Mondelez India opens its first-ever experience center in India; from custom-made milkshakes to 3D printed chocolates, here’s how it is wooing consumers

• Cadbury Dairy Milk manufacturer Mondelez India has unveiled a new experience center called ‘The Purple Room’ in Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai.
• It allows consumers to experience the joy of watching their favourite Cadbury chocolates taking shape live in a 3D printer.
• Anil Vishwanathan, Senior Director, Marketing, Mondelez India walks us through the research and execution process of bringing the whole experiential center together, his goal behind this new milestone and larger vision for the portfolio.

Remember the old jingle, "Kitna mazza aaye re, duniya Dairy Milk bann jaye?" The brand behind this ad, Mondelez India's Cadbury India is converting this fictional world of being surrounded by chocolates, which was every child's dream, into a reality. It has opened its first-ever experiential center in Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai. Called ‘The Purple Room,’ this experiential center takes consumers inside a chocolaty world, allowing them to experience the joy of watching their favourite Cadbury chocolates taking shape live in a 3D printer.

Throughout Cadbury’s journey, the brand has tried to offer a different experience to consumers. This time, it aims to take it a notch higher.

Telling us why the brand chose to launch an experiential center, Anil Vishwanathan, Senior Director, Marketing, Mondelez India, said, “It's been a constant journey of bringing in new concepts and experiences from a premium standpoint, because that's what the consumer is looking for. Over a period of time, it has also translated into the way we are offering personalised and customised experiences on e-commerce and D2C side. Now, The Purple Room is yet another such initiative in the same context, where we are bringing in new experiences to the country and some of these experiences cannot just be done in the regular retail way. We want to offer novel experiences and we're starting with the whole 3D Chocolate but this is one of many interesting new things to market experiences that we want to bring to consumers.”

The pandemic has proven how the value of personal attention may be far greater than we gave it credit. So, Cadbury’s The Purple Room is designed to consistently give customers more reasons to return by offering a personalised experience. It houses the whole Mondelez India range, a few exclusive products that are not available in India and also prints customised chocolates as requested by consumers in front of their eyes.

When consumers walk out of The Purple Room, Vishwanathan is optimistic that they will be wowed. Talking about what he thinks consumers will feel once they visit, he said, “Definitely a wow. We don't want to create experiences that they've seen before. So that's what we're aiming for. It's not something that they would have seen, even if they've traveled outside India. It's not so much about exclusive merchandise that's not available in India, but available elsewhere, which I've imported. It's not an imported range. It's also not something that's available in the regular stores. Now, of course, you have consumers who also would want the regular merchandise, so we have the merchandise as well. But really the priority is set of experiences that are not available anywhere and maybe new to the country -- not been commercialized ever, and hence, getting consumers to feel a little bit of a wow and leaving the Experience Center saying `oh, this is what I would expect a Cadbury to be doing.’”

Cadbury is relying on word-of-mouth to do its magic and bring in organic footfall. It has also planned a few local activations to spread the word about the new center.

The idea of launching this experiential center was born earlier this year in January and it took Cadbury 10 months to bring it all together. The brand also wanted to wait for the market to open up. “We actually wanted to do it even faster and more possibly we could have had the second wave not come out. We were ready to launch faster. The launch date was reflective of when it is a safe situation, firstly, allowed by the authorities to open and then of course, the right time for the consumer also starting to feel okay to step out. Now, they're kind of coming back. The likelihood is that they'll come back with a bang because there's a lot of pent up feeling, ‘oh, I'm cooped up at home and I really want to step out, I really want to go somewhere and watch a movie.’ So as that feeling comes back, we see this as a great time to leverage as the momentum is gonna come back,” said Vishwanathan.

But why ‘The Purple Room?’ “In partnership with Ogilvy India, we wanted to bring in a very recognizable element of our brand. And then also give a little bit of the premium feel to it. So pick up something which people can recognize, but it still evokes a little bit of a premium feel,” Vishwanathan told Ad and Media Insider.

On a larger scale, Cadbury will be focusing on increasing its investments as the markets open up and launch new marketing campaigns around generosity.

Sharing his optimism about the future, Vishwanathan said, “I think we have had good growth momentum. As we speak, we seem to have come out of the challenges of the first two waves, and we're positive about the future. In the long term, we do believe that we want to continue to grow the category. So we'll stay invested behind our core brands. We also believe the timing is right for us to bring back some of our innovation that we had pulled back for the last couple of years. So as we enter the new year, you will see some interesting innovations come, you'll see a lot of investment and you will continue to see the kinds of campaigns that we've been putting out around our overall purpose of generosity. And it's not just going to be linked only to chocolate, it's also around biscuits and beverages. You'll see a lot of purpose-driven interesting consumer engagement. You'll see a lot of thrust on ecommerce, you'll see a lot of work happening on digital. Most importantly, you will see us staying invested because we are optimistic about the growth opportunity."