Making That Cadbury’s Gorilla Advert: Marketing Wisdom from Phil Rumbol, ex Marketing Director at InBev

0:16Welcome to Curious Customer, the consumer podcast. This show is for anyone curious about the world of consumer. From insights, trends, companies, brands and design, we'll uncover the hidden stories from the people at the forefront of consumer industry. industries. The show has a wide range of guests from marketing leaders to startup founders. So whether you're in the world of brand building or the startup ecosystem or simply curious about the world around us, then this podcast is for you. My name is Matt. I hope you enjoy the show. Phil, firstly, a massive thanks for joining today. Really appreciate your time.

0:51I'll just do the embarrassing bit briefly now. So your background is you've got a long, illustrious career in brand building back at InBev, where you won awards for the Stella Artois reassuringly expensive campaigns. And then you moved to Cadbury, where you created what I think is one of the most iconic TV adverts of our time, the Cadbury's guerrilla adverts, with the guerrilla on the drums to the Phil Collins in the air tonight. And then you moved to found your own agency. And now you're a non-exec director of various companies and the chairman of the Marketing Academy. So you know an awful lot about brands.

1:29And maybe just to kick us off, I'd love to ask, what's one truth about branding that most companies are getting wrong today? I think it's that a brand lives in the mind of consumers, not in the minds of people running the brand or the company. So lots of people think that you write a positioning statement or you write some nice PowerPoint slides that that's the positioning, that's what the brand stands for. When in reality, consumers decide how a brand is ultimately positioned based on what they think and i think a lot of people lose sight of that they get wrapped up in their own stories rather than saying well actually what what does this brand really mean to real people in the real world yeah great okay well let's um let's talk about some of those examples of when you've put that into practice and i think you're clearly bold in your choices and a kind of abstract guerrilla advert that required sort of immense bravery back in the time.

2:25Can you talk us through the process there? Yeah, it's an interesting one because whenever people talk about that ad, they always talk about it as very sort of left field and just something quite different. And actually there was a lot of logic that underpinned that ad and why we did it. So I think firstly was some beliefs about marketing and central amongst those was that people think that consumers behave entirely rationally when the reality is they don't. Most people are as affected by feelings and emotions as they are about cold, hard logic. And I always think the best example of this is, you know, when you buy a house, the biggest purchase you ever make, most people will have a gut feeling about it first, and then they'll think about it rationally afterwards.

3:11So what we were trying to do with the cabriad was to tap into people's emotions and their feelings and think about how we could build affinity towards the Cadbury brand. And that was important because we had effectively lost a generation of consumers. So in 2007, anyone over the age of 40 thought that Cadbury chocolate was the best and anyone under the age of 40 was less sure. So we had a sort of relevance and affinity challenge. And so what we set out to do was to recover that lost generation, if you like. Bear in mind, this was in 2007 at a time when it was the very early days of social media.

3:51So the likes of YouTube and Facebook were around 18 months old, and more and more content was being viewed on smartphones. And so we deliberately set out to create something that was engaging in that new emerging world. It would be something that people would want to talk about and would want to share. So what we were looking to do was to activate a product truth of Cadbury chocolate, which is the fact that it's made with a glass and a half of liquid milk rather than powdered milk. But what we didn't want to do was the sort of advertising equivalent of stopping someone on the street and saying, did you know that Cadbury chocolate is made with a glass and a half of milk?

4:30That would be too rational. And also, you know, remembering it's chocolate. chocolate is a very emotional thing so we wanted to land that message by connecting with people's emotions and the way that we chose to do that was to link that product truth of a glass and a half of milk in every bar to the the brand or the company ethos and you know in many respects Cadbury was one of the original purpose-driven companies one of the Cadbury brothers very early on had a phrase which was doing good is good for business and they really live that spirit and that sort of generosity of spirit so whether it was building a factory in the countryside away from the slums or providing accommodation or health care they had that generosity of spirit and similarly there's a truth in that for all of us that we've been brought up giving and receiving Cadbury chocolate at Christmas Easter and birthdays and you know as I said it's that in the product itself is not just a glass, but it's a glass and a half.

