Marketing Essential & Management - Cadbury

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P1 Explain the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing function in Cadbury

Varied roles are played by the marketing function within Cadbury.

• Defining and managing the brand - One of the major roles is to carry out promotion of the Cadbury brand and also ensure that there is maintenance of positive brand image for the company. This helps to define the experience for the consumer as well as the partners that interact with the firm (Morhart and et.al., 2015).

• Conducting promotional activities - promotional activities are further carried out by the company so that the consumers can be lured towards the product and service offerings. In case of Cadbury this is done by use of television ads, banner designing, endorsing key people as brand ambassadorsuch as film actor Amitabh bacchan in India among others (Boelsen-Robinson, Backholer and Peeters, 2015).
• Creating content for the website - the marketing department at Cadbury has ensured that its website is well developed so that people are lured by the products (Choksi and et.al., 2016). The marketers thus keep the web content quite accurate and current.
• Social media management - Other than the website of Cadbury, the marketing department also makes sure that social media pages of the company are well managed and it also watches carefully as to what is being posted about the firm online.
• Serving as media liaison - A member of the marketing department from Cadbury also acts as a spokesperson for the company. His role is to provide guidance to media executives as to how the queries should be handled.
• Conducting market research – this is one of the key functions within marketing department of Cadbury as research helps to define the target markets and gain a know how about their needs. This helps the production department to work on its product offerings accordingly (Tuten and Solomon, 2017).
• Corporate functions – this involves for setting up and enforcing of brand standards, defining infrastructure for public relations, formulation of event strategies among other. All this function is performed by creation of a corporate marketing plan calendar so as to deliver the stipulated marketing objectives in the best possible manner.
• Keeping up with the competition – the marketing department of Cadbury also ensures that the company is able to keep up with the competitor strategies. This is done by carrying out the research on rival firms as to what products are being launched by them; what are their strength and weakness and how Cadbury can avoid the mistakes that have been committed by the rivals. It is also essential to know as to where Cadbury has placed itself in relation to its competitors being Lindt, Nestle, Godiva among others. This function thus helps the marketing managers to formulate the best possible strategy.
• Communicating with other departments – it is also a secondary marketing function within Cadbury where focus is given on creating a communication channel with other departments (Sinha and Sheth, 2017). This is done so as to familiarize the employees with the overall marketing ethics, philosophy and consumer relation activities to be performed by front office staff. It does this by carrying out workshops, training sessions with respect to consumer complaints and building up of overall brand awareness.

P2 Explain how roles and responsibilities of marketing relate to the wider organizational context in Cadbury

As discussed in the above section, one of the important functions of marketing is to create a communication channel with other departments. Same applies to Cadbury as well where the implementation of a marketing plan requires the help of other departments such as Hr., finance, production, consumer service among others (Bailey and Alexander, 2017). For example, the Hr. department plays the role of recruiting of employees who can work on varied marketing divisions of Cadbury as brand managers, social media experts, content writers, executives, and spokesperson among others (Boelsen-Robinson, Backholer and Peeters, 2015). The role of hr. here is to train the employees with respect to working of the company, its policies and procedures as well as ensuring that they receive the salary on a timely manner.

Then is the finance department of Cadbury which fixes a budget for the marketers so that marketing plan is set and implemented as per the finances available with the company. It is very crucial to have a good communication between these departments as Cadbury has focused on a lot of marketing and promotional activities. Hence the need is to ensure that its plans are under control (Jha, Saini and Kaur, 2017).

Next department is production and manufacturing which is involves creating chocolates, biscuits, ice-creams as per the needs and requirements of consumers. This will be done by working in close cooperation with the market research team that can guide the firm about taste and preferences of consumers as well the products that are being offered by the rival firms being Nestle, Godiva, Lindt among others.

Then is the logistic department that is involved in raw materials such as chocolate, coffee beans, milk etc. to make Cadbury products to production department as suggested by the market research team. The logistics team will also supply materials for the working of marketing department (Telang and Deshpande, 2016). These will be in form of computers, printers, papers, stationery in order to product banners, promotional advertisements among others.

The operations department of Cadbury is also closely related with the marketing department as the market research team guides the operational manager towards desired quality and texture specifications that has been asked by the consumers. The number of orders that has been generated through the marketing activities is then met by the operations department.

