Green & Blacks VS Kraft

This article shows that Green & Blacks have realised the contradicting values held by their company and the US dominant food industry held by Kraft.

Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker.

Scharffen Berger is an artisan chocolate makers company owned by Artisan Confections Company (A subsidiary group of The Hershey Company). The story of the company is much more interesting and personal than many others and gives the brand a much more unique and romantic feel about it. The company are often considered the starting force for the boom of high quality premium chocolates in the United States. 

The story started with the physician and co-founder of Scharffen Berger, Robert Steinberg. In 1989 Steinberg was diagnosed with cancer and was told that he had a 50% chance of dying within 10 years of the diagnosis. Steinberg sold his doctors practice and started to explore some more interesting career choices for the remainder of his life. At some point Steinberg read through a 600 page book about chocolate and cooking at the suggestion of a friend which is what influenced him and interested him in the art of chocolate making.  

Steinberg travelled a lot to learn more and more about the process of chocolate making and visited a chocolate company in Lyon, France called Bernachon. He loved the company and sent them a letter asking if he could take part in an internship to learn more about the their methods in chocolate making. 

He was successful an Bernachon granted him a 2 week internship. 

After returning from France, Steinberg soon ran into his neighbour and former patient John Sharffenberger. Scharffenberger told Steinberg about how he was looking to sell his wine making business and winery and look to other business ventures. During the conversation Steinberg offered Scharffenberger a piece of chocolate that he acquired at his internship. 

"Robert had this chunk of chocolate in his pocket that I think he'd been carrying for months. But it tasted better than anything I'd ever had," 

This event made Scarffenberger and Steinberg partner up and start creating chocolate. Their first experiments worked with using very basic home kitchen instruments and making the chocolate in Steinberg's own home. They used the name Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker because Scharffenberger's own wine business already had a relatively well known name in the surrounding area and gave the company a head start. 

In 1997 the pari made their first batch of chocolate in a factory in San Francisco. In just 4 years the company had already moved to a larger factory in California. 

Scarffen Berger were one of the first companies to really appreciate the premium chocolate production and performed every step of the creating including actually roasting the beans themselves. They were the first american chocolate company to ever put the % of cocoa solids on the packaging of the bar, a trait which has been since copied and become the standard for premium chocolate bars as it gives the suggestion of higher quality.  

On July 25th 2005 the company announced that they were to be bought out by the Hershey Company for double the annual profit of the company (Approximately $20 million). In the same year Hershey bought another similar premium chocolate brand and formed the Artisan Confections company which has since grown to incorporate more chocolatiers.

Steinberg died as a result of his diagnosed Lymphoma on September 27th 2008 aged 61. He survived for nearly double his originally predicted life expectancy.

Currently Scharffen Berger produce a number of different chocolate based products, the most renowned probably being the chocolate bars. They come in 1 or 3 ounce bars and cover around 8 different flavours.

 

 

The Chocolate Society

The chocolate society is a UK based manufacturer, retailer and community about all things chocolate based. They launched in 1991 and have a lot of information about chocolate as well as direct retail of chocolate from Mast Brothers, Valrhona and their own brand of chocolate called "Hokey Pokey".

Mast Brothers

The Mast Brothers are a pair of sibling chocolatiers from Brooklyn in New York. They are a relatively new chocolate production company and focus as much on design as they do about the taste of their chocolate, producing some of the nicest chocolate bar packaging I have seen. Their website doesn't explain much about them or how the company started and nor does any other source that I have found, although everyone seems to agree that the Mast Brothers have a significant amount of quality to their products.

Prestat

Prestat are one of the oldest chocolatiers in the world, their company being founded in 1902. With such a long heritage, Prestat have gained a really impressive name for themselves with a focus on high quality produced chocolate. As a UK chocolatier brand, Prestat are definitely a large competition to companies like Green & Blacks and are for sale at a relatively average price for premium chocolate; About £2 per bar (£8 for 4 usually).

In 2007 (unusually for Prestat), they released a series of new chocolate bars created to preserve and refine the antioxidents in cocoa and create a healthier kind of chocolate. These are called Choxi+ and show a much more modern level of design in terms of packaging, helping keep the brand up to date and introduce some incentive for existing and new customers to buy from them.

On top of all this, Prestat have the privilege of owning two Royal Warrants (One from the Queen, and one from the Queen Mother) which allow them to publicly announce that they are royally endorsed. 

