Gone tomorrow?
Cadbury has distinguished itself with a “gay kiss” advertisement, apparently aimed at children. Jack Taylor considers …..
A bit of history ……
Visit the Cadbury website and you will find that its Quaker antecedents have been carefully airbrushed out of its corporate story. Christian! How inconvenient!!
Today Cadbury has distinguished itself from competitors with a “gay kiss” advertisement, associated with its ‘cream egg’ product, and apparently aimed at children.
The company was established in Birmingham, in 1824, by John Cadbury. He was a Quaker who sold tea, coffee and drinking chocolate. He developed the business with his brother Benjamin, followed by his sons Richard and George. George developed the Bournville estate, a model village designed to give the company’s workers improved living conditions, and based very much on Quaker principles and values.
Dairy Milk chocolate, introduced in 1905, used a higher proportion of milk within the recipe compared with rival products. By 1914, the chocolate was the company’s best-selling product. Cadbury, alongside Rowntree and Fry’s, were the three major British confectionery manufacturers throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Here today, gone tomorrow?
One cannot help but feel that old Quaker John Cadbury would ‘turn in his grave’ if he knew what Cadbury was up to today. I mentioned this to a friend at our local church. In response, he emailed me this interesting story – though I have changed the name of the Company:
For the last almost 30 years of my working life I was a print sales rep.
Twenty years ago one my customers, in fact this chap worked for my biggest customer, gave me an envelope and said “this has a disc, printout and order for 200 copies. Take it and phone me a price please”.
When I opened the envelope the printout appalled me. It was a “card” he was proposing one of his private customers (he was a designer) would send out at Christmas.
Page 1 was a nativity scene with the 3 wise men with the caption “Only 3 measly gifts, they should have booked a Smithhire truck!” I can’t remember pages 2 and 3, but page 4 showed a picture of Jesus carrying his cross and a similar caption to page 1.
As you can imagine I was shocked and felt awful! I took the whole lot to one of my directors and asked “would you print this?” He said he would.
I said well you print it then, I don’t want to have anything to do with it and certainly not the commission! I said I fear that if I refuse this, we may lose my biggest customer. He said, “We will back you up if you turn it down.”
I did turn it down. I took the whole thing back to my customer and told him I thought it would be bad for the company image if they were to send it out. He said that he wanted still to send it, which he did. The outcome was I lost my biggest customer and within a couple of years I never saw any Smithhire Vehicles anywhere! Then a couple of years later my biggest customer went out of business! And within a few more years, both the company that did print the card and the company I worked for both went out of business!
So you see God always wins in the end!
Gone tomorrow?
We shall see. When a Company (or indeed an individual), egregiously opposes God’s will, ultimately there can be only one outcome. By the way, Swiss chocolate really is very, very nice!
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