The Impact Of Cadbury Influence Over The Community Marketing Essay

Cadbury is Australia’s largest chocolate producer with their first factory market built internationally in England since 1881. Large Corporation has the power to create social issues as a part of business strategy and it can build relationship between society and business (Ian 2005). Cadbury has been Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) seriously by improving people’s standard of living in many parts of Australia. CSR promotes successful, sustainable, educated and inclusive communities and it helps to improve a company’s business image (Neil 2004).

There are various stakeholders who play important roles in Cadbury for example; consumers provide feedbacks on current products and share new ideas on future products with the company. The stakeholders group who are directly involved in the company’s operation and future prospects includes Shareowners, Consumers, Customers, Suppliers, Employees and Society (Surinder 2010). There are also other stakeholders groups who contribute indirectly to the company. This essay analyses Cadbury’s social responsibility on groups of stakeholders who are directly involved with the company in term of the effects of its productions created to the society.

The main business objectives of Cadbury are profit maximisation , growth of shareholders and maximize shareholders value (Horne and James 2005). However, Cadbury also did many beneficial to the Australian community with their great amount of profit generated (Cadbury n.d). They allied with Toll in2Store helping the not-profit organization to organize and provide job opportunity for the disables in Australia (inSite 2010).

Apart from that, their product provides great respect and takes care of consumer’s religion for example, they enforced and justified their products as “Halal” even though the Muslims stands at minority of only 1.5% in the Australian society(Carabellese 2010). This also shows that Cadbury takes serious measure on people’s health by making quality products and consumers choice within their individual diet and lifestyle (Cadbury n.d.).

Cadbury also took on responsibility in children’s marketing initiative. They had ceased advertising during commercial break in children’s program and also reducing the sugar and salt level in their products (Berg 2010). Further, Cadbury educates children to protect the environment by distributing a booklet named “The Little Green Book”. This initiative enables children to recycle and learn about the effects of greenhouse and other environmental issue at home, school and during holiday (Planet Ark Environmental Foundation 1995).

The above initiatives illustrate that Cadbury is taking steps to improve standard of living of people living in Australia by taking into account the needs and wants of the society, creating awareness of greenhouse effect and educate the society from young. This builds up a strong and good relationship with the society. This also increase stakeholders’ image by providing the company effectiveness and sufficiency in the society. In addition, the company’s CSR will bring Cadbury Australia in a long run business which cost them a small portion of their cash while resulting to a Win and Win position between Cadbury and their consumers.

Likewise in India, the world’s second largest population, the people also share almost similar benefits that the Australian community are enjoying despite its lower standard of living. Cadbury has been in India for over 60 years, owning over 5 manufacturing facilities and 4 offices in India that provide many job opportunities for the Indians(Cadbury India n.d.). Further, Cadbury provides clean water supply in such a way that rainwater has been to be filtered for its chocolate production and also cleaning the water in India since the water in India is badly contaminated and carries all kinds of sickness and disease to Indian (Purple goes green 2007).

Cadbury has a well organized management of operating funds that work for capital efficiencies and tighter controls over capital expenditure in order to tighten the manufacturing and interest costs while taking care of its stakeholders. This has driven Cadbury to perform better and bring further benefits to its workers.

To further show its social responsibility, several sales campaigns have been carried out to push the goods to consumers. For instance in year 2000, the launch of new products such as milk treat, perk slims and chocobix that aim for better health and to fill customers’ need and improve stakeholders’ activity (Cadbury India Ltd. 2001). Social responsible investments often join forces with stakeholders to influence the positive societal change of environment to endow with urban life style and emphasis on education for the next generation as business leaders (Frieder 2002). This is to illustrate a relationship with the local community stakeholders has been built and form a social contract that shows concern to society health and wealth generation for shareholders.

All of the above are the macro view of people think of Cadbury generally since they had been supporting the society big time. However, in the micro point of view, some information are detrimental and will affect its reputation.

Ivory Coast produces over 43 per cent of the world’s cocoa and Ghana is also a huge producer. They discover that approximately over 100,000 child labours are in use to carry heavy loads and harvesting cocoa (Egan 2007). According to David Morley, the president and CEO of Save the Children Canada in Toronto, he said “the wonderful free hand of the market is not working here”. It means business is good but doing the business unethically in any form is bad for the business and society. These poor children are being tortured to walk three days before they could arrive at the cocoa farm to work for only a minimum wage in order to earn some money to support their families (The Canadian Press 2008). Children of the age of 12 to 16 are being sold into the slave labour to harvest cocoa bean under an extremely abusive and heartless condition. In UNICEF research, there are more than 200,000 children trafficked yearly in west and central Africa. The countries involved are Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire; Mali, Nigeria and Ghana where suppliers or receivers of children take place (Chanthavong 2002).

In Cadbury Nigeria, auditor had uncovered an overstatement upon meticulousness undertaken at prompting that Cadbury Schweppes in London has increased the stake of the company by 4%. This has an impact of £15 million to the Nigerian as impairment of goodwill in Cadbury Nigeria to the benefit of its own (Solanke 2007). It is said to be unfair to the company in Nigeria as it has unforeseen a loss of shares on the expense of the other’s benefit. Therefore, the larger the company it is, the higher the impact it carries affecting the community.

Cadbury faces problem in allocating its resources and funds since its business is so huge. This is because Cadbury is scattered internationally whereby the stakeholders are not able to support all of them in the same time. As a result, Cadbury takes advantages of importing and exporting their goods without giving concern. It develops the better part of the world depending on country’s economy to maximise their profit margins which is also Cadbury’s main goal as per written in the beginning. It simply does not care much about the outcome of the poor country and they continue using them as part of assets for main reason. The company can deal with such imbalance of social contract because the people in the not so well developed countries are not highly educated since they are poor but still have to earn a living to support their family.

In conclusion, Cadbury is a well known chocolate producer around the world. It supplies itsr famous chocolate and candy to over 180 countries accordingly to customer’s taste and preference. It uses top quality raw materials to produce their product and to overcome poor customer’s feedback about problems of their product effectively. It benefits the customers, stakeholders as well as the company since the company can improve its weaknesses while customers and stakeholders are able to enjoy improved products. Even though they fulfil all the customers’ and stakeholders’ needs, in the dark side, it is taking advantage of poverty countries to enjoy lower cost of production by hiring child labour and slave to pursue its harvesting, manufacturing, operation processes. Further, education is not provided to the children despite working extremely hard and in dangerous condition while the company is selfishly caring for its own goals. Cadbury incurred a lot of sales which are hidden from customers and stakeholders since it has worldwide production. Its raw materials cost is insignificant but they are purchased in bulk as in billions of dollars annually. However, its corporate social responsibility reveals only in millions of dollars. To sum up, “with great power comes great responsibility” by Stan Lee, is a good quote for this because it is similar in the case above and it reflect what Cadbury is currently doing to the society.

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