Tcho

Tcho is a chocolate production company from San Francisco that started in 2007 and have an obsessive love for development of great dark chocolate as well as a keen eye for design, having some of the best packaging/website combination that I have seen from a premium chocolate bar. Tcho move away from the classic premium showy style and rely on a much simpler approach to design to communicate their product.
This is a result of the CEO and president being the co-founders of Wired magazine.

Tcho have 4 distinctive separate flavours that they market in different ways, including bar format, gift boxes and even a "Tcho-a-day" where small samples of the chocolates are in 30/ 60/ 90 day tubs with the idea that one a day is healthy and contributes to a consumer's lifestyle.

Tcho are not really a retail brand but are more exclusive even than the exclusive premium chocolates mentioned so far, supported by their $11 price on a pack of 2 chocolate bars. They are relatively unknown but are still pretty much a start up company so will probably continue to grow and become more popular in time. 

Amano

Amano is an artisan chocolate manufacturer from Utah in the US. They work specifically with hand crafting chocolate for personal, home and wholesale use. Artisan stand out as one of the top premium chocolate brands in the world, having gained a reputable quality of chocolate and a prestigious name through multiple award winning since developing in 2006.
The brand have won several awards from the US and the UK including the London Academy of Chocolate.

The longevity of the brand doesn't beat Green & Blacks but their quick rise to interest in the recent years makes them a strong competitor for Green & Blacks. In terms of the way the branding works currently, I honestly don't think that Amano stand up to Green & Blacks at all, I think mainly because the colours across the range sort of jar against each other.

Lindt

Lindt are probably one of Green & Black's biggest competitors. They have a selection of chocolte bars called "Lindt Excellence" which actually even look quite similar to the Green & Blacks organic range of bars.

On top of that, they have 14 varieties of Lindt Excellence chocolate bars which is the exact same number as Green & Blacks had until the introduction of their most recent Caramel bar. Even the types of chocolate flavour are very similar across the brands. 

One major difference is that Lindt have gone for a 90% chocolate and even taken it to a 99% Cocoa chocolate which is the highest percentage I have found so far. Not only is it 99% but it is also actually encouraged for eating plain, not cooking into food as you might assume such a high percentage would be. In fact it actually comes with instructions on how to eat it properly on the packaging and some graphs showing how flavour and intensity change over time.

Fair trade

Green & Blacks is well known for being the first company in the UK to receive fair trade certification in 2001. Fair trade is a social and ethical movement designed to make sure that farmers and workers in developing third world countries get a reasonable share of money produced from the sale of their hard work; a concept which has been under much debate for decades and was practically unheard of in the past.
In effect, fair trade attempts to put an end to exploitation in agriculture and outsourced clothing workshops around the world.

Green & Blacks have worked hard to achieve their deserved recognition of fair trading and it gives them another positive attribute and reinforces their good brand name.

Green & Blacks - The Products

As I said earlier green & Blacks are most well known for their chocolate bars because this is how the company started and this is their main focus. As well as expanding the range of chocolate bars they have also changed to other products and even expanded outside of the edible chocolate to produce some other products.

Chocolate Bars:

The chocolate bars started with the 70% cocoa "Dark" bar which was the first bar they ever created and was done so in 1991. It moved on from there to create the Maya Gold Chocolate bar and then the other recipes carried on from there. Currently Green & Blacks have 15 different types of chocolate bar from milk chocolate to the darkest 85% cocoa content chocolate.

The chocolates are pretty much split into 3 categories: Light, Medium and Dark (top to bottom).
These categories could work well to design some branding around for the promotional campaign.

As well as chocolate bars, Green & Blacks also produce some other products which are much less well known. They have items like these gift boxes available for sale as well as bars.

They also sell chocolate made specifically for cooking and hot chocolate made with the same cocoa as the bars, as well as a 'nutella'-like chocolate hazelnut spread. They sell ice cream, biscuits and also special edition easter chocolates. 

Green & Blacks - The Company

This research will go into detail about the company in terms of history and what they have to offer which should open up some doors for ideas further than Will and I have already thought through.

About the company:

Green and Blacks are primarily known as a chocolate bar producing company. The bars are seen as being pretty 'premium' as a brand, mostly because of their high quality packaging and their price, which is much higher than most chocolate bars in the country. It is also well known for being an ecologically friendly brand in terms of quality and well sourced ingredients and for dealing properly with the fairtrade organisation.

