Cadbury Schweppes' two-pronged portfolio of candy and soft drinks wasn't too far off strategically from the soft-drink and snack-food approach that has served PepsiCo so well. The difference is that Pepsi has Pepsi, not Dr Pepper, as a top brand and an organization that can execute to the last bottle cap. For Cadbury, growing two separate businesses proved an insurmountable task, undone by bad execution, bad luck and the weird actors who dominate candyland--the secretive, privately held Mars Inc. and the stumbling, publicly held Hershey Co., which is controlled, ineptly, by the Hershey Trust Co.
Under relentless pressure from shareholders like...
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