ny marketing handbook with a chapter on the marketing of food brands will vouch that of all the consumer habits, the most difficult to change relate to food. Extremely culture-sensitive and recalcitrant, the palette has a tendency to display singular indifference to �non-indigenous� foods, favouring instead, the part ingrained and part cultivated taste of the familiar.

The marketing challenge multiplies manifold when a non-indigenous food, because of its construct, refuses to fit into the �indigenisation� mould. Chocolate is one such hard-to-indigenise food, as at the product level, chocolate will always be chocolate. And will always taste like good old chocolate. This puts the task of breaking consumer resistance and finding avenues of growth in the hands of advertising. ... more