Eighteen years ago, I was celebrating the 40th birthday of Nutella in Extrawurst, and my hm-hm-hm-hmth birthday. For those with a sweet tooth, here’s the history and cult status of the chocolate hazelnut spread as I saw it in 2005.
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As I have recently been celebrating my birthday, I thought I would write a piece about a brand that is celebrating its 40th birthday this year in Germany.
On the subject of brands having birthdays, this does seem to have become “this year’s thing” for marketers here, perhaps in the absence of anything new to say. We had thirty years of IKEA last year and now every corner shop, local newspaper and frozen pizza seems to be celebrating some birthday or another. Just as the market here has been deluged with “flavour of the year/season” for the last few years, we now seem to be beset with birthdays. Most of it seems to be an excuse to dig out some “retro” pack designs and revel in the worst excesses of the 70s, 80s or whatever decade your brand was born into in a rather self-congratulatory way rather than offering people any new benefit or real reward for buying you in the first place.
In this case, however, I feel that the celebrations are justified: the brand in question is Nutella which I believe is one of the most “present” brands in the German psyche. Over 100 million jars of the stuff are sold per year with the average buyer consuming something like 1kg of the stuff per year (oh dear, think of the calories!) and Nutella really is a brand that one could say has achieved cult status in this country. A client of mine (non-German) recently made something of an error of judgment (in my opinion) when she recently turned down the prospect of a co-operation between her brand and Nutella on the basis that Nutella “was too unhealthy”. While, of course, she is right in thinking that Nutella is not among the list of top 5 healthy things to put in your mouth, what she missed is that Nutella is allowed to be unhealthy just because it’s so loved here – like Bratwurst and Pils it may pile on the calories but it is an integral part of German culture – a rare accolade for a non-German brand!
Although officially only 40 years old, Nutella’s origins go further back: to the 1940s in fact. During the war years, chocolate was a rarity, a delicacy and cocoa was in short supply so the Piedmontese confectioner Pietro Ferrero experimented with making a cream out of cocoa and roasted hazelnuts. From the beginning onwards, Ferrero’s experiment was a success and even incorporated an interesting retail concept in 1940s/50s Italy whereby schoolchildren could go to the local corner shop with a piece of bread and get it spread with the forerunner of Nutella.
In 1964 the nut-nougat crème got the name Nutella. Ferrero Germany had already opened its doors in 1956 and introduced Nutella in 1965. Nutella really created a whole new market in Germany for a country used to either jam or honey as sweet spreads for the breakfast bread.
There are now several generations of Germans who have grown up with Nutella – it’s rather like Marmite in the UK but it doesn’t have quite that extreme love-hate relationship: everyone loves Nutella except for a few extreme health campaigners. Nutella signifies childhood and family: there is something very motherly and reassuring about the name, the pack design (almost unchanged from the original of 1965), the shape of the jar and the sweet, creamy product itself. And, unlike Marmite, it is pretty versatile stuff: you can make cakes with it, slap it on pancakes and Nutella seems to be a fairly major component of most of the confectionary products that Ferrero produces these days.
The cult status of Nutella in Germany is observable through the sheer presence of the brand in Germany. It’s not just on practically every breakfast table but also highly visible on pancake stands in the city centre or at Fests, on T-shirts (the aforementioned unchanged pack design), in bookshops (“Das große Nutella Kochbuch”), on e-Bay (collectors of promotional jars or giveaways) and there are even Nutella cafés in some city centres where you can have a cup of coffee and eat your fill of various Nutella concoctions – all this in addition to the expected supermarket and classic media presence. Of course, anything that is successful and cult spawns cover versions. In Nutella’s case they are numerous and quite blatant in their copying of the mother of all hazelnut spreads, from Lidl’s Choco Nussa to Aldi’s Nutoka but none of them have quite managed to copy the subtleties of Ferrero’s secret recipe.
Of course, cult status brings you more than your fair share of urban myths. In Nutella’s case these include the positive (“Nutella is a wonder cure for cold sores and other forms of Herpes.”) and the not-so desirable (“Nutella gets its colour from cow blood.”). But none of these myths seem to be so extreme as those associated with McDonald’s or Procter & Gamble’s brands – maybe Nutella’s “Italian Mamma” personality makes it less vulnerable to attack than those brands which are assumed to be run and controlled by George W. Bush doppelgangers.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Nutella’s cult status is that much of this comes not so much from TV advertising but from in-store and on-pack promotions. While there have been some memorable TV campaigns (involving some of the usual suspects here such as the ubiquitous Boris Becker), it is the special promotions that have become collector’s items. A 2kg jar was available in 2000 for the millennium, for example, and the 40th birthday promotional packs were soon sold out. These included stencils of characters from Asterix concealed in the lid which was a repeat of a promotion originally from the 1970s or 1980s.
It seems to be fitting, then, that Nutella celebrated its 40th birthday with a spectacular promotion: the biggest breakfast in the world. No less than 27,854 Nutella fans turned up to the event which earned Nutella a place in the Guinness Book of records. So, here’s to the next 40 years unless the extreme healthy-eating killjoys get there first!
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Only a few months after writing this article, I suffered a public humiliation that I’ll never live down. I took part in an on-air radio quiz and was asked to name which German football players featured in the Nutella ad for the 2006 World Cup. I didn’t know. Me, working in advertising, with a football-crazy husband.
I still hang my head in shame.
As for Nutella, well, the healthy eating police are still stomping around, but not to any great effect. The latest member of the Nutella family is biscuits.
And me? Sorry, but I still prefer Marmite. I’m not that German.
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