Rom Chocolate's Innovative Marketing Campaign

Rarely, companies come up with a staggeringly innovative marketing campaign, which goes against, every integral value which the product stands for.

And even if they do, they seldom succeed.

Recently Rom Chocolate, which is a popular chocolate bar from Romania came up with a campaign to address the falling sales which the company was facing.

Rom, traditionally, had positioned itself as a national chocolate bar. The packaging of the bar prominently includes a Romanian flag. The entire idea was to instil a sense of patriotism amongst the consumers. The chocolate was extremely successful, until recently when the sales began to drop.

Romania, as a country too, is suffering from the aftermaths of recession. The economy is projected to grow at 1.5 %. The government is trying to privatize a few state-controlled energy companies to kick start the economy and bring it back on track.

Now, the problem which ‘ROM’ was trying to deal with was the lack of popularity among the Romanians. The grim economic scenario wasn’t helping the cause either. The political and economic situation of the country was disrupting what ‘ROM’ stood for…the patriotic feel which one derives out of the ‘ROM’ bar. People started believing that nothing good can happen in Romania and they were willing to seek opportunities in other countries.

The company came up with a shock and awe inspiring kind of a campaign. What did they do?

They changed their packaging drastically. Now, instead of featuring the prominent and popular Romanian national flag on the chocolate bar, the company came up with the American flag. Ads came up and intensive promotion was done, in English, to promote ‘ROM’ as a ‘Taste of Coolness’ and as something which upheld what can be called as an ‘American Dream’.

The results were as expected by the company. There was a serious backlash from the people. Their national ego was challenged by the company. There was tremendous criticism in the social media, blogs, television and website. The general public wanted the chocolate to keep up with the Romanian traditions and values. The backlash was unprecedented. There were even self-made videos for Youtube to criticize the entire idea of presenting the American flag on ‘ROM’.

After an intense week, the company came forward and expressed that the whole idea of ‘American ROM’ was a joke. They came up with a ‘ROM’ anthem too and the whole campaign raised the brand awareness to a new level. The campaign reached 67% of the country’s population and was hugely successful in improving the sales of ‘ROM’, which incidentally, increased by 79%.

It was one such campaign, which could have gone seriously wrong, but it didn’t. The campaign won the Grand Prix at Cannes Direct Lions.

A truly amazing campaign indeed. But would it work in the long term?? After all, the success of a chocolate cannot rest solely on the marketing campaign. Well, only time can answer.

You can view about the campaign here.