Cadbury restores Caramel bar as a standalone brand

Cadbury’s Caramel is being relaunched as a standalone brand – a complete U-turn on the company’s master branding strategy. It follows the successful relaunch of Wispa.

The Caramel bar will be reintroduced early next year and will return to its distinctive yellow packaging. A dedicated advertising campaign is planned to raise awareness of the relaunch, although the Caramel bunny will not be returning to screens.

Cadbury moved the Caramel bar under the Dairy Milk umbrella brand in 2003 at the same time as it ditched the Wispa brand (MW May 8, 2003). The aim was to help Cadbury better support a number of variants with one brand campaign, and create a distinctive “purple patch” on shelves.

Cadbury marketing director Phil Rumbol is known to favour promoting individual brands instead of master branding, and is thought to have been keen to move away from such a strategy since joining in 2006.

One source says that the success of Wispa, which was reintroduced permanently earlier this year (MW April 10), has convinced Cadbury to completely scrap the Dairy Milk strategy, despite spending millions of pounds on the repositionings. It is thought Cadbury’s Caramel will sit alongside the Dairy Milk fruit variants – apricot crumble, and cranberry and granola – launched earlier this year to appeal to women (MW June 5).

Meanwhile, Cadbury is launching a range of chocolate-covered raisins, peanuts and crumbles in an attempt to make a major assault on the bite-size market (MW November 8).

It is understood the range, which will be available in hanging bags and single servings, will be launched under the Cadbury brand.

One source says it is a “major departure” for Cadbury because this is an area where it is “not as big as Mars”.