotional hook to the brand before supplying them with the chemical ‘hit’.

However, the chocolate advertising boys and girls don’t always get it right when dabbling in politics to help sell their wares. The not-so-forward-thinking Cadbury marketing people in India thought they would try to sell more chocolate by playing on the biggest issue facing the world’s largest democracy – Kashmir. This is an issue which continues to threaten to plunge India and its neighbour, Pakistan, into nuclear war. Newspaper advertisements for the Temptations range of chocolate depicted a map of Kashmir alongside the riddle: ‘I’m good. I’m tempting. I’m too good to share. What am I? Cadbury’s Temptations or Kashmir?’ As soon as it came out, as you can well imagine, waste matter hit the fan and the company were forced to apologize. Mr Vinod Tawde, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party said, ‘Why use an emotive issue like Kashmir to promote products?’ The answer is very clear – because it works … usually! They want to stir up emotions – that’s the whole point. They want people to take notice. Unfortunately for them this one backfired, but they’re usually spot on.

ET – EXTRA TURNOVER

Although advertising and sponsorships are clear winners, they pale into complete insignificance when compared to good product placement. If you can get a picture of a Milky Way or Flake in a blockbuster film like James Bond, you’ve done well, but get Bond to eat it on screen and WHAM – you have a winner! With that in mind, please spare a thought for Mars who turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer for M&Ms to be ET’s favourite sweet in one of the biggest grossing films of all time. Perhaps they didn’t think the film would ever catch the public imagination – dough! Instead, the contract went to Mars’ rival, Hershey and their sweet named Reese’s Pieces. Although not a chocolate product, there are few who believe Reese’s Pieces were not designed to go head to head with Mars’ bestselling product, M&Ms – they even look similar. Jack Dowed was Hershey’s marketing man at the time and there is just no way that he or anyone at Hershey could have envisaged just what a coup getting the ET gig was. Nothing like that had ever been done before and although the thought seems crazy now, at the time it was a massive $ lm risk. Bear in mind that Dowed made the deal without seeing a script or an image of the alien, and with the knowledge that although Spielberg had been successful with films such as Duel and Jaws, his previous film 1941 starring John Belushi completely bombed. However, according to Dowed himself it turned out, ‘The biggest marketing coup in history’. With such emotional triggers proclaiming that Reese’s Pieces were ‘ET’s favourite sweet’ being plastered everywhere, and with cinemas all over the country putting the product in prime buying spots in their display cabinets, sales shot through the roof. Distributors reported as much as a tenfold increase during the 14-day film launch.

THE ULTIMATE CHOCOLATE RAPPER

Mars may have missed out there, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they struck lucky as the biggest-selling rap artist of all time adopted the street name of one of their bestselling chocolates – M&Ms. Now you may think I’ve made a huge mistake here and that it’s not M&M but Eminem. In fact, when this incredible rapper started out his name really was M&M. The cost to Mars for this association – sweet nothing!

IT’S ALL ‘OK’ IT SEEMS

Because good product placement has the power to reap such incredible financial rewards, it appears the chocolate companies will stop at nothing to get a shot of some celebrity eating their product into a magazine or newspaper. A few years ago OK magazine paid Anthea Turner and Grant Bovey an undisclosed six-figure sum for the exclusive wedding picture rights. It is something which Anthea Turner now deeply regrets, and for a very good reason. As part of the ‘exclusive’ deal, OK was to sell-on just one photo of the happy day to the UK daily newspapers. Unfortunately for them, the photograph OK chose to sell to the newspapers was one of the couple eating a chocolate bar. The magazine thought it was more than OK to have a deal with Cadbury. Their job was to make sure they got a good picture of Anthea and Grant eating one of Cadbury’s new chocolate bars named ‘Snowflake’. They managed to get their prize picture by persuading Anthea and Grant – at the end of a long day – to pose for one last ‘tongue-in-cheek’ photo.

Despite what so many people think, the truth is that neither Anthea nor Grant was paid a penny by Cadbury and the deal was all OK’s doing. Not only did it ruin what should have been happy memories of a special day, but it also lost Anthea 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