While candy company acquisitions may be outside the normal "celebrity" radar zone, the corporate battle for Cadbury between Kraft and the allegedly uninterested Hershey company makes for excellent corporate celebrity fodder!
Hershey needs to repackage itself away from its post-Industrial Revolution inertia and start adopting 21st Century branding strategies. Cadbury has some great product that could improve Hershey's product line offerings and geographic reach. What makes "celebrity" really needed in this corporate confection drama is the existence of the Hershey Trust and its control of the candy company.
Hershey's Board of Directors need to make a call to "Willy Wonka" or create some celebrity candy maker identity to get this deal done! Hershey product placement is weak. Even the news coverage about the candy sector and the Kraft/Cadbury deal is vapid.
Kraft may be on the street trying to raise additional equity to buy Cadbury, but Hershey should be using its internal talents to think about becoming a celebrity confectioner in the vein of Willy Wonka. Milton Hershey, himself, had many "celebrity" characteristics. His namesake company needs to resurrect some of that persona. Halloween is coming and this is the perfect opportunity!
I Wanna Be On® strongly advises Hershey to "Nestle crunch" the numbers and think about character candy campaigns that have direct ties to reality shows and social media enterprises. Nestle has the Willy Wonka Candy Brand. Hershey has the real Milton Hershey. Though nostalgic wrappers will not necessarily appeal to today's generation, a great movie about the life story of Milton Hershey could do wonders for the brand. What about a reality TV show set in Hershey Park or a cooking show for families who love to cook with Hershey-branded products? Should Hershey deploy this strategy now, the Cadbury deal may be superfluous. However, the Cadbury and Hershey stories together would provide enough entertainment product for multi-media platforms to generate sufficient revenue to finance the deal--think Oliver Twist meets Horatio Alger!
More importantly, Hershey really should start deploying some online video games for new product development where consumers could go and play around in a virtual candy factory and create new candy lines!
P.S. We are sending this out in honor of Milton S. Hershey who was an amazing philanthropist. His dedication and legacy for orphaned children warrant our free advice and hope others may benefit appropriately.
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