Cadbury Goes for Total Message Control in Product Recall

By B.L. Ochman Anyone who knows me knows there aren't too many things I like more than chocolate. So a story about Cadbury Chocolate's UK recall of more than a million chocolate bars caught my eye this morning. Cadbury is handling the issue in a very traditional way on their website, aiming for total message control. Dear Cadbury: There's no such thing anymore.

Kudos to Cadbury for prominently getting the announcement onto their home page immediately, and for explaining what happened. But they want total message control and NO feedback, which is, quite simply, an outdated way to handle the situation. There's no email on the site, no name of a human anywhere in the contact info, and no effort to engage the customer in an interactive conversation.

There is a lot of fun stuff on the Cadbury site, which is in serious need of a social media marketing update. They actually ask you to register by filling out a form if you want to receive information about their products.

The form asks for your date of birth, how many children you have, and the (optional, whew!) dates of birth of everyone in your household. That's too much work for me. I just want to eat the bon bons.

I saw this on the BBC News this morning with spokesmen for Cadburys (the UK CEO on TV) the European CEO on radio) repeating how safe the product is as theri main line. And, in questions, saying that it wasn't until a conversation with the FSA on Monday of this week that they disclosed the problem from January; and it sounds as though that was in response to FSA concerns about an increasing (but still very small) level of reports of salmonella affecting public health.

The Cadburys CEOS were at pains to say that there was no evidence connecting their January problems with the public health incidents . . . But, on the other hand, they didn't say that there was evidence that they were not connected.

This could run a while yet.

I normally wouldn't post a comment about the company I work for (goes against my blog code of ethics) but I'd really love to know your opinion about their services/software, since they relate to customer engagement. Do you think this technology could be "the next thing" in customer interaction? Could it solve a customer communications issue such as Cadbury's? Here's their webpage www.neighborhoodamerica.com...BTW, no hard feelings if you say you don't like their services. I'll still keep this within my favorite blogs list!