In feature 021 of Conversations Behind The Campaign, we interviewed Connor Gould, Brand Manager at Cadbury, who went from being a Sales Graduate to Brand Manager and was part of Cadbury’s Yours For 200 Years Campaign.
In our interview, Connor discusses the Yours For 200 Years campaign that began back in 2022 when the team put the challenge to their creative agency, VCCP, to find a way to celebrate Cadbury’s 200 year anniversary. Connor further shares the role nostalgia plays in tapping into consumers’ emotions, how Cadbury’s core values are kept at the forefront of their marketing and communications, how potential is just as important as performance and so much more.
1. Can you please share your story on how you got into marketing? When did your marketing career begin, what is your current role(s) and what role(s) have you previously had within the industry?
I had zero intent in becoming a marketeer. I studied History for my undergraduate degree as it was my favourite subject at school, however, after 3 years I wasn’t drawn to a career in academia so I decided to undertake a Masters Degree in International Management. After I completed this I saw myself heading down the sales route and so applied for the Sales Graduate Scheme at Mondelez International. Throughout each of my role rotations I worked with Marketeers in different guises and experienced a growing appreciation for the role they played in our business; specifically, the guardianship of our incredible brands.
I applied for a Junior Brand Manager role looking after the Cadbury Bitesize portfolio upon finishing my graduate scheme. This role was very commercially focused, looking at price pack architecture, manufacturing efficiency and our innovation pipeline and thus, my experience in the commercial side of our business was a real asset. The role also gave me my first taste of advertising, working on a campaign featuring Cadbury’s partnership with Premier League football clubs. It is this variety that continues to drive my passion for FMCG marketing. One minute you are poring over a P&L, the next you’re on a 5-aside pitch with Leah Williamson in late October worrying about whether we have enough hot water bottles on hand to stop her freezing.
Across that first year I became closely acquainted with how challenging and complex FMCG marketing could be. However, my approach of finding creative solutions to overcome challenges was definitely a factor when I was asked to join the marketing team tasked with the delivery of Cadbury’s 200th anniversary campaign – Yours for 200 Years. This was an incredible opportunity to be given as a Junior Brand Manager and I strived to make the most of it. I had specific ownership of our owned, earned and trade marketing strategies as well as supporting on the delivery of all our paid assets. The campaign was so big it entailed a dedicated team (rare in our business!), with four of us working flat out alongside our incredible agency partners.
We are slowly coming to the end of the campaign and I was fortunate enough to secure a promotion to Brand Manager – Cadbury Dairy Milk. So far in this role I have helped to craft our 2025 Equity strategy for Cadbury and am in the process of leading the delivery of some of the tentpole initiatives that we’ll bring to life next year. I am also returning to the world of innovation (but that’s still top secret).
2. You were part of the team crafting Cadbury’s 200th Anniversary campaign – ‘Yours for 200 Years’, which was released in January 2024. Are you able to walk us through the creative process from brief to execution? What was the art, science and design process behind the campaign?
So ‘team’ is the vital word in this question as a lot of people had a hand in creating such an important and complex campaign. The journey began back in 2022 when we put the challenge to our creative agency VCCP to find a way to celebrate Cadbury’s 200 year anniversary in a manner that:
- Increased the brand’s salience and fame
- Made modern Britain proud that Cadbury exists
- Built Cadbury’s equity as a caring and generous brand
- Cemented the brand’s status as fabric of the nation
Being a historian at heart, I would love to spend more time debating the necessary tension between art and science but in its purest terms the science element was the research and the art the creative execution. The level of detailed research that was undertaken was phenomenal, both to understand the detailed history of Cadbury, but also how best to bring it to life for our consumers. It was only possible due to Sarah Foden, our archivist and her team up in Bournville. Sarah helped both our campaign team as well as our agency partners to understand the fundamental themes of generosity and belonging that contributed to the creation of Cadbury as a business and brand, and its resilience through two centuries. In a more colloquial sense Cadbury is held as a national treasure. National treasures are created by and thus belong to the people.
As we shifted into strategic exploration our biggest asset was our campaign framework. It became our criteria for judging potential activity that allowed us to probe how an idea a) would deliver on our objectives b) what phase it would sit in e.g. Celebrate/Involve/Explain/Act c) what the desired consumer outtake would be. There was so much fertile ground to explore, we had to stay incredibly disciplined to avoid proliferating our message and undermining our objectives.
The results of this approach were a range of executions that hit different touch points and provoked different consumer responses, but all delivered on our campaign objectives. This is where the ‘art’ really came to the fore, with commissioned illustrations to support our limited edition packs, an historic remake of our ‘mum’s birthday advert’, and the OOH & Digital photo campaign.
3. With the success of Cadbury’s 200th Anniversary campaign and the release of the 7 retro packaging designs, it’s evident that nostalgia plays a significant role in tapping into consumers’ emotions. Do you think we will see an increase in nostalgia-driven marketing across the industry in the future?
