Winning combos

The other day I pushed the boat out in Poundland and bought a packet of caramel Kit Kats as a team treat for the gang here at PrintWeek Towers. Fortunately, I also bought a packet of the classic Kit Kat variant at the same time, because the caramel version received the thumbs down. In the annals of ever-extending brand extensions, it was not viewed favourably here. Perhaps that's why it was in Poundland. As it happens Nestlé is adept at using social media and crowdsourcing for picking winning new flavours, one of its promotions saw a whopping 500,000 people vote for peanut butter Kit Kat chunky to become a permanent variant. Anyhow, thinking about these perfect-with-a-cuppa choccie wafers (the two-finger Kit Kat is apparently the country's number one biscuit) reminded me about a Kit Kat stat: six million Kit Kats are produced every day at Nestlé's plant in York. Six million! That a lot of printed wraps and packs of one sort or t'other. Good news for the printers riding on the coat tails of Nestlé's success. The company is also doing some interesting cross-media stuff: a new campaign involves GPS-enabled chocolate bars (yes, really). Also six-sheet posters featuring near-field communication and QR code activation points for consumers to engage in a high-profile competition involving prizes of up to £10,000. Clever uses of print, in all sorts of ways. This, in turn, reminded me of something a wise print boss once said when I was asking him about dealing with lots of High Street clients, given the travails in that space. He said: "We focus our efforts on the successful ones." Follow the [not necessarily chocolate] money.