5:29So that generosity was what we were really looking to associate the brand with. And in many respects, the big unlock for the approach that we took was, you know, there's a saying that's, don't tell people you're funny, tell them a joke. So we didn't want to tell people that we were generous. We wanted to actually be generous to give them something, you know, to give them moments that would put a smile on their face or make them feel good. And so in essence, the brief for the Guerrilla ad was, I want an ad that's as enjoyable to consume as a bar of Cadbury chocolate. Yeah, I'd love to hear a bit more about how you get to the playfulness that comes through in the advert.

6:05But before that, just your point around there was a generation lost, which you were trying to re-engage with. How did you understand that they felt the same emotion, that a plus 40 customer of yours, which you didn't want to alienate, would also find that advert, which was presumably geared towards that slightly younger demographic. And how would they both have the same sort of emotional response and both become or continue to be customers? It was something we were definitely aware of. And I suppose at the heart of it was this sense that whether you're someone who's seven years old or 70 years old, there's an element of Cadbury being Willy Wonka.

6:41It taps into that sort of inner child in all of us. So we felt that if we did it in the right way, it wouldn't matter what age someone was, they could relate to the emotion or the feeling that we were conveying. How did you understand that the Cadbury's customer really wanted to feel that playfulness? Well, you know, ultimately it's the bar of chocolate. And I totally get your point that you wanted the communications to be as fun and exciting as eating a bar of chocolate. But how did you sort of more deeply understand that emotion before you put all the time and energy and cost into creating that advert?

7:15I think it was sort of based on two things, really. One was some science that says that when you eat chocolate, a good chocolate, it releases endorphins and serotonin and other things that that does make you feel good so it was rooted in a truth that that's the feeling that people have when they eat Cadbury chocolate and then the other is the meaning of the brand was as much in consumers minds as it was on pieces of paper in Cadbury and that meaning was based on a sort of deep well of emotion that people associated with Cadbury that everyone remembers being given it as a child they remember giving it to their kids they remember buying it for themselves.

7:54So there was a truth around how it makes you feel and this sense that Cadbury is this somewhat magical, slightly wonker-esque company. And that was a truth that when we did our research, whether it's talking to consumers or experts, we realized that was the sort of foundational truth of the brand on which we based the campaign. So if we dive into the specifics there, so you have this magical brand, the Willy Wonka-esque, you have this sort of playfulness. How do you take that and end up with a gorilla playing the drums? Good question. So we gave the agency in question the brief that I said about, you know, an ad that's enjoyable to consume as a bar of Cadbury chocolate.

8:40And they came back with two things, really. One was a big overarching idea or vehicle. And then attached to that were a number of specific ways that you could execute that. So the vehicle was this idea that Cadbury should behave like a production company. So think Disney or Pixar or someone like that. And so they came up with this concept of glass and a half full productions. So this entity that were producers of joy, whether that's a bar of chocolate or making a film that just makes people feel a certain way. And so the idea was glass and a half full productions is a vehicle. And what we should do as Cadbury is produce bits of content that made people smile and gave them something.

9:26It wasn't about hard selling. It was about just rewarding them for their time and making them feel something. And within that idea, one of the first idea that they presented was the guerrilla. And so if you picture the scene in a meeting room, they've talked about this notion of glass and a half full productions. Someone then presses play on a CD player, shows you how long ago it was. the opening strains of Phil Collins open and the creative in question read a script which very faithfully described what ultimately became the final film. And so the judgment really was, was that something that would make people feel that way?

10:19I've been waiting for the storm out for all my life. Oh Lord, oh Lord.

10:32I've been waiting for the storm out for all my life. I remember when it was presented, myself and one of the team that worked with me, we sort of left the room and we were just looking at each other, just grinning, almost sort of going, are you thinking what I'm thinking? And, you know, they presented probably 20 different ideas. And we just said that gorilla thing. We've just got to do that. People have got to see that. Really? So it's from that very first session, the very first time they presented it? Absolutely. Didn't necessarily know fully why we felt that. It was very much coming from gut instinct.

