This
week, Cadbury’s kicked up a media storm, announcing the release of its latest
chocolaty confection, Crispello.
The
company is pinning its hopes on the new product, the first since the 1990s, to
reverse a worrying downward trend in chocolate sales. According to industry research, annual sales of single chocolate bars
fell by 6.6 per cent last year, in a market worth approximately £800m a year.
Now apparently women
are to blame for this. We are all too weight conscious and have therefore
decided to forgo fatty snacks in favour of nuts, raisins and rice puffs. Taking
this as our (dubious) starting point, you can understand Cadbury’s logic in
designing a slim-line chocolate bar that would appeal to women with one eye on
their waistlines.
Nevertheless, it is one
thing to design a light chocolate bar which may appeal to women, it is quite
another to market it so unashamedly to an out-dated female stereotype.
A Cadbury’s
spokesperson described the concept behind the new bar, “The
mix of wafer and chocolate is a lighter way to eat chocolate, and we know from
experience that women are attracted to this particular format. It will also
appeal to women, because it is in three separate portions so they can consume a
little at a time rather than in one go.”
Much
as I hate to admit it, I am just the kind of girl that this bar should appeal
to. I find a whole snickers hard to handle and have a tendency to buy a bounty,
only to leave the second half for later (much to my flatmate’s consternation).
But
if there is one thing I hate, its being patronised.
Susan
Berfield summarised my feelings exactly on Bloomberg BusinessWeek commenting, ‘I’m
sorry, did the spokesman just tell women how to eat chocolate?’
Everything about the Crispello, from the
tragic strapline (‘A little treat for
you’), to the condescending comments of the Cadbury’s spokesperson, makes me
want to inhale a king-sized Mars whilst burning my bra.
I
do not deny the business sense or effectiveness of gender specific marketing. I
do however think that marketers need to spend more time ascertaining how that
gender would like to be marketed to. Women in the 21st century may
still count calories, but we’ll be damned if anyone counts them for us.
By
Polly Robinson
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