The nest of the Marche
Nestlé story "Successful figurative marks are the result of archaic, rampant energies," writes René Lüchinger in the foreword to his book "Bildmarken. In it, the designated new editor-in-chief of Bilanz traces the genesis of twelve logos - one of which deals with the life's work of the Swabian chemist Heinrich Nestle.
Nestlé story "Successful figurative marks are the result of archaically proliferating energies," writes René Lüchinger in the foreword to his book "Figurative Marks". In it, the designated new editor-in-chief of Bilanz
retraces the genesis stories of twelve logos - one of which deals with the life's work of the Swabian chemist Heinrich Nestle.
A bird's nest, a chemist: Nestlé. Perhaps it is intuition, perhaps divine providence, that Heinrich Nestle no longer likes his name when he appears on the shores of Lac Léman in 1843. The pharmacist's assistant, who was not even thirty years old, changed his name to the francophone Henri Nestlé - undoubtedly a melodious neologism for the scion of a family from Württemberg, which had gone by the names "Nästlin," "Nästlen," "Nestlin" or "Nestlen" in the annals. Today, Nestlé is a global brand of a global company, a brand jewel of priceless value, a multilingual name - no other of the officially documented family names could have developed such a potential.The first entrepreneurial attempts of Henri Nestlé are as numerous as the name variations, since he bought the property "En Rouvenaz" in Vevey, Switzerland, for 19,000 francs, an industrial property including a few machines. Henri Nestlé tries his hand at producing mineral water and lemonade, sells oil and vinegar and also makes mustard or liqueur, trades in artificial fertilizer and liquid gas. He does this with great diligence and reasonable commercial success. Admittedly, it is not the big hit.
Infant flour for premature baby
Perhaps it was intuition that Henri Nestlé began using the professional title of "chemist" in addition to "merchant" in 1845, set up a small chemical laboratory and immersed himself in the research of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig, who had, among other things, dealt in detail with nutritional issues for infants. In order to tackle the high infant mortality rate in Europe in the 19th century - depending on the country, up to 25 percent of infants died in their first year of life - Liebig developed a food that was close in composition to mother's milk. When Nestlé married Clementine Therese Ehemant, a native of Frankfurt am Main, on May 23, 1860, he also gained a strong personal motive to continue working on nutritional issues. Clementine's father was a doctor for the poor, and the daughter knew from her own experience about the tragedy of infant mortality.
The newlywed throws himself into work and continues to tinker in his laboratory. It takes years to find a recipe that meets the high standards and can be produced on the company's own machines: Henri Nestlé finally uses sugar, to which he adds top-quality Swiss milk. He condenses this mixture in a vacuum until it is as consistent as honey. In parallel, he makes a rusk-like bread from wheat flour, which is ground into powder and mixed with the milk concentrate. He dries this mixture completely at a constant temperature and adds potassium bicarbonate. The powder is ground and sifted again - and Henri Nestlé's children's flour is ready.
The inventor is well aware that he does not deserve all the credit: "My product is prepared entirely according to Liebig's principles," he confesses, "only I achieve the same end by other means." And he also knows the quality of his invention - but how does he teach this to the mothers who are now to buy his product? It is fate that shows him the answer. It happened one September evening in 1867, when he received a call for help that he could not ignore. "As a result of his mother's serious illness, little Wanner was born a month premature," Nestlé later recalled, "the weak child accepted neither mother's milk nor any other nourishment. All hope had already been given up when my friend, Professor Schnetzler, presented the case to me and asked me to make a trial with my infant cereal." From then on, the 15-day-old premature baby was fed Nestlé's infant cereal, and soon the all-clear was given: "He has never been sick until now and is now a strapping boy of seven months who already stands up in his cradle all by himself."
Word of the little one's rescue spreads among mothers, midwives and doctors in the area. Several people made a pilgrimage to Henri Nestlé's to see for themselves that there really was a "strapping boy" in the factory owner's cradle, and of course the visitors also took the opportunity to buy a few kilos of infant cereal. Sales increased without Nestlé having to advertise - only the local newspaper Journal de Vevey published a thirty-liner on July 16, 1868 about "une découverte utile" made by "un chemiste suisse, Henri Nestlé, de Vevey".
The episode with little Wanner is the initial spark for a rapid development of his business, and Henri Nestlé, the merchant, chemist and entrepreneur, now develops into a gifted marketing expert. He switches the company's production to infant cereals and relies - in new German terms - on a single-product strategy. He marries product and family names to create a brand name: "Nestlé's infant cereal." In 1868, when he launches the product in Switzerland in Vevey and Lausanne and in Germany in Frankfurt and immediately starts exporting it, he creates a figurative trademark - long before the term even exists. The ingredients are of captivating simplicity: the Nestlés' family crest consists of a bird sitting in a nest. Henri Nestlé took this pictorial idea a step further: one bird becomes four, one of which is the mother bird feeding her three little ones in the nest on an oak branch. A strong visual symbol for a company that produces baby food.
Criticism of the modern age
Nestlé puts the packaging of its 500-gram cans of children's flour - initially made of cardboard, later of tinplate - entirely at the service of marketing. The product and family names are clearly visible, as is his signature as a personal promise of quality, and Nestlé's bird's nest is emblazoned in the visual center. He also endeavored to imbue his invention with the higher consecrations of "scientificity": he had his preferred professional title of "chemist in Vevey" printed on every can, as well as easy-to-understand instructions for use written by the respected French chemist G. A. Barral; and he was not above doing some public persuasion work himself. On June 6, 1868, an article "on the feeding of children" by "Henri Nestlé in Vevey (Switzerland)" appears in the Frankfurter Familienblätter, which reads like a critique of the modