Chocolate Bar Advertising

While I try not to eat too many chocolate bars, I do eat one or two on occasion. There's such variety, and most of them are oh so tasty and good. Anyone who has ever been to a convenience store with an indecisive nine year old knows all about the variety issue. There are scores of different bars on the shelves, almost all of them the same price, but in every size, shape and colour you can imagine. How does one select a chocolate bar? And from a marketing perspective, if you are trying to sell your particular brand of chocolately goodness, how do you get the message across?

I've noticed recently that while their is nearly limitless selection in chocolate bars, there isn't all that much variety when it comes to advertising them. The commercials seem to fall into two broad categories: what's in the chocolate bar, and how to eat the chocolate bar. Not all that creative, IMHO. Let's break this down a little further.

What's in the chocolate bar: There are only so many things one can put into a chocolate bar, really. There's chocolate (milk chocolate usually, but sometimes dark). There's nuts (peanuts or almonds, usually, and I guess I can count coconut as a nut, too). There's some sort of cookie/wafer, and there's fudge/nougat/caramel. And that's about it. There are a few other less common ingredients, but I've covered the common ones.

There are hundreds of products build around this short list of simple components. Yet the candy companies seem to insist on telling us that their products contain nuts and fudge and chocolate. Tell me this: have you ever seen a commercial telling you what a chocolate bar contained and it made you want to eat that particular chocolate bar? "Oh, that has peanuts and chocolate, I want one of those right now!"

How to eat the chocolate bar: Time for a show of hands. Does anyone reading this page actually need help with how to consume chocolate bars? It's not like you're eating a lobster. But yet I can still remember from my childhood those commercials informing me that "You insist on crunching Crunchie." Currently I'm seeing commercials telling me that Areo bars are not to be bitten, but rather allowed to sit on the tongue and melt. And have you ever seen a Kit Kat commercial that didn't feature someone breaking the bar to eat it section by section? They even use the slogan "Have yourself a break."

If I'm going to have a chocolate bar, I don't want to be told how to eat it. If I want to let my Crunchie melt in my mouth, I'll let it melt. If I want eat the chocolate off an O Henry before starting on the peanuts, well, that's kinda neurotic, but doable. And if I want to eat M&Ms with a spoon, well, don't try to stop me.

Now why am I craving some chocolate right now?