History

Green & Blacks started in 1991 when co founder Josephine Fairley found a bar of chocolate on her husband Craig's desk. The chocolate was a sample of dark 70% chocolate made from organic Cocoa beans. She tried the chocolate and loved it, deciding that others would appreciate the intensity of the chocolate that was otherwise very rare in the UK. It was this that started Jo and Craig to make their first chocolate bar with the 70% cocoa level which made Green & Blacks so popular.

The next type of chocolate bar came in 1994 when Jo and Craig went on a holiday to Belize where they met a group of Mayan farmer who owned cocoa trees and sold their produce to a large chocolate company which left the farmers with no market. The couple decided to buy the cocoa from the farmers at a fair price and used it to make the Maya Gold chocolate bar which still exists now. Because of the fair price and treatment of the farmers, Green & Blacks was awarded with the UK's first Fairtrade mark.

The rest of the products and development of the company came from expanding and growing the company successfully and a lot of loyal customers. Since the company was started in 1991, this year is the 20th anniversary of Green & Blacks which could be used in the solution to the problem.

In 2005, Green & Blacks was bought out with an 80% share by Cadbury Schweppes. Many thought this was a stumbling point of the ethically solid and well reputed company as at the time of association with Schweppes (The collaboration has since dissolved), they were well known for producing a number of unhealthy and relatively unethically sound soft drinks and chocolate bars. These worries were mostly unfounded as Craig stayed on as a top decision maker and the company realistically just expanded more and from what i can tell kept the same high quality and attention to detail.

In 2010, Cadbury was bought by Kraft Foods, the biggest confectionary, food and beverage corporation in the world. This means that Green and Blacks is now owned by them as well which could potentially have some serous ramifications in the future regarding the loyal customers who have known since starting as a small independent company and have now developed into a huge global organisation.

Green & Blacks - The Brief

The YCN brief that Will and I have chosen is the Green & Blacks brief.


The Brief:

The brief effectively calls for a new marketing campaign to be developed and suggests that this will include at least a partial rebranding of the chocolate bars to fit with the campaign.

The brief calls to use the marketing campaign to 'recreate the buzz' of Green and Blacks. It also suggests that getting customers to taste test the product is the most successful way to get new customers hooked ' on the chocolate; Apparently taste alone is enough to secure most people.

Considerations:

The brief says that a tagline is not necessary but that they want an 'infectious brand idea'. It makes a point to focus on marketing communications, new products and various distribution channels.
It specifically references the Cadbury 'Glass and Half' campaign and the Dove 'Campaign for Real Beauty' as marketing examples that have an 'infectious idea'

The brand may only originally connect with a few select people but should spread through word of mouth.

Audience:

They want to broaden the appeal of Green & Blacks but also keep it a premium brand and not have it dumbed down. It wants to focus still on adults but to lower the target audience to include the youngest grade of adults. After all, the chocolate is expensive and cant really be afforded by children. "Our consumers are environmentally friendly but it's not their priority".

Tone of Voice:

Aimed at adults and intelligent use of language. Wittiness encouraged if possible but not to an extent that anyone feels alienated or the brand becomes pompous. Be creative with content.

Media considerations:

Any media is encouraged to be used if it can work appropriately with the concept of the new marketing campaign. It calls to think about different environments and spaces that the campaign can exist in. It wants the idea to be as creative and original and relevant as possible.

Deliverables will be informed by idea development and final resolutions.

Summary:

Green & Blacks need a new campaign to encourage new customers to the brand. This means that they must need more income through sales and have decided that they need to broaden the scope of the niche, premium audience to incorporate a larger age group and gain more sales. In doing so they still want to keep their high-end kind of appeal and yet don't want to alienate anyone which are almost contradictory statements. They want to gain more loyal customers by rebranding and expanding the audience but they also want to keep the same audience. Basically I think the company want to make more sales but keep the exact same clientele, though I doubt that both can be achieved so I will work to focus on foremost gaining a wider audience.

We need to create a big campaign that has branding and identity which can be used across a whole range of different media and uses for the campaign to work. This could include coming up with new ideas for products or using the existing products. The campaign above everything needs to be bold and work across a range of media.

As a first step to dealing with the brief, we need to do some research into the brand, problem and context of the brief.