Cadbury and Oreo: A 5-Star Collab

We live in an era of collaboration. Mergers, mash-ups and multiverses sit at the heart of media, influencers and content creators love to excite fans with collabs, and naturally this all extends to our shopping baskets. A lot of the most popular innovations are brand collaborations, and a savvy modern marketer is always on the lookout for the right ones.

Brand collabs are an area where Test Your Innovation can excel. It will spot a great idea, like this week’s Innovation Of The Week, Cadbury’s Delights combination with Oreo cookies. But it’s also an excellent way to quickly pick up on collaborations that don’t make sense to consumers at a basic level, by being emotionally neutral, too difficult to grasp, or just not feeling like a great idea. The Test Your Innovation combo of personal response and market-oriented share-buying leaves nowhere to hide for collabs that don’t come off.

Fortunately, this week we’re talking about a collaboration that really does work. Cadbury Delights x Oreo scored an exceptional 5.3-Stars on Test Your Innovation, our core measure that predicts the in-market success of new products. It’s a permanent addition to Cadbury’s successful lower-calorie Delights range, which markets itself as little treats that don’t skimp on indulgence or taste. The two Mondelez brands feel like a natural fit, with Cadbury’s core platform of everyday joy a great match for Oreo’s emphasis on playfulness.

There’s deeper insight into that playfulness, and Oreo’s approach to innovation in general, in an Uncensored CMO episode where Jon Evans and Oreo CMO Eugenia Zalis chat about Oreo’s love of collaborations and how the cookie brand approaches them. Oreo has a great reputation for collabs among marketers and shoppers alike, with team-ups across categories and even media: Zalis talks about a Coca-Cola collaboration and one with superstar Post Malone.

The brand knows its fans want to have fun and picks out collaborations with that in mind, making the distinction between ‘core’ and ‘extension’ more fluid. The strategic value of a collaboration might simply be in how much the brand’s fans love it!

The Cadbury Delights bar is a permanent range addition, not a seasonal novelty, but fun is still at the heart of the product offer – customers see Oreo as adding to the idea of low-calorie high-flavour indulgence, with a 55% “Happiness” emotional response way above the 36% country average.

Stepping away from emotion to the other elements that make up the Test Your Innovation Star Rating, the bars are also seen as an objectively good bet – a strong 72% say they would buy shares in it, making the decision exceptionally quickly. And in the “implicit attributes” section, the Cadbury bars score particularly well on “brand fit”, “distinctive” and “trustworthy”, which is all further proof that this collaboration is a natural one for both brands.

Collaborations have their risks, especially when it’s two established brands. You’re exciting the fans of both, potentially expanding your market, but also risk annoying fans of your brand who dislike the other. That’s part of the reason you test the idea. But while no collab is perfect, this one is a great example of a 5-Star synergy that gets the balance between playfulness and satisfaction just right.