With more than 2000 brands, from global icons to local favourites, and present in 190 countries, Nestlé is one of the world’s largest food-and beverage companies. It operates in four different strategic business units: beverage. milk and milk products, prepared dishes and cooking aides, and chocolates. To design a proper marketing mix for all four product groups, Nestlé employs country -and market- specific marketing teams to design an IMC strategy, regardless of the product group.
Figure 1. Some Nestlé brands. Source: Rankia.com
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Have a Break from TV. Have a KitKat.
KitKat serves as a good representative of Nestlé’s promotional strategies. Its “take a break” message enjoys high-level recognition in more than 80 countries globally. The official website follows that philosophy faithfully: it literally just asks the visitor to take a break and have a KitKat. The brand’s promotion is concentrated mainly in TV commercials and posters, where the powerful colours of the pack and the product reinforce the marketing message.
Advertising plays an important role in the confectionery industry, which Nestlé is a part of, so it is not surprising that the company heavily invests in it. In 2016, for example, it spent £10 million on advertising for KitKat. The brand has a history of very successful campaigns, like one in 2012, in which customers who discovered one of the six GPS-enabled chocolate bars were delivered a prize of £10,000 by helicopter. The campaign drew a huge number of visitors to its website and Facebook and Twitter pages, all eager to see how many bars were yet to be found. Building on its success, an additional contest was organized to win £2,012, the year in which the campaign was launched, by entering the code on the inside of their KitKat wrapper into a custom-made Facebook application. Customers were only allowed to enter after they had liked the KitKat page.
Another creative ad was the KitKat’s 2015 Christmas commercial, which showed a blank screen for 30 seconds -a break from the holiday noise of the season. More conventionally, for the 2019 winter season in the UK and Ireland, KitKat launched on-pack promotion where customers who found a golden ticket in their KitKat won a “holiday break” to one of ten sunny exotic locations. The winning chocolate bar featured the name of the destination written on it in white chocolate. Besides the ten holidays, the company offered other prizes to be won every day, like beach towels, luggage tags, sun visors, and KitKat-branded passport covers.
Besides advertising, Nestlé has used a wide range of IMC tools for KitKat, including sales promotion activities. Personal selling is costly, but large companies like Nestlé can afford it. One of its classic campaigns was a direct vendor selling activity in the summer months of June, July, and August in Lahore, Pakistan, during which a team of vendors clad in branded t-shirts, caps, and jackets, sold chilled 0.5-liter bottles to commuters on all major intersections. The brand got great mileage out of this innovative idea of personal selling in terms of brand awareness, paid trial, image, as well as real sales.
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KitKat has become a particular obsession in Japan, where sales and profits are higher than in any other market. The introduction of KitKat Green Tea (Uji Matcha) in 2004 has not only expanded the over 350 KitKat varieties that have been available in Japan over the years but also drawn more attention to the brand and increased sales volume. After its massive success in Japan, in February 2019, the KitKat Matcha was introduced in Europe.
In direct marketing, Nestlé has even used physical mail creatively. For instance, it sent out a mailer made to look like the card left by postal workers when they are unable to deliver a parcel, saying that the package, the KitKat chunky, was “too chunky for your letterbox.” The recipients could exchange their card at their local news agency for a free KitKat Chunky.
