It's been a bad 10 days for Nestle. It started with a Greenpeace campaign over palm oil production and the destruction of the rainforests.
The usual pressure group gimmickry - a reworked Kit Kat logo saying 'Killer' instead of 'Kit Kat' - inevitably found its way on to Nestle's Facebook page, whereupon all hell was let loose: the minder responsible for the page got shirty and decided to remove the offending logo.
Big mistake. It wasn't long before Nestle was issuing an apology both for 'rudeness' and for the deletions. 'As you can see, we're learning,' it said. The question is, what are the real lessons?
Well, for a start, it's instructive to see one of the world's most powerful organisations grovelling like this, even if it's not as rare a spectacle as it used to be. It says a lot about how our communication environment is changing. But behind the drama lie some even bigger questions about Nestle's underlying assumptions. They're not that out of order. In fact, they're pretty common.
What they seem to boil down to is this: branding is about messaging. If you believe this, two things follow.
First, it's necessary to keep everything 'on message', which means you have to be in control. As the Nestle minder declared: 'It's our page. We set the rules. It was ever thus.'
Actually, it was never thus. The peculiar workings of top-down mass media, in which the branding-is-messaging ideology grew up, made it appear thus, but that's only because the few bits where the brand was in control were highly visible, while the broad areas where the brand had no control remained invisible.
As the Cluetrain Manifesto - a collection of published theses that examine the impact of the internet - pointed out many years ago, markets are conversations and brands are just one part of them. The belief, or hope, that brands are the conversation, or can or should control it, was always vain.
The second thing about messaging is that its overriding concern is the effect it has on other people. It doesn't matter what realities lie behind the message, as long as it has its intended effect.
This is one of the ways companies and brands emptied themselves of meaning. Sure, in human conversation people joke and gossip, but ultimately they want to talk about the realities.
'Messaging' is phoney - and boring. In conversation, people earn respect when they demonstrate they know what they are talking about, and earn trust when they have the courage of their convictions. That's what makes it interesting and meaningful.
On this score, how did Nestle fare? Well, here is the statement it eventually came up with: 'We do care and we will continue to pressure our suppliers to eliminate sources of palm oil which are related to rainforest destruction.'
To compare, here's Unilever's statement from a few months back. 'Unilever is convinced that we have to break the link between cultivation of oil palm and climate change... (we have) formalised our commitment to draw all our palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015.'
They may be saying the same thing, but it doesn't sound like it.
The ideology of messaging teaches brand managers that it's their job to change how other people think, feel and behave.
If you think that's your job, the last thing you are going to do is change the way you think, feel and behave. That's what this spat illustrates. The really difficult change right now is not taking place 'out there', it's taking place inside: inside brand managers' heads.
Alan Mitchell is a respected author and a founder of Ctrl-Shift and Mydex. Alan.Mitchell@ctrl-shift.co.uk Read his blog at marketingmagazine.co.uk/reinventingmarketing
30 SECONDS ON ... KIT KAT
- Launched as Chocolate Crisp in 1935 by York confectionery firm Rowntree, the Kit Kat name was added in 1937; the Chocolate Crisp part of the name was dropped in 1949.
- Kit Kat has been owned by Nestle since its acquisition of the Rowntree business in 1988. The brand is available in more than 70 countries on all five continents.
- In the US, Kit Kat bars are manufactured under licence by Hershey, to a different recipe. As part of a deal struck with Rowntree in the 60s, Hershey also holds the licence to produce and sell Rolo in the US.
- Kit Kat is also produced in the UK, Canada, Germany, India, Malaysia, China, Japan, Australia and South Africa.
- Nestle claims that one year's production would stretch around the London Underground more than 350 times.
- Many seasonal, regional and limited-edition variants exist; Japan is particularly keen on different flavours, from soy sauce, pickled plum, wasabi and cucumber to ginger ale, apple vinegar, roasted tea and candied sweet potato.