11:08But there was just something about it that just felt it was, it tapped into that emotion. And it would be really striking and different. And we'd get people talking about it. How important is the song choice? I think in that particular execution, it's everything because, you know, it's all about that iconic drum break in that track. And so I don't think it would have worked in quite the same way. You know, if you think about the narrative arc of that film of he sat there waiting, he's been waiting for this moment all his life. And you as a viewer know where the track is going with that iconic drum break.

11:45and then it's that anticipation and then when it happens you share in just that unbridled joy that he has because he's so into that that song and playing that drum break it's the suspense of it all yeah yeah so you mentioned earlier that it was the advent of youtube and the popularity of beginning to share things online i mean how important was that when you were thinking about something that could have massive virality which is obviously what ended up happening but did you forecast for that? Definitely, it was by design. So we were conscious that it was 17, 18 years ago now, but we could even then see that the days of consumers passively sitting in front of their TV, watching whatever was served up to them by adverts that those days were slipping into the rearview mirror.

12:33So we set out to create something that would be organically viral. And the other reason for that was, without sounding too pompous about it, we felt that Cadbury was one of those brands that was as much part of culture as it was a product in the chocolate category. It's one of those what I call fabric brands that everybody knows and it's part of UK culture. So we just felt that we had more permission than most brands to do something that was as much about cutting into popular culture as it was selling bars of chocolate. Did you sort of consider what a downside could be? I mean, to me, it's not a particularly risky advert, but I guess if you're sat in that boardroom and there might be other folks around the table, you need to persuade, be it a CEO, a CFO, and you need to shift that thinking away from short-term sales activation and towards long-term brand building.

13:27And then all of a sudden, on top of that, you go, we've got this idea and it's a bit new and it's a bit different. I mean, how do you try and shift that thinking? Well, I think the first thing to say was it happened at a time when the company was very risk averse. So we would just come off a major product recall, may recall the salmonella incident that we had. And so that meant people were more risk averse than they would normally be. But what I said to people was the risky thing is doing nothing or just being a bit apologetic. apologetic. So what I said was, we should do this. And sometimes I think risk in marketing, you have to qualify that risk.

14:06But if I put it into context, the Cadbury UK marketing budget at that time was about 60 million. To make this ad cost half a million, and the media that you spent on it was 5 million in the first burst. So the worst thing that could happen is that that 5, five and a half million doesn't work and you go again but it just felt like that was a risk that was worth taking so it it was honestly one of the hardest things in my career to persuade internal stakeholders for that ad to be aired and it took a good six months from grinning at the script idea to then getting it on air it wasn't easy but yeah i think sometimes the risk around these things is overstated.

14:49You have to do something pretty bad to damage a brand. And I always think it's better to do something, try something and learn from it rather than procrastinate and spend weeks or months not doing anything. So what's your advice today to the startup CMO who's trying to persuade their CEO to invest into brand and maybe something like a TV advert? What's your advice? So I think one of the benefits of the whole marketing ecosystem we have these days, it's far easier to test and learn than it was back in 2007. So my advice would be to find a way to minimize the risk, whether that's being able to make a film that doesn't have to cost hundreds of thousands or millions, and then put that out in the real world somewhere where you can gauge people's reaction to it.

15:40And, you know, there's businesses I've been involved in and still involved in where that's what we've been doing is to not go all in straight away, but to have a hypothesis about how you can build the brand and grow the business and then progressively test that hypothesis in market before you put the full amount behind it. I sort of want to understand how you think through balancing trying to stay current and trying to stay relevant, but without losing authenticity. I actually think that what the industry as a whole has lost a bit is that recognition that you actually have to work to earn people's attention.

16:19There are too many businesses where they're a bit too wrapped up in themselves and their own belief in their product. And don't get me wrong, that's the good thing. But sometimes I think they need to work harder to actually engage people in their busy lives when they're bombarded with hundreds of different commercial messages every day. So yeah, I think there needs to be a greater emphasis on engagement. Going back to some of the reasoning behind the Cadbury's advert, I'm just thinking here, quite often a customer profile might begin to change or shift. And are there ways or tips or advice for startups how to think through or see the earlier signals as to when that might be happening and to take action sooner than they would have otherwise?

