To revive its fortunes Cadbury Schweppes announces plans to axe 7500 jobs; sell its US drinks business; withdraw support for family favorite brands; sack its UK Managing Director and consolidate its £250 million global advertising budget.

Why should anyone believe this will work now when the company has such a consistent and awful marketing track record of getting it wrong over many years.

Cadbury is the company that: -

- Lost significant market share by making the chocolate bars smaller to maintain an illusory consumer   attractive price point.

- Diverted large and effective advertising budgets to price promotions etc that maintained volume but lost both a consumer franchise & margin.

- Withdrew from individual effective product line advertising - "Award yourself the CDM" and "Everyone's a Fruit and Nut case" are now only relics of a bygone successful communications era.

- Collapsed brand consumer benefit advertising for Turkish Delight, Crunchie and Whole Nut, etc., replacing it by bland Cadbury company TV programme sponsorship, from which it has only now been able to withdraw

- Dissolved product benefit propositions (enjoyment; indulgence etc) behind "they all look alike" Cadbury bars

- Bonus WH Smith assistants at airport checkouts to push big bars at Mickey Mouse prices


The UK IPA have contributed greatly to our understanding of positive effective advertising and marketing through its well established awards programme "Advertising Works". The learnings from this volume of work are legion.

Perhaps now is the time to get published the results of sustained ineffective marketing. There would be even more to learn from what goes wrong as from what goes right.

I sense that if Cadbury Schweppes were to enter their last decade of advertising and marketing for the "Ineffective Advertising Awards", they would be strong candidates for the Gold Medal SIM (Sustained Ineffective Marketing)