Then comes the consumer service department which provides data to the marketing department from the complaints filed by purchasers and talks made by the sales persons. This assists in increasing the chances of overall success to be attained by the company with respect to growth rate.

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P3 Compare the ways in which different organizations apply the marketing mix to the marketing planning process to achieve business objectives.

Cadbury utilizes extended marketing mix to attain the business objectives which can be compared with Lindt and is as follows;

• Product – the product range of Cadbury is quite vast and is spread over chocolates, beverages, desserts, ice-cream segment and biscuits. This is quite big in comparison to Lindt which focuses majorly on chocolates, sweets and seasonal confectioneries. The classification of product mix in case of Cadbury is basically as per the seasons and sales in various nations. There is a presence of certain standard products that are sold everywhere while some are just meant for festive occasions like Halloween and Christmas. For example, it launched Dairy Milk Snowman in vanilla; Cadbury tubes; Roses boxes etc. especially for Christmas (Christmas comes early with Cadbury, 2017). Similar such trend has also been adopted by Lindt for Christmas and Easter that includes hollow milk chocolate rabbit for Easter, reindeer and Santa chocolates for Christmas (Lindt, 2018). Still the product list of Cadbury is quite huge and it has given immense growth rate to Cadbury.
• Price – The products of Cadbury are priced as per the quality that is provided by them. For example, certain products like Bournville are highly priced while others like Éclairs, Five Star and Perk have been serving the low priced segments. On the other hand, Lindt has however been following premium pricing strategy as its prices are a lot more than competitors on account of product quality leadership that distinguishes the company from other players (Lynch and Dhesi, 2017). Nevertheless the strategy of Cadbury is such that it wants to reach all the people with different taste buds and also caters to the overall friendliness of the pocket. Other than this, the company can lay focus on adopting one more pricing strategy where the bulk purchasers will be required to pay less in comparison to the ones who are buying just one or two pieces of Cadbury products. This can help to bring a further increment in growth rate and sales revenue followed by increasing the overall return to the shareholders.

• Place – The products of Cadbury are available almost all around the globe on account of the presence of good distribution channel it has. This has ensured that its product reaches urban as well as rural areas which help to generate good sales figures and profitability. Lindt on the other hand has a presence in just over a 100 nations but still its supply chain management system is quite strong (Onikoyi, Awolusi and Ayodeji, 2015). The company has further kept its marketing and distribution centers outside Switzerland and expanded itself across UK and US. The company has also been catering to online orders since 1988 (The story of Lindt, 2018). The product availability is also widespread being airport, lounges, shopping malls as well as luxury stores. Cadbury however has a wide spread presence and can be easily in the local grocery market as well while the same may not apply to lindt in all nations such as India.
• Promotion – Both Cadbury as well as Lindt has been carrying out its promotional activities through TV ads, digital means, social media and also by offering discounts and offers in the festive seasons. However Cadbury is required to come out with innovative means of promotion such as done by Nestle in form of Maggi story (The magic ofMaggi, 2018). Similar such efforts can be taken by the company with dairy milk where people will get a chance share the ways in which the chocolate was consumed by them (Sinha and Sheth, 2017). Free chocolates can also be given to the consumers whenever any new product is launched by the company.
• People – the staff members of Cadbury are such that they are instilled with passion to work on chocolate and for the company. The company also ensures that its staff is professionally developed and provides them with many training courses as well.
• Process – Cadbury makes use of several products to product its chocolates so that special taste and texture can be rendered to it. There is also a usage of advanced technology so as to get in tune with the taste and preferences of consumers. There is further an involvement of highly sophisticated as well as computer controlled processes so as to get the best texture and taste. Similar such techniques are also used by lindt in chocolate manufacturing but the one invented by the company is conching process that has brought a huge revolution in the chocolate industry. There is also a huge difference in chocolate mixing process in both the firm so as to give it is a smooth taste. A study has found out that lindt chocolates gets the luxurious touch as it is mixed for 12 or more hours while Cadbury is mixed only for two or three hours (Metz, 2015). Both the companies also give similar emphasis on the packaging aspect of chocolates in such a manner that there is minimal environmental impact and increase in the overall shelf life as well.
• Physical evidence – Both Cadbury and Lindt have a well maintained website that provides a good amount of information about the products offered by the companies. The store outlet of Cadbury is also well managed and provides an ease of shopping to the consumers. Same holds true for lindt stores as well but they are less catchy in apperance as compared to Cadbury.

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