Nostalgia definitely has a role to play in tapping into consumers emotions, it engenders feelings of comfort and warmth and focuses consumers on the security of what has been, compared to the uncertainty of the future. This is one reason we saw so many brands lean into nostalgia during the pandemic.
Having a strong connection with your consumer base is a brand’s biggest strategic advantage over its competitors, in particular over private label brands. However, just because a brand has been around a long time does not mean that consumers automatically feel connected to it; you have to consistently deliver on their expectations. This was the driving insight behind Yours for 200 Years. We sought to highlight the relationships people have had with Cadbury over the last two centuries to show the role it has played and continues to play in people’s lives.
We had a great discussion internally about the big winners from Cannes this year. The general consensus, which I agree with, is that creativity, and campaigns that put creativity at the heart, were the big winners. Thus, it feels like we aren’t necessarily in an era of nostalgia, but of one where brands are taking more time to understand their consumers, the problems they can solve for them, and the wide range of creative strategies that they can utilise to do so. When relevant, nostalgia or heritage can then be leveraged within the creative execution. If you want another recent example of this, the work that Co-op (together with VCCP) are putting out at the moment is a great example of this.
4. Cadbury’s brand values are generosity and kindness. How do you ensure these core values are kept at the forefront of your marketing and communications plan?
As a Cadbury marketing team, we are laser focused on this. There was a brilliant session at Cannes 2023 where Sukesh Nayak, Mie-Leng Wong and Darren Bailes unpacked how and why Cadbury’s focus on generosity has worked. Whilst many will hold up Gorilla as the most iconic Cadbury ad that helped to modernise the brand, its focus on joy did not deliver a clear consumer hook that strengthened brand love or brand loyalty. Joy was also not ownable to Cadbury and competitors could easily compete for consumers attention.
The Cadbury story is one built upon principles of generosity. John Cadbury and his sons Richard & George put employee wellbeing so high on their list of priorities they ended up building a community for their employees. This was backed up with education, health care, bank holidays and opportunities for female workers. This generous spirit also inspired their products – one glass of milk simply isn’t enough for their consumers. Going back to these fundamental principles is 100% ownable to Cadbury, all we needed to do was remind our consumers.
From 2017 to 2023, Cadbury saw a global increase of over $1.4bn in revenue and over 40 million new customers. Our equity scores have strengthened and we won the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix in 2022.
In simpler terms, we keep Generosity at the forefront because it’s what Cadbury was built on, it’s what consumers should expect from us and because it works.
5. What has been your biggest challenge in your marketing career and what advice would you share with someone going through something similar?
Perhaps its unsurprising but I would have to say imposter syndrome. I didn’t study marketing, I had a history degree, 3 years of sales and 1 local football activation under my belt before joining the 200 years campaign team. Within 4 days of starting I was in the room with creative directors & marketing directors and being asked for my opinion. I felt like every time I spoke I was at risk of letting the team down or losing my place.
There are two pieces of advice that I would say were most influential.
- Find your foundation. I was offered the role on the 200 years campaign by our Senior Marketing Director Elise Burditt. From my perspective, she was the one that I was most accountable to and was best placed to help me rationalise my expectations. She helped me to understand that potential was just as important as performance. As a Junior Brand Manager I had licence to challenge and to probe without constraint. We worked to break down the role so I could be clear on what I was seeking to develop, where I opportunities to draw upon the experience of others and where I had opportunities to lead.
- Strong opinions held lightly. This is one of the phrases I have said most regularly to myself since joining the 200 years team. Pretty much every creative session on 200 years involved senior stakeholders and I would often be nervous about saying an opinion; I am a bit of a perfectionist and the risk of getting something wrong in front of such esteemed company was terrifying. However, this mantra really helped. In essence it encouraged me to look at the evidence, form a point and communicate it with full confidence, yet not to define myself by whether it was agreed with or not. My role was not to win the argument but to contribute to it and make the final result better.
6. Since joining Cadbury, which has been your favourite ad to create and why?
Yours for 200 Years – OOH & Digital
Objective – celebrate Britain’s relationship with Cadbury. Again, put our consumers at the heart.
We mobilised the nation through our database and our internal employees’ networks to search for images of people with Cadbury products throughout history. We were hoping we might receive at least a few hundred with which we could choose from, but ultimately we received over 3000. It was fascinating sifting through such a diverse library of images to choose a range that brought to life the nation’s relationship with Cadbury.
These were then transformed into a digital and OOH campaign which celebrated these very relationships.
The impact was compelling and really brought to life how Cadbury belonged to the nation, however, it was the process that I found even more satisfying. It truly felt like we were tapping into a community of people that really cared about Cadbury and were proud that it existed. This was gratifying but also relayed a sense of responsibility to steer the brand through this period and set it up for success over the next 200 years.
It was a great reminder that our job as marketeers isn’t really about awards or grabbing headlines, it’s about delivering for every person that touches Cadbury, from our consumers to our factory workers. It’s a responsibility we should and do take seriously.
7. Where can our audience follow and engage with you on social media?
