3 Public Relations Indicators That Cadbury's Board was always going to Sell Up

Anyone else who caught the Sky News interview with Felicity Loudon, the great granddaughter of Cadbury's founder John Cadbury will know just how gutted the family are that this iconic brand looks like it is on its way to becoming owned by a foreign company in Kraft Foods.

It now emerges, in my mind at least, that it was always the Cadbury board's intention to sell the company, once they had got a suitable taker to up the price they offered to one they felt would deliver value.

The real question is, why did we not spot this before as there were plenty of indicators that Cadbury's original position of seemingly no sale at any price was a hollow war cry.

The battle in earnest broke out in late mid to late September and at that time Cadbury put out a statement saying that the offer made "no strategic or financial sense"... all good stuff, but from that point on, the official statements from Cadbury were not a cast iron "no" more of a "not at this time".

The three main public relations indicators that, with hindsight, should have made us realise this deal was going to happen:

Indicator One: For me, the real indicator that the Cadbury's board was looking to get Kraft Foods to increase their price rather than fight off the take-over is in the lack of communications activity.

As has been mentioned on Twitter today (conversation I had with Mark Pinsent on Twitter), after such a successful viral campaign to get Wispa brought back (albeit by Borkowski, the agency behind this campaign) it is very clear that there is a lot of love for Cadbury's as a brand by the great British public. The Cadbury comm's team could have easily leveraged (sorry for use of w*nky term!) the Wispa love up the chain to try and protect the brand - but they declined to do this.

Indicator Two: As I mentioned above, the company's media statements seemed to be getting watered down over time, from a flat, it makes "no strategic or financial sense" and the board being "confident in Cadbury's standalone pure play strategy" in media releases on 30th Sept 2009, to more recent statements that gave greater emphasis to the fact that the board wanted to make sure that people realised the true value of the company. In my mind alone, such a shift in positioning represents a really good indicator that a sale was on the cards

Indicator Three: Lack of stakeholder engagement. It now looks like the surviving members of the Cadbury family were not kept in the loop as to what was going on. This certainly seems the case having heard the interview with Felicity Loudon this morning on Sky.

The easy option is to say that the board had no obligation to communicate what was happening to the surviving family members of the founders because they had no financial reason to do so. If the board were serious about protecting the brand from a take-over though, surely they knew that a few choice words to the Cadbury family would ensure a sufficiently large media storm that would have maybe helped defend them from the advances of Kraft Foods.

Given Cadbury's ability to lobby MP's, even though it may have had no direct impact on the chances of a sale, raising the issue in Parliament would have given further profile to the cause of trying to save the brand. As far as I can tell, the only mentions that made it into the political world were more Union orientated to try and save British jobs.

If the Kraft Foods deal does go through it will be a huge blow to yet another once-great British brand. Jobs will eventually go, as has happened with the likes of Walls Ice Cream courtesy of its parent company Unilever and the fact it is much cheaper to produce the ingredients for its goods overseas than in the UK.