Cadbury's Unethical Issue

Cadbury is facing is the ethical marketing policies. Cadbury were trying to build a global ethical platform for its key Dairy Milk brand with Fairtrade certification, while on the other hand they were ruining all their hard works with an outrage involving switching their cocoa butter to palm oil as a key ingredient in its chocolate manufacturing in its flagship brand. This incident has created depressing impact for Cadbury's on-going worldwide ethical brand building efforts.

One of the after effects of not having good ethical marketing policies is that it will create cognitive dissonance in relation to buying Cadbury's products containing palm oil which perceived as unethical as harvesting palm oil involves removing palm tree in a forest area which could house wildlife animals which renders them homeless. This shows that Cadbury had neglected the welfare of animals just for the sake of cutting cost in their manufacturing and directly affected the consumer's perception on Cadbury. The consumer psychology and behaviour processes are influential on consumer reactions which will then lead to the serious consequences for Cadbury's businesses such as a drop in its business. For confectionary and food, there are a lot of substitute products for consumers and little differences among various brands. Cadbury is now seen as a pretender for ethical company which also resulted to customer avoiding and boycotting Cadbury . Consistently, the profit of Cadbury would end up with a downfall.

Cadbury may want to pay more attention on corporate social responsibility in order to make decision on what is right or wrong. This would guide Cadbury to recognise whether the action that they are planning to make would bring any negative consequences to the company. With better marketing strategies, Cadbury will be able to rebuild their ethical name.

It is recommended that Cadbury to understand its consumer's behaviour well. Consumer behaviour brings direct impact to the processes and profitability of the organisation's business itself. Cadbury can resolved its approach-avoidance conflict by providing customers with a product that offers the positives features but minimizes the negative features. Confectionary and food managers must first understand the concept of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in order to overcome motivational conflict in an efficient way. According to Maslow, lower level basic needs must be satisfied before progressing on to meet higher level growth needs. Once these needs have been reasonably satisfied, one may be able to reach the highest level called self-actualization . According to the case, for low involvement products such as confectionary there is a lot of choice for consumers and little differentiating amongst the various brands. Hence brands that also satisfy the needs at higher levels in the hierarchy will be more appealing to consumers. However, the higher order