Within this blog I think I’ve got out of the habit of writing short posts apropos of nothing, so here’s an attempt to get back into the habit.
Something that’s intrigued me over the last few years, perusing the confectionary aisles at newsagents and supermarkets, is the apparent proliferation of the range of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk-branded chocolate bars. Looking through the Cadbury’s Dairy Milk website here I can see:
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut
- Cadbury Dairy Milk
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Mint
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Oreo
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Daim
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Marvellous Creations Jelly Popping Chocolate Candy Bar
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Wholenut
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Salted Caramel
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruitier and Nuttier
- Cadbury Dairy Milk &more Caramel Nut Crunch
- Cadbury Dairy Milk &more Nutty Praline Crisp
- Cadbury Dairy Milk Crunchie Bits
What intrigues me about this is that, from a marketing perspective, the majority of these chocolate bars are marketed as:
Cadbury Dairy Milk, plus something extra!
But at the same time, the weights of the bars all seem to be identical, along with the price: if the standard Dairy Milk bar were 25g, for example, I don’t think the Cadbury Dairy Milk Crunchie Bits is 30g: the 25g of the standard Dairy Milk bar, plus another 5g of crunchie bits. So, what the other lines of bars offer is actually something like:
Cadbury Dairy Milk, minus some Cadbury Dairy Milk, plus an equal amount of something extra!
I.e. it’s really a substitution, which involves both subtraction and addition.
So, is a substitution a good thing or a bad thing from the perspective of the customer? From a purely economic perspective, I guess the answer depends - so long as the price of the good isn’t changed - on whether what’s taken away as part of the substitution is worth more or less than what it’s replaced by.
Now, I can’t be bothered trying to work out the materials costs of what the subtracted chocolate is being replaced with, but according to the website tradingeconomics.com, here’s how the trade price of cocoa has changed over the last decade:
So, almost regardless of what’s been added to the chocolate bars, it seems likely that it costs Cadbury’s less than the chocolate that’s been taken away from the bars!
In the marketing psychology book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense, advertising guru Rory Sutherland makes the distinction between what’s logical, and what’s psycho-logical. Of course, logically, it doesn’t make sense to conflate subtraction with addition. But psycho-logically, for Cadbury Dairy Milk, it seems to make perfect sense!