The Marketing Savvy of Cadbury Creme Eggs

One must, of course, do Easter-themed posts at this time of year so I thought I'd share with you the marketing savvy of Cadbury Creme Eggs...

The Cadbury Creme Egg first appeared in 1971 and now dominates the market with approximately 500 million being made each year. Apparently Birmingham’s Bournville factory turns these out at the rate of 1.5 million per day!

According to Wikipedia they are the best-selling confectionery item between New Year’s Day and Easter in the UK. Several advertising campaigns have certainly assisted with this.

Marketing Campaigns

 In the 1970’s the “shopkeeper” campaign saw a boy asking for 6,000 Cadbury Creme Eggs.

This was followed in the mid 1980’s with “How do you eat yours”  of which there were various versions including one between 1994 and 1996 which used the popular Spitting Image characters. 

After that came Matt Lucas with the catchphrase “I’ve seen the future and it’s egg shaped” You might like to check out his TV ad here. 

After 2008 the world saw variations on a “Goo” theme –starting with “Here Today, Goo Tomorrow”, “Goo dares wins” and, of course, “Gooing for Gold” during the year of the Olympics. However, despite that Olympic effort the brand was struggling to get its voice heard in a crowded confectionery market and sales dropped by 20% in 2011 and 19% in 2012

Stemming the tide

According to the Telegraph this is how they tackled the marketing “to fix the problem, Creme Egg went on a Facebook offensive at the start of the year” 

Using a previously unprecedented collaboration between the Brand, Agency and Facebook teams "They uploaded saucy pictures of Creme Eggs in various stages of unwrapping. They created fake dating sites with eggs looking for love. They sexily dripped goo all over the face of TOWIE stars, and posted provocative pictures of people who were Made in Chelsea. They threw money at the Facebook campaign, and it worked. Sales immediately jumped nine per cent”

In fact they threw one third of their usual TV investment at the Facebook campaign and according to campaignlive.co.uk  it reached 15 million people (6 million on mobile) - 21% of whom had not been exposed to TV activity.

econsultancy.com says “To achieve this Cadbury had to develop a new art of storytelling, creating a long series of one-off posts that fed into an overall narrative across the three months.”

The agency’s social media team started with some ideas, but over the course of those three months they actually let customer engagement guide them as to what type of content proved to be most effective.

 Always be listening

One of the best promotions came about purely by being reactive to a fan who'd come up with the idea of creating Creme Egg brownies, the fan posted pictures of these on Facebook and got about a dozen shares.  The Agency’s social media manager, Jerry Daykin, noticed the photo and re-posted it receiving an amazing 85,000 shares.  He said

“We then got hundreds of posts per day from other people baking their own brownies. The team could never have come up with this idea on our own, it happened naturally but we were quick to react and reaped the rewards”

The 2014 campaign is on course to continue the upward growth. “Have a fling with a Crème Egg” has been heavily promoted through social media where it creates egg versions of social networking sites like “Eggstagram” :-)

It also continues last year’s popular use of #CremeEggBake which had been spawned from that original Facebook post and which encourages people to suggest new ways to bake with Creme Eggs. If you're a fan of Creme Eggs this will be heaven for you to check out!

Ok, so as a small business you may not have a whole pile of money to throw at YOUR marketing but there are still some key marketing lessons to be learned from this case study:

1. To maintain market share you can’t keep doing the same old same old
2. Although you must start with promotional ideas, successful social media engagement is about being flexible and fast on your toes

I hope this has been helpful to you? If you like learning marketing lessons from the "big boys" you might also enjoy these posts from Ocado, Costa Coffee, The British Heart Foundation, The Cat's Protection Organisation and Compare the Market

Sorry? Oh yes the photo...OK I admit it, it is me wearing my happy Creme Egg Face :-)

Apart from the websites I mentioned above I’d like to nod to a factsheet from cadburyworld.co.uk, and to you.gov as further sources for this post.