Brand spanking: Nestlé gets hijacked

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the video clip: an office employee, bored stiff at work, decides to “have a break, have a KitKat” — only those aren’t slender fingers of dark chocolate and biscuit he’s snacking on, but orangutan fingers, and just look at the blood dripping off his chin! The goal of the ad was simple: highlight Nestlé’s sourcing of unsustainably produced palm-oil products, and the knock-on effects of deforestation and dwindling orangutan numbers.

Two months later the ad has had its desired effect: following more than two million views and inspiring roughly 200 000 emails of protest, Nestlé has teamed up with The Forest Trust, an organisation that will help Nestlé to source its palm oil sustainably. The ad has been so successful because it hit Nestlé in the sweet spot, hi-jacking its most prized possession: the Nestlé brand.

In essence the process of branding is pretty simple. It’s about creating a personality — and corporations such as Nestlé and Nike spend millions marketing and developing their personalities; ensuring that their brands are instantly recognisable and highly reputable. The guiding principle is to create an emotional connection with consumers so that they come to identify with (and thus purchase) your brand of goods.

Branding gives meaning to arbitrary things, turning sports shoes into cultural icons and chocolate into status symbols. Done just right, it means that Nike can slap a swoosh on any old takkie and sell it for 10 times more than the same shoe sans swoosh — and the difference is not the presence of the actual logo, but what it stands for. In this way the most successful brands are those no longer tied down to physical commodities. In a world where there really is very little difference between Nestlé, Cadbury and Beacon, being profitable is less about the actual chocolate, and far more about the fluffier things: emotion, association and identification. It’s all about the brand.

The genius of Greenpeace’s ad, then, is that it turns the Nestlé brand against itself. It was only because Nestlé was so recognisable that the ad generated such protest, and only because Nestlé had such a profitable reputation at stake that it responded so swiftly. Using the ad, Greenpeace cleverly hi-jacked the branding process and created a few Nestlé associations of its own. So whereas Nestlé would like you to associate itself with decadent pleasure, Greenpeace reconfigured those associations, creating links to destruction, greed and indifference.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s not all peachy just yet. “Teaming up” with The Forest Trust is still a long way from sustainable production. I’m also aware that Nestlé is not the only one guilty of such abuses, and that it was singled out from a big bunch of corporations all with blood on their hands. But knowing how resilient brands can be, I’m confident that Nestlé will soon turn around and trumpet its alliance with The Forest Trust and its new “Happy Chocolate”. Their new, more sustainable practices will become just one more aspect of the brand, but hopefully one that’ll drive other corporations to begin sourcing their raw products more sustainably too.

What’s interesting about this campaign though, is how Nestlé seemingly lost control over its brand for a period of time. Kidnapped by Greenpeace, the Nestlé brand became something of a public persona with an entirely different image. I’m hopeful that this “brand spanking” won’t just be a once-off thing. For too long now global corporations have been talking down to us, telling us how we should feel about their brands, and what to associate them with. Perhaps we are reaching a turning point where, as we become more acquainted with the powers of social media, we’ll get a lot more involved in the branding process. If so we may soon find that many brands are a lot more two-faced than they’d like us to think.