17:07The initial success is often based on the product or the service that they're providing. And usually for the successful ones, there's something innovative or different about it. And if you have a great product or service that offers something new and different that people will talk about and you get word of mouth around that, that's really good. But there comes a point where you get diminishing returns from that. So I think what you have to be looking for is signs that that momentum might be just running out of steam a bit. And the people that are most likely to come to the brand have already come and you need to project the brand further to more people and work harder to give the brand charisma so that they notice it and want to lean in to find out more about it.

17:55So I think some people can do that, they can just sense that, but you can do things like using brand tracking to understand the conversion funnel of awareness, consideration, trial and penetration in terms of how many people are buying it. And I think if you track that over time, once you sense awareness is starting to plateau, that's when I think you often need to think about more investment in building the brand beyond the merits of the product. Let's come back there on awareness and ROI. But I just want to talk quickly about brands today. You mentioned that they need to earn the right to that attention.

18:37If you were building a brand from scratch today, what are some of those first steps that you would do? so i think it starts with having a great product idea because you know the notion of brand and marketing all of that kind of stuff can only be as good as the product so that's the foundation but i think that's not enough i'm a great believer in the notion of charismatic brands brands that have charisma and so what i think you need to be thinking about is what is the uh the ethos or the spirit of of the company behind that product that people will feel some affinity towards that that they think yeah i like those people and and by the way it feels like people not a company so you're thinking about some of those beliefs and then that quite readily translates the next step into what i would call the the clothes a brand wears and how it talks and by that i mean the visual identity of the brand and and its tone of voice and again in both of those things i'd be looking to create a visual identity for the brand that is different, stands out.

19:41And the same with tone of voice where, yeah, it just doesn't feel like another corporate player in the same space selling another generic product. It feels like something that's got something different to offer with real people behind it who passionately believe in their product and the beliefs that led them to create that product or create that company. And when you mentioned turn of voice and building that brand identity, how much do you as a marketeer lean on your own intuition versus leaning on the customer's input? I personally, and this everyone will give you a different answer to this, I think that it should be driven by the marketeer or the entrepreneur.

20:21You shouldn't be asking consumers whether it should be red or blue or what you should be doing. It should, Back to one of the words you used earlier, it should have some authenticity. It should come from you. And I think in that sense, particularly with startup brands, where in many respects, if you're doing it well, what you're trying to do is lead consumers to a slightly different place in the market or to buy products for slightly different reasons. And I'm a big believer in this notion of brand leadership. Brands should lead people where they want them to go. And that's not to say you shouldn't listen to consumers and do research.

20:57But when it comes to creating that charisma around the brand, you should have your own instincts and back them. My summary of that is it feels like it has to come from within. So maybe this is a slightly controversial question, given you went off to start up your own agency. But for startup businesses, do you think they should be using agencies which are external or that they should be building that marketing muscle internally from day one? Generally speaking, I think for big ticket items, let's say, whether that's the design, packaging design, or if they're investing a significant amount in marketing, I think it's helpful to have agencies to help with that.

21:40because as the marketeer or brand owner, you're still the person that needs to say yay or nay to an idea. So you still use your instincts for that. But when you use an agency, what you can tap into are creatives, people that think differently. So if we take the Cadbury example, I don't think anyone at Cadbury would have ever themselves come up with the idea of a gorilla playing the drums. That's something that came from a creative who has skill and expertise in creativity and coming up with ideas. So yeah, generally speaking, I think it's helpful. But the key thing is, you know, the bit that people often misunderstand or don't appreciate is the role of a marketeer or a brand owner to exercise their creative judgment, to pick the right ideas that are being put in front of them, whether that's by an external agency or internal people.

22:32That I think is absolutely critical. And I think the successful charismatic brands, there's usually someone in that organization who is that, let's say, creative custodian, the person who has the judgment to pick the right ideas, the best ideas. Let's move on to one of those prickly topics, which is how do you measure ROI on brand building events? Great question. So I'm a big believer in using what's called econometrics to really quantify and empirically prove the impact that marketing investment has. And that comes from, I think, amongst other things, the fact that I did a maths degree and I sort of understand the theory of how mathematics can be used to model or explain many things.

