This is the headline of The Verge’s article I came across last couple of weeks. Nescafé. I wasn’t that surprised as I wrote a similar stuffs last month, how the website is getting obsolete and irrelevant. Everybody knows Nestlé, they are huge in the global food industry, and a well known brand.
According to The Verge, Nescafé is trying to present a human face to its operations and products, and its latest move has been to convert its Nescafé.com website into a Tumblr blog. Michael Christment, Nescafé marketing chief said that “the dotcom is reflection of us talking to people; this approach is dead. It should be much more inclusive and allow conversations.” After reading the entire of this article, I noticed that they are aiming for younger generations. The Gen Y or Millennials of the world, which generations covers approximately 25% of the global buying power. A generation that hardly spend time on websites, who opts for social media instead.
The direction Nescafé is taking seems making sense to me. Instead of the brand populates all sorts of content to the website and ‘talk’ to the consumers about how good their coffee is, they want their fans to do it for them. Enjoy Nescafé with friends and family members, post the moment into the social media and create a hype. A hype will then turn into mentions and conversations, and these will then turn into curiosity that eventually push to brand towards dispersal of spill over to other social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and others. Now this is what I call a brilliant move!
Not only Nescafé, I was reading a few other articles similar to this and there are quite a few other major brands who are targeting younger generations, are also in the midst of testing out social media as their core method of promoting their products and services. And at the same time, they plan to tone down their traditional means.
