Chocolate: From Mass Production to Custom-Made Bars

There is something that everybody likes, a temptation that nobody can resist to, a pleasure that involves all senses: Chocolate! 

It probably seems weird to choose this topic for my report; the reason is not only that  I am a chocolate Enthusiast (with capital E of course!), but also because chocolate offers different kinds of experiences, it evokes several feelings and reveals insights.

I don’t think people realize how much chocolate can effect emotions. I love chocolate because every time I eat my favourite piece of chocolate it’s like returning back to my childhood, it’s connected with carelessness and happiness.

The taste of chocolate is amazing, and so are things you can do with it. The purpose of this paper is to discover why people love it, what makes them so satisfied when eating and why we can speak about customer experience in this field. Chocobars, chocosweets, chocofestivals and chocoevents are not only products or services, but have been cleverly transformed into more involving goods.

More precisely I want to structure this report in a singular way trying to compare how customer behaviors and their responses change in different contests, from the big industry to the single person who likes to cook for him/herself.

The purpose is to observe the various attitudes when:

• a big company produces bars or candies and consumers purchase at the grocery store (all produce for all); 
• a medium company enters the market with a chain of stores (many people working for many customers);
• candy makers, who transform the simple ingredients into delicious pastries and sell them in small pastry-stores, where the customer can perceive the taste of an hand-made product (small group of workers produces for a restricted elite of consumers);
•  the individual as protagonist of an experiential environment (one to one);

In the first category I’d like to analyze companies like Hershey, Nestlé, Lindt. These are multinationals that produce a large amount of products, all with the same characteristics: ingredients, shape, taste and package. When a consumer decides to buy Hershey’s milk chocolate KitKat or Lindt’s Goldbunny he/she is already aware of what he is going to taste.

Of course quality and innovation are the number one priorities and the commitment to consumers.

Chocolate taste of  Lindt’s products for example, is beyond description, it’s my favorite, but what about the customer experience? Consumers perceive the same feeling every time they eat it and maybe the act of purchasing is mechanical, it has become habit.

Big corporations exploit ExPros to create ads that include communications, visual and verbal identity and specific features to differentiate their products from competitors’ ones. 

Going through the second group we find companies like Venchi, Valrhona, Cioccolati Italiani who detected an innovative format to attract clients, adding creativity to the common concept of palate satisfaction. Venchi for example opened “Cioccogelaterias” different from usual ice-cream shops: the idea was to make the company less “Company” and more within the reach of the public and the consumer. 

Candy makers are those people whose success is determined by customer loyalty: they cannot trust on “magic ingredients” and scale economies of a big company, therefore they have to be able to maximize the pleasure derived by enjoying a chocolate cake, while relaxing in a suggestive environment. It’s interesting to pinpoint how they segment consumers to fulfill them in the best way.

The last category is focused on the individual attitude when attending to events which involve the entire sensory system: the single person becomes the protagonist and the maker of his own experience. Some example can be the “Eurochocolate” in Perugia (famous for its Baci Perugina), where people can taste chocolate from all over the world, make sculptures and buy samples, or the School of Chocolate, where housewives can learn how to make chocolates.

The SEMS model is useful to identify the levels of consumer’s involvement in these situations.

Consumers’ involvement is also the matter in hand in the article “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate”, which tells the story of three guys, who decided to found “Chocomize”.

Chocomize is an online shop that allows chocolate lovers to customize their candy bars with several ingredients ranging from dried raspberries to bacon.

The idea came from a chocolate bar left in the back seat of the car, which melted with gummy bears and brought the company to produce around 4,000 bars a week.

What makes Chocomize different from competitors is their customized product, that can't go into" supermarkets or stores where consumers might pick up a bar while they're waiting in the checkout line”.

That’s exactly what I want to analyze in my paper: how do big and small companies reach the customers? Which means do they use? Which results do they obtain in terms of customer experience, involvement and attitude?

Click here to read the article: “Jobless Grads Bet on Custom-Made Chocolate” by Zachary Tracer