Less than a week before Easter (and April Fools’ Day), KitKat was the victim of a chocolate heist when 12 tons of its bars were stolen as they made their way from Italy to Poland. There’s absolutely no evidence it’s a stunt…unless you consider the strategy of its comms team.
As a cynical, near-50-year-old PR guy who has been around the fake-media-stories block, something caught my eye about this stolen KitKit story. As the kids would say, there are some red flags.
And I suppose I need to say somewhere that this is all just my opinion, right? So, this is all just my opinion.
However, I have some experience in spotting these kinds of things. I was one of the first media commentators to call b/s on the Amazon drone delivery story (version 1.0) in 2013. The story was announced by the Bezos e-commerce giant just a few weeks before the peak festive retail shopping period and ensured that they had mass media exposure at a very convenient time. Some 13 years on, that same story has been rinsed and repeated and yet the drone deliveries have never happened at the commercial scale that Amazon promised.
Don’t get me started on the more recent Colossal Biosciences de-extinction of dinosaurs’ nonsense. The pictures of a back-combed fluffy mouse in a science lab does not a Woolly Mammoth make.
Through my work in crisis communications for some of the largest brands in the world (including a stint at Nestlé’s archenemy, Unilever, where I was a lowly marketing-analysis-wonk), I also know a thing or two about what you do or don’t say about a corporate heist. For starters, you never reveal the full details of a large-scale theft for fear of it being repeated, albeit usually in another guise.
So, when the story broke about Nestlé having twelve tonnes of KitKats go missing, and on the run up to the busiest Easter egg buying period of the year, my Spidey senses went off.
At best, I suspect that this is an April Fool’s Day prank that landed far faster, ahead of schedule, than the brand anticipated. At worst, it is a crass attempt to manipulate search engines and your LLM surfacer of choice into giving KitKat a peak global-chocolate-retail-period market boost.
Let’s look at what we know.
AFP is credited by most media outlets that ran the story as the first major wire to break the news of the KitKats being stolen. The original article is a bit vague and that vagueness is the first red flag. There are talks about Nestlé working with the authorities from the relevant countries, but no one is quite sure in which country it happened, because the products were, of course, going between a few different territories.
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This makes fact-checking incredibly hard. Not least because we don’t have the first clue which authority to call or email to check out the chocolate maker’s version of events. I tried. Not too much, admittedly, but the rabbit hole I went down further piqued my interest. The statements are scant on real detail. I would be keen to know which authority is dealing with it.
In the UK, as evidenced very recently when a political hot-potato mobile phone was conveniently stolen, at least the Government could cite a crime reference number issued by the British police. We have no such crime number from Nestlé to work with.
Then there was the official statement it made to The Athletic. “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat,” it said, playing on the famous slogan. “But it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate.”
I have already mentioned the timing, but that must be another red flag. It is also Nestlé’s get-out-of-jail-free card. I researched this. Giving Easter Eggs is a global thing. It is not a small “thing” either. The Easter chocolate gifting industry is estimated by my mate ChatGPT to be worth around $25bn annually.
Nestlé sits fourth in the industry by estimated global sales, hot on the heels of Ferrero (of spenny Ambassador treats fame) which is rumoured to have a slightly higher market share, and then Mars Inc. The Cadbury/Mondelez crew sits at the top of the chain, says my AI assistant. So, it would not take much for Nestlé to overtake Ferrero.
For example, were Nestlé to need a giant global dollop of a media campaign that would dominate the SERPS and create enough brand noise to make the LLM crew think they are the most credible company in the sector, then, a cynic may say this theft campaign would tick that box perfectly.
Another red flag is the correction that Nestlé put out on, of all places, PR Newswire. No one other than desperate comms people who sit brand-side wants to use the likes of PR Newswire. The benefit of paying to be on that wire is that you control the message and face zero scrutiny. Nestlé used the wire to put a correction out that they were not, in fact, facing a shortage of product because of the theft (as had previously been reported). They clearly wanted to quickly tidy that up.
Nestlé could have put that message on its own news section. I know from my Unilever days just how much media scrutiny a global FMCG brand’s news section faces. It is almost like it wanted to be doubly sure that the story got out. PR Newswire was not needed; it was a step too far.
Finally, and most intriguingly, who wants to steal 12tonnes of KitKats? I must have missed the episode of The Sopranos where the mafia decided chocolate was the key to their growth and success. Similarly, would the main character from Scarface have faced such a gruesome life if he had just focused on large-scale confectionery theft? Did he miss a trick? His loss was clearly Reece’s good fortune.
I won’t lie; I want it to be an April Fool campaign. It would be one of the most successful in history and will finally stop people going on about either the BBC spaghetti story or BMW repeatedly trying to convince us that Germans are humorous after all.
No matter what the truth, and I suspect this will be left to quietly die by Nestlé under the guise of operational security, this story has helped the brand move up a notch in the chocolate sales rankings and someone somewhere deserves an extra finger for that.