Day Three: Two for one (Part 2)

After lunch with J&J, we headed to Nestle's office. Out of all of the companies, we visited, I would say that Nestle had the most American style layout with open concept offices. Nestle took us through two case studies of product launches within Turkey. The first focused on NesCafe. Let me step back for a second. NesCafe is a huge product internationally, but is relatively small in the U.S. as Americans still like roast/ground coffee over instant.

Laura Hufschmidt and the Nestle team

Turkey is a tea drinking culutre. The numbers are pretty stupid. An average Turk will drink between 2000 and 3000 cups oif tea a year. They will drink only 55 cups of coffee a year. Coffee is primarily consumed after meals for celebratory purposes or with a group. Individual consumption is small. With that said, Turks know how to make a cup of tea (how much sugar and cream to add), but were unsure about coffee, which prevented many from even trying it.

To overcome this, NesCafe came up with the 3 in 1 concept, which combined coffee, sugar, and cream in powder form into individual size servings. Essentially, take hot water, add 3 in 1, and boom, you got yourself coffee. This product doesn't exist in the U.S. Closest thing we got to this is hot chocolate. Nestle rolled out three different types--Regular, Mild, and Strong. It took the market by storm and created a whole new category. As with everything in Turkey, the competition immediately copied it and rolled out an almost identical product. The competition took it one step further and started to offer flavored coffees. In the U.S., this would have made complete sense, but Nestle didn't think it would catch on. However, it did and Nestle was suddenly the second mover.

Here is Terry, Katie, and Mark showing the three NesCafe products. Looks like Mark has had about four already and Katie wishes they had given us the coffee an hour ago.

The lesson here is that you can't rest on your laurels. You must continue to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Creating a category is not enough. Nestle is in the process of introducing a whole new marketing campaign for the 3 in 1 products and their new product--2 in 1 (no sugar). Wish I could find the new ads as there is a crazy moustache on it, but I can't seem to find it.

Something that we didn't talk about at Nestle, but wish we would have is their Maggi Mashed Potato Machine. Here is a picture.

Yep, sitting right next to the coffee machine is this device that dispenses instant mashed potatoes because there is apparently a need for mashed potatoes on the go. Did we try it? You know we did. Verdict--suprisingly good and could easily be tempted to consume mashed potatoes on the go. Now, we never saw this machine in any store, but it is only a matter of time when you are sitting on technology like this.

Yes, I will take a NesCafe 3 in 1 and a cup of mashed potatoes....tea sugar and dreams (inside joke, sorry).