23:21And so what econometrics does, or essentially what it is, it's about building a statistical model that explains why your sales go up and why they go down. And it takes all the different variables that might affect sales, whether that's seasonality, weather, availability, price, promotion, and things you might spend money on like advertising. and it's able to quantify how much each of those variables affects your sales. And importantly, it's able to do that over an extended period of time. And that's important because there's a huge body of evidence that shows that a lot of marketing investment has a short-term impact, but as importantly, if not more importantly, it has a long-term impact.

24:05And that sort of a ratio of one to three, so one quarter of the benefits you get in the short term, but the other three quarters you get over the following, let's say, two years. So what this modeling can do could enable you to isolate those impacts. And as a result of that, you can determine the return on investment from every dollar or pound you spend on marketing. And is it entirely backward looking or can you use metrics to forecast? You can. So it's backward looking in that it explains historical drivers of sales. But what it does effectively is to build a model that what you're really looking for is the best fit between the model and your actual sales.

24:49So I've been working with a business recently where we built a model that had what's called an R squared of 96%, which means perfect would be 100%, but 96 is pretty good. And so what that means is once you've got that model, you could say, what would happen if we increased our price by this much, spent an extra X million on media, what would happen to sales? So you can use it to model future sales based on those variables and how you might change them. How much data do you need to feed it to be highly accurate? you probably need a minimum of two years of data and the other thing about it is essentially what you're looking at is what statisticians would call time series so a particular variable over time and the more data points you've got the better so if you had two years of say of a particular variable on a weekly basis that would give you 104 data points for that for that variable which is a lot to go on.

25:47So it depends how many data points you have in the time series. But generally speaking, if we take FMCG or most consumer goods, I think you could build a model based on two years of data. And the other thing that I think, you know, since when I first started doing this 30 years ago, the computing power that's now available is so much greater such that you could literally throw a whole load of data into this, including some variables that you think, I'm not really sure whether that does affect sales or not, but you just throw it in the model and the computing power is such that it can deal with that.

26:24I may well have been living under a rock, but my perception is that marketers don't often talk about econometrics. Is that a fair statement? I think that is fair, yeah. And I remember seeing a stat probably about five years ago that only around 20 % of marketeers used econometrics, which I found staggering personally. You know, the way I've always viewed it is as a marketeer or a business leader, you have a responsibility ultimately to shareholders to spend their money well. And so being able to prove that ROI and use it to improve performance going forward is, I can't understand why you wouldn't do that.

27:05But you're right. It's something that not everyone does. fascinating one final question on econometrics is are there any startups or agencies out there that you think are doing fantastic things i mean if there are startup cmos or ceos listening are there any pointers for them in terms of actually getting going with econometrics i think the key thing is you've obviously got the science behind it people that build the models and then you want people that can explain in the boardroom if you like those findings and and those types of organizations are a bit rarer, but there are plenty of companies out there.

27:43Cool. Okay, Phil, look, thank you so much. I mentioned we are a consumer podcast, so I would love to ask if there is a brand or product that you'd love to shout out that you've got enjoyment from recently, then please do. Yeah, there's one brand in the food and drink space, which is historically where my roots have been that I think I really like what they're doing, which is Moju. M-O-J-U. I think they've got the idea of something that is food, but that has a functional benefit. And so I think they're great products. And also I think the way they marketed the brand, it feels very charismatic to me that it's the sort of thing that stands out.

28:24So I think both at a product level and a brand level, I think they're doing a great job. Brilliant. Well, that just leaves me to say a big thanks, Phil. It's been fantastic having you on. really appreciate your time no problem at all it's a pleasure and that's it folks thanks so much for listening as mentioned please do provide any feedback or ideas of future guests via the website curiouscustomer.co and please do click subscribe if you did like it because it really helps improve visibility in the algorithm and makes the podcast more discoverable amongst a sea of great content so that one click does really help my name's matt i hope you enjoyed the show Thank you.