The story of the revitalisation of Dove Galaxy, the Mars brand that won the international brand development award at The Marketing Society Awards for Excellence 2008
In 2003, Mars had two established chocolate brands with different strategies and degrees of success. There was Dove in China and Galaxy in the UK and Middle East. Each brand had gone its own way doing its own thing.
In the UK, Galaxy had done well with its marketing campaign, ‘Why have cotton when you can have silk?', in other places it had done less well. In 2003, as the UK campaign became a little jaded, Mars decided to overhaul its chocolate portfolio and build a global strategy and a global brand.
Years of research had shown women as a core audience for the chocolate brands with sensual indulgence as a primary motivation. However, a very similar conclusion had been taken by many competitors too like Cadbury's Flake. To get some fresh insight, Mars set up a global project team tasked with talking to women all over the world, not about chocolate but about indulgence.
This analysis of women and chocolate showed that the joy of chocolate starts long before they eat it, they create personal rituals around the time they eat their chocolate. This led to one consumer insight, “the thought of chocolate heightens the pleasure”. This would see Dove Galaxy repositioned as the brand that epitomises the intimate relationship between a woman and her chocolate.
A role and strategy for Dove Galaxy was identified as ‘my personal indulgence chocolate', heightened by anticipation and private rituals in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and coffee shops all over the world.
These personal indulgence moments vary across the globe. In the UK, women enjoy eating chocolate alone on the sofa, in India where married women live with their in-laws it's in their bedroom, in China where women often live with their parents, it's in coffee shops.
The product was redesigned to emphasise this sense of anticipation. The logo was drawn to look like liquid chocolate, the actual squares of chocolate were made curvier and an image of rippling silk was used in a corner of the packaging to reveal a glimpse of the chocolate.
In the space of just three years, these two different chocolate brands were built into a single, global brand Dove Galaxy worth $1 billion. This saw the brand increase value by 42% globally. In 2004, the brand team aimed to achieve a target of $785m by the end of 2007, a goal that was successfully achieved and overdelivered.
Growth was not just seen in new markets. In established markets, the overall growth was 35%. For example, in the US, the brand had been fairly static but grew by 106% between 2004 and 2006. In 2007, the brand was launched into Russia and Mexico. 2008 sees launches in Canada and Poland, with other launches in the pipeline.
The original award-winning paper for Dove Galaxy can be read in the Inspire section of the website.