Hidden Nuggets: Nestle Cappuccino Eclairs – Sign of Growing Up

Confectionery is a smorgasbord of many different shapes, sizes, colours, and flavours. While it gives a lot of variety to the customers, it is confusing too, and they are all vying for the same consumer mind space. It can potentially be an advertising nightmare. 

Nestle wanted to launch Cappuccino flavoured eclairs in 2012. The advertising was handled by Lowe. Sonali Khanna was the account director and the ebullient Uday Rao, who led the creative team.

The Head of Planning on Nestle at Lowe – John Thangaraj had a well defined and crisp brief pitching the product to the early teens who did not want to be seen as kids anymore. They wanted to associate themselves with grown-ups, which in itself created a distinctive positioning for the product. All it needed was a creative idea that did not layer the purity of that insight.

Uday recollects that, with a rich brief like the one which John had written, came lots of ideas, but along with it, the tendency to over intellectualise it. We toyed around with a couple of such ideas and finally, I had a simple take that literally transformed all those usual comments we all have heard as kids from our parents, teachers etc. while growing up, into a series of relatable, entertaining films. 

Uday narrated one simple script to Amer Jaleel (Chairman of Lintas now) on a huge terrace that they had at Lowe over a carbon dioxide inhaling session and without blinking an eyelid he said “Uday mast hai, craft it nicely, do a series and give it an Italian touch.” The territory the idea was playing in was so inviting that everybody, starting from Nestle’s brand team of Himmat Singh & Neelav Bose plus Sonali Khanna who was the account director on the brand and Sri Ram Iyer contributed by thinking up situations that could make a series of interesting films.

Sainath Choudhury directed the films with the late Anil Naidu, the erstwhile Head of Lintas Productions managing the entire show in South Africa. The films turned out well and did pitch the product effectively. All-in-all, it was fantastic teamwork bringing a simple idea to life which was triggered by a well thought out brief.