Cadbury

Translating your above-the-line strategy to pack copy isn’t always easy. That’s why Cadbury approached us to work on their Pascall brand in Australia and New Zealand. Their ad agency had drafted some ideas based on Pascall’s ‘lollies for grown-ups’ positioning, but what worked perfectly in a TV ad break just wouldn’t have worked on the supermarket shelf.

Nibbling market share

Pascall is a well established, extended family of traditional sweets – or lollies, as they’re known to south of the equator – like Marshmallows and Barley Sugar. The brand had been ticking along nicely until supermarket own labels started nibbling away at its market. This was Cadbury’s cue to liven things up.

A family of individuals

The Pascall family are sweets for grown-ups, the kinds we bought when we were kids. Treating yourself to a packet is like reading the Beano – one of the most innocent of guilty pleasures. Cadbury saw them as individual characters, each with their own personality (some stronger than others). Pretty much like any other family.

The idea was:

• add some wit
• develop the personality
• boost supermarket sales

Adult humour?

Cadbury gave the brief to the ad agency. But their team took ‘wit’ and ‘grown up’ to mean adult humour. The result was so shocking that it was quickly buried. Some of the copy was totally unsuitable to share a trolley with decent household grocery shopping.

Call the tone guys

That was when our phone rang. Cadbury call us ‘the tone guys’ – just the people to raise the tone of the Pascall writing to make it suitable for family reading. We took the 36 Pascall branded products and put a team of four writers on the task.

Tone of voice, straplines and pack copy

We came up with the tone of voice, and set about writing straplines and pack copy. Our plan was to use people with a sense of humour, get them to write good, strong copy and, if it turned out to be witty too, that would be an added bonus.

Cadbury liked it a lot and have invited us back to work on naming, brand positioning, more straplines, pack copy and whatever else they need. And we get to try out free sweets.

Pascall and the star device are Cadbury group trade marks used under licence