Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft - 200 Years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry

"We were just making the point with this book that branding goes back into the mists of antiquity, but what we would recognise as contemporary branding also goes back further than I’d imagined before I looked into it. The concept that you can take an ordinary product and associate it with a bigger idea isn’t something that comes from the 1980s or the 1960s. It goes back to Victorian times, and my favourite example is Cadbury. There’s a wonderful book about the brand story of Cadbury, called Chocolate Wars , by Deborah Cadbury, who’s a descendant. The Cadburys were Quakers and the original Cadbury—John—wanted to sell cocoa as an alternative to alcoholic drinks. His son, George, was worried because cocoa has a lot of fat in it, which you have to get rid of, and the way that tended to happen was by putting unpleasant additives in it, like sawdust. So George went to the Netherlands and came across a machine that was like a centrifuge. You would whizz the cocoa around, the fats would go to the edge, and you’d end up with really pure cocoa. He brought that back to Britain. He wanted to make money, but he wanted to make it by having a better product. “Companies come and go but brands, which are these fictions, are bigger than the products and bigger than the company, and outlast them.” Then, without, I think, ever using the word brand, he created a brand and publicised—to use John Berger’s word—not just the cocoa but its purity. He used images. He used paintings of children to express innocence and ‘absolutely pure’ was the slogan. He even started a campaign for pure food. These are all things that you associate with contemporary branding, but he was doing it before World War I. I’m also very interested in the Quaker approach to business. We were talking about ethics. The Quakers—by instinct—had an ethical view of business. It was important to provide something good for the customers but also to look after your employees. They were just as important as your shareholders were. That’s once again becoming a mainstream view about business—after decades in which the only person who mattered was the shareholder. The Quakers were doing it 100 or more years ago. Cadbury famously built a whole village (Bournville) for his workers, and had nice, well-lit factories. He gave people paid holidays, built schools, and so on—because he knew that if he did that the workers would work better and he would make more money. It’s not philanthropy at all. It’s a more rounded view of business that says that business works when all of the people affected by it benefit from it. For me, it is much more that than a mechanism for exploiting the masses and making rich people even richer. It’s bigger and more interesting than that—or should be. They’re fighting against the big Swiss chocolate companies, and then later on with Hershey in America. It still does—and the longevity of brands is interesting. Brands generally live longer than the companies that start them. A business can die, but the brand comes back again. Another example is Polaroid , which has returned making a whole range of consumer electronics. The brand is still working, even though the original Polaroid company is long dead. Companies come and go but brands, which are these fictions, are bigger than the products and bigger than the company, and outlast them."