Nestlé targets "emerging consumers"

All marketers should pay attention to the words of Nestle's chief financial officer as reported in WARC.

He says that the food group, is targeting "emerging consumers" with a wide range of affordable products. Currently, these "popularly positioned products" (PPP) provide around 12% of its total sales, which rose by 6.6% in organic terms during the first half of this year.

He said that the "first thing" observers often assume about these offerings, quite wrongly, is that they are best suited to developing nations."It's actually for the emerging consumer," he told analysts - "So whether the consumer is in the emerging market or in the developed market, it resonates to that consumer who wants to buy our PPP products

Let me decode. What Nestle has rightly seen is that a growing number of consumers in the developed west are going to behave like the newly emergent consumers in the developing countries.

This is another manifestation of ultra fragmentation. Companies like Nestle, P&G and Unilever will have two totally different product lines for the 'haves' and the 'have very little' consumers. In the longer term it will be inaccurate to talk about the 'developed' west because it will be two very different groups of consumers living in the same geographic space. Dick Stroud