I’ve stumbled across this fascinating piece about how Nestle has completely messed up the nation’s favourite confectionary, the KitKat.

But the tale of the KitKat in Britain, its home market, is a cautionary tale: sales have fallen 18% in two years, which is even faster than the sales collapse of the Daily Express. Taking the blame is a “hotshot executive” from Australia, now departed, who launched a pretty bog standard product development programme.

“For the summer months, it launched strawberries and cream, passion fruit and mango and even red berry versions. In the winter came ‘Christmas pudding’ and tiramisu, which contained real wine and marscapone. Even though Britons never fully embraced the Atkins diet craze, the company launched a low-carb version.”

The new flavours went down badly, piled up in warehouses, and have since been abandoned - and also take the blame for the core plain-old-choc-and-wafer version losing sales.

But it can’t just have been those flavours that caused the fall. They also callously disposed of that delicious ritual about eating one - removing the paper wrapper and running your thumb down the foil to snap off the four legs of biscuit. When they got rid of the paper and foil wrappers in favour of a plastic all-in-one wrap the ritual was ruined for all - even if the new packaging did have little perforations.

The ritual lent a humble KitKat great value - it simply lasted much longer than other biscuits - but it also allowed you to regard eating one as something a little more than simply scoffing “product”. The marketing people obviously didn’t get it. They changed the wrapping, reduced the amount of chocolate used on the things, added the ugly Nestle branding to remind us this is now a World Sweet, ended the “Have a break. Have a KitKat” campaign.

While many people don’t like big business, suspecting it of reducing us to mere retail pawns in the face of their cunning plans, it’s a reminder that even research-heavy conglomerates don’t necessarily have a clue about what makes their products successful in the first place.

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