Company Case Nestlé: Integrating Marketing Communication into Daily

Operations
With more than 2,000 brands, from global icons to local favor
ites, and present in 190 countries, Nestlé is one of the world’s
largest food-and-beverage companies. It operates in four differ
ent strategic business units: beverages, 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.
Have a Break from TV. Have a KitKat.
KitKat’s “take a break” message enjoys high-level recognition in
more than 80 countries. The official website follows that philoso
phy 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 colors of the
pack and the product reinforce the marketing message.
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 ap
plication. Customers were only allowed to enter after they had
liked the KitKat page.
Another creative ad was the KitKat’s 2015 Christmas com
mercial, 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. 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 activ
ity 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 com
muters on all major intersections. The brand got great mileage
out of this campaign in terms of brand awareness, paid trial,
image, as well as real sales.
KitKat has become a particular obsession in Japan. The in
troduction of KitKat Green Tea (Uji Matcha) in 2004 not only ex
panded the over 350 KitKat varieties available in Japan over the
years but also drew 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 cre
atively. 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.
Direct and Digital Marketing
Nestlé is active in social media marketing and connects and inter
acts with more than 11 million Facebook fans, 250,000 followers
on Twitter, and more than 180,000 followers on Instagram.
The company makes sure that its products are positioned for
the wider but also the most appropriate audience using brilliant
ideas for creative advertising. A campaign launched in India in
2015 provided a fresh take on its signature tag line. This cam
paign was about “celebrating the breakers,” and recognized that
people take many different types of breaks. Animated videos and
ad photos of people snoozing at their desk, listening to music,
and partying all night were posted with the hashtag #mybreak
on Instagram. The campaign was a success, with a 42-point lift
in ad recall and 6-point lift in message association.
Nestlé constantly responds to rapid technological changes
in the marketing environment. In 2011, the company launched
the Digital Acceleration Team (DAT) to design a better mix of
traditional and digital IMC tools and enhance its product mar
keting and e-commerce. Inspired by hackathon culture, this in
volves an intensive and highly entrepreneurial eight-month train
ing program where diverse high-potential leaders from across
the globe gather at Nestlé’s HQ in Switzerland to exchange
marketing experiences. The DAT works on specific digital mar
keting topics, and the team returns with the expertise needed
to lead the digital transformation in their home units. Beyond
DAT, Nestlé has also endeavored to become more digitally con
nected by having an internal social network where more than
200 employees can engage with one another, and by enabling
employees to blog and inspire or influence customers as a daily
practice.
Developing Effective Communications
At Nestlé, the process of developing an effective IMC strategy
for promotions begins with identifying the target audience. For
KitKat the target audience is everyone—the mass consumer
market. Next, the communication objectives, such as building
awareness and knowledge, and providing information value
for the customers, are determined. As KitKat is already a well
known product globally, the company advertises not so much
to boost sales as to remind the customers about their favorite
chocolate bar. It then decides on the suitable media, including
personal and non-personal channels, for the marketing mes
sage. Nestlé uses all possible channels, including print media for
its cost effectiveness and non-intrusiveness, which is a struggle
in the digital era.
KitKat uses broadcast (radio, television) and display (bill
boards, signs, posters) media to reach a broader target audi
ence. It uses print media mostly in the form of posters that cel
ebrate an event in a funny way, focusing on the “Take a Break”
slogan. In one example, when a “no Wi-Fi zone” was introduced
in downtown Amsterdam in 2013, a street sign was installed
with the “Take a Break” slogan. Nestlé also uses events: in 2013,
Android launched its new operating system using the KitKat
name.
Feedback is vital for measuring the effectiveness of commu
nication tools, so Nestlé analyzes big data from retailers and in
ternal processes such as how many people bought a product,
talked to others about it, or visited a store. Insights from these
analyses are then used by Nestlé for suggesting changes in the
IMC strategy or in the product offer itself.
Budget-Setting
Nestlé sets its promotion budget based on what it wants to
accomplish, defining specific promotion objectives, determining
the tasks needed to achieve them, and estimating the costs of
performing these tasks. The sum of these costs is the proposed
promotion budget, which is then divided among various IMC
tools. For example, KitKat announced that it would double its
media spend in 2015 with the launch of a £10 million multime
dia campaign after losing sales in the sweet biscuits category
the year before. Seeking to reclaim the 11 percent of sales lost,
the campaign involved heavy promotion in-store as well as on
social media. Budget-setting is also in line with pricing policy:
the price is dependent on the market of each individual prod
uct, so market leaders Nescafé and Maggi are priced with higher
margins for the company as compared to the competition. To
deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the
products, Nestlé ensures close cooperation with market- and
marketing-specific local-country teams to consider culture and
market differences.
Nestlé has worked hard to make sure that its traditional mar
keting approaches blend well with newer, tech-savvy ones, like
printing of QR codes on candy bars and boosting social media
engagement. Sales promotion is also done through interactive
and responsive websites. For example, in the UK, the company
printed individual codes on KitKat packaging that could either
be entered on a dynamic website or texted on a mobile phone
to win a prize—proof that traditional promotion can co-exist with
digital tools. The particular blend of channels—of traditional and
digital media—is based on observation of customer behavior.
For instance, when marketing analytics indicate that a product
appeals to a younger generation, digital is clearly the way for the
company to go. However, this doesn’t mean that Nestlé should
abandon more traditional approaches; it continues to find ways
to use traditional marketing to raise brand awareness with cre
ative ideas that reinforce the marketing message.
To continue building attractive and rewarding brand experi
ences for customers, Nestlé designs its IMC strategy collabora
tively with other groups, such as sales and e-business, R&D,
technical applications, and agency partners. Through these well
defined steps in IMC and budget-setting, Nestlé has executed
multiple campaigns with great success and is all set to continue
that trend in the future.22