Cadbury is a brand with a very broad audience. Rooted in generosity, and having a ‘Glass and a half’ full attitude, its mission is to spread a little more kindness in the world. This year in social media, our objective was to create more authentic, organic content that resonates culturally with our audience and reaches new audiences on their terms.
In order to achieve our objective, we needed to immerse ourselves in culture, and stay on the lookout for opportunities for the brand to enact the generosity and positivity at its heart.
Additionally, Cadbury is a responsible, inclusive brand that aims to use its brand as a platform to advance representation. So another objective for this post was to create culturally relevant content that resonated authentically with the LGBTQ+ community and ultimately help to make the world a little more welcoming for minorities.
Drag queen Black Peppa, a contestant on season four of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, showcased a Cadbury inspired outfit in episode one, complete with a headpiece made entirely of our products. During their performance the headpiece fell to the ground and broke.
We saw this as an opportunity to enact some of our trademark Cadbury generosity, generate culturally relevant visibility in social media and also make a positive impact within the LGBTQ+ community and beyond.
We set about recreating the broken headpiece using real Cadbury products, gifting it to the artist and making some content to share on how we brought our replacement headpiece to life.
From the moment we saw the episode, we knew we had a unique opportunity on our hands. An up and coming drag artist uses our product to create a masterpiece on national television and then boom. The headpiece falls to the ground and smashes. We had to do something. We assembled a team to start working on a replacement within minutes of the episode airing. But this wouldn’t be just any replacement. We’d create the new headpiece with over 7 kilos of delicious Cadbury chocolate, and have it assembled by one of our finest chocolatiers, ready to be gifted to Black Peppa.
Our chocolatier worked on the project over the weekend and filmed the entire process. We took the footage, edited it into a fierce 30 second clip and sent it out into the world on Twitter and Instagram. The replies flooded in. Within minutes of going live we had thousands of fans, former contestants and celebrity drag queens retweeting, sharing the love and trying to get hold of Black Peppa as quickly as possible.
Within the hour we had made contact with Black Peppa and the post was gaining more and more traction within the LGBTQ+ community. We decided to go all in. We regrouped and set up a chocolate making experience for Black Peppa, and the creator of the original headpiece, Paul Cherry. Two weeks later we were back in our innovation lab creating another piece of content with the stars themselves. They made five different chocolate bars and we presented Black Peppa with the headpiece.
Our objective for this year was to create more authentic, organic content that resonates culturally with our audience and reaches new audiences on their terms. Within weeks of setting this objective, we created this post. It became Cadbury’s most successful organic post of all time, within hours of going live.
250K+ Organic Views
1M+ Organic Impressions
99.4% Positive Sentiment
But most importantly, we connected with the LGBTQ+ community in a completely authentic way, we were officially declared “high camp”, “iconic”, and “legendary” by thousands of fans. We started our new strategy with a bang, it could not have gone better.
