Brands Having Fun

The stolen truck carrying 413,793 packages of KitKat bars launched memes and jokes from Nestlé and other brands. The situation is another example of companies embracing mishaps.

KitKat took full advantage of the incident:

We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat—but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate.

Then other brands got into the game. Pizza Hut claims a new KitKat pizza, DoorDash suggested people add 500-600 KitKats to their order, and RyanAir posted a plane with a mouth full of KitKats. This Del Taco one is cute.

We saw similar brand responses during the McDonald’s mini-bite incident. McDonald’s humbly poked fun of itself, and other brands pounced. The art is responding on-brand and quickly. Some of the KitKat responses are repetitive and feel like copycats. Student could analyze them to see which are most and least effective. RyanAir’s stands out for its weird silliness—definitely on brand.

I expected to see something on the KitKat website. But under “latest news” are progressive muscle relaxation and box breathing videos, perhaps overdoing the “have a break, have a KitKat” slogan. Student will have opinions on this too.