Cadbury and MCoBeauty just put chocolate-flavoured beauty products and a watermelon Cadbury block on shelf together, exclusively at Woolworths. It's the kind of pairing that makes you stop scrolling and look twice.
The campaign's PR, influencer coverage and brand activation have created a lot of buzz online. Outside marketing circles, though, we were curious how it actually landed with real shoppers.
It's always interesting to get a peek into the "why" behind a collaboration between two brands. Mondelēz's ANZ director of chocolate and meals, Katrina Watson, told B&T this was about "fresh and creative ways to connect with Australians and particularly younger consumers." MCoBeauty's head of marketing, Lucy Robinson, said the brand has "always believed beauty should be fun, accessible and a little unexpected."
We went straight to the audience this campaign was made for: females aged 18 to 34. Then, out of curiosity, we asked a wider group outside that target too - to see whether the effect held, or whether it was a niche win only. We took a quick read from 200 Australians who have shopped at Woolworths in the last fortnight - here's what they had to say:
Among women 18 to 34, both brands were already well known pre-campaign. Over half said they'd be likely to buy the product off the back of this collaboration.
The top two things the younger female shoppers associated with this collaboration were 'fun' and 'interesting'. But, a third also said 'weird'. On its own, that number looks like hesitation. It's actually something sharper - more on that below.
Dig into who's saying what, and this isn't a mild, everyone-shrugs-and-moves-on reaction. It's a genuine split.
Of those who associated the collaboration with 'weird' or 'confusing', two in three said they were unlikely to buy - and the verbatims back that up. Among those who picked 'iconic', 'fun' or 'indulgent', the swing runs almost the opposite way, strongly towards purchasing.
There's barely any middle ground. If you're into this collaboration, you're properly into it. If you're not, you're not pretending otherwise.
That's not a flaw. A collaboration built to be safe rarely gets talked about at all. This one clearly asked something of shoppers - but despite the divided opinions, over half of everyone surveyed said they'd still consider buying it.
Worth noting: the strongest thread behind the "weird" reaction was the watermelon and Dairy Milk flavour combination itself. But it's not the only one - some of the hesitation ran deeper than the flavour, landing squarely on the idea of chocolate and beauty sharing a shelf at all.
Two very different kinds of "no, thank you", sitting inside the same box.
Here's the twist. Women walked into this already knowing MCoBeauty far better than men did - 84% brand awareness among women, compared to just 26% among men, before either group had seen the collaboration.
Despite that head start, women weren't more receptive to the collaboration - if anything, slightly less. Asked how likely they were to consider buying from the two brands together, 48% of women said yes, against 54% of men. Half of the men surveyed wanted to buy the chocolate too, despite most having never heard of MCoBeauty until this collaboration put it in front of them.
For MCoBeauty, the more telling number isn't the purchase intent one - it's the awareness one. Three in four men had never heard of the brand before this campaign. What that reach actually means for MCoBeauty is the more interesting question - one we dig into below.
Whether this becomes revenue for MCoBeauty is genuinely an open question - the brand has been built around a specific audience, and this data doesn't tell us whether that's shifting. What it does tell us is the collaboration travelled well past the audience it was designed for, which is its own kind of result.
What it is: reach. Half the men surveyed now know a brand that, before this collaboration, three in four had never heard of. That's not a sales result - it's a brand awareness one.
For a challenger brand up against a saturated beauty category, getting in front of that many new people in one campaign is genuinely valuable. It's just not the same thing as a sales win.
Cadbury's the one converting this into something closer to a straightforward win. As a brand that already sells to everyone, male purchase intent is exactly the kind of result its "connect with younger consumers" brief was chasing - and it did it loudly enough to split opinion, which is usually a sign it actually landed rather than passed people by.
A collaboration that gets a strong reaction in both directions is doing something a safe, everyone-mildly-likes-it campaign never will: giving people something to actually feel and talk about. Impressions and social chatter are worth celebrating - they show something got noticed. Consideration and intent are the numbers that tell you whether it landed too.
These are the things only consumers can tell you directly - which is exactly why Stickybeak exists. Our campaign optimisation test gives you a real read on how it landed with consumers while it's still fresh - so you can double down on what's working, and optimise for the next round.
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Stickybeak Campaign Testing: n=200 Australian consumers 18-54, who have shopped at Woolworths supermarket in the last two weeks. August 2026.
