The Cadbury chocolate company has been experiencing a prolific social media backlash following the release of a chocolate bar designed to celebrate India’s Independence Day.
The release of the bar has prompted people to criticize the company for misjudging the release of the product in a variety of ways.
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The limited edition bar, called the ‘Unity Bar’ was released on 15th August initially only in India to mark the anniversary of India’s independence.
The occasion marked the 72nd anniversary since India gained independence from the United Kingdom.
The bar itself was designed to promote ‘Unity’ by including ‘dark, blended, milk and white chocolate’.
The bar was developed in conjunction with an advertising agency called Oglivy. On their website they described the bar as such:
“India is a diverse country, with people of different castes, creed, languages, regions, religions. Everyone living together, but not always with love. Cadbury Dairy Milk, which is loved by everyone, wanted to send a powerful message of unity. So we worked with the brand to create the Unity Bar: India’s first chocolate made of dark, blended, milk and white chocolate—all united in one bar.”
The bar was widely shared on social media by the brand; however, it received mixed reactions.
The public took to all forms of social media to articulate their opinions on the bar, with most of the reactions being that Cadbury had wildly missed the mark with the product.
Most of the tweets and comments came in various sarcastic forms of, “And that’s the story of how racism was ended”.
Another person commented, “Pack it up boys, we solved racism.”
With another tweeting, “It’s ok racism is over everyone as Cadbury has brought out a UNITY bar”.
Other’s voiced much more serious concerns with the bar.
Regardless of your opinion on the bar, its safe to say that the campaign did not go as smoothly as Cadbury had probably anticipated.
The backlash was in fact so prolific that Cadbury’s official twitter account released a statement to try and calm the twitter-verse.
Cadbury UK’s official twitter account took to replying to as many of the enraged comments as possible with this statement:
The bar itself managed to also anger people for the way in which it divided up the sections of different chocolate.
The fact that the white chocolate segments came at the top of the bar prompted a considerable amount of users to brand the bar as racist.
There were also those who didn’t really see the problem with the bar.
A lot of angry tweets eventually turned towards those who were angry about the bar, accusing them of overreacting.
One user commented, “Some places in the word, people are getting killed for being gay. In England, people complain about a chocolate bar. Ok then twitter. I read the moment. You can shush now.”
With another user even going so far as to say, “If you’ve got time to complain about the color of a chocolate bar, I hope you also have enough time to take a long walk off of a short pier.”
Unsurprisingly, in a conversation about chocolate there was also a healthy, or rather unhealthy, argument which was more focused upon which flavor of chocolate people preferred chocolate.
Now, I personally never got the hate for white chocolate, but the anger was real in the comments:
“No thanks… I hate white chocolate.”
“The unity comes from finding someone to eat the crappy chocolate you don’t like (for me, that’s the white chocolate, yech.)”
This is far from the first time that a company such as this has received negative backlash for a marketing campaign in recent times.
Only back in 2017, Pepsi were forced to take down a commercial in which Kendal Jenner offered a drink to a police officer during a protest. The advert was quickly condemned as being ‘tone-deaf’ and generally insensitive.
Similar to the Pepsi backlash, a lot of anger has been directed at Cadbury due to the fact that they had used a serious issue for what is essentially a marketing campaign. Who knows whether Cadbury will address the backlash more publicly. Either way, it is highly likely that a company will attempt a marketing strategy in this vein in the future only for it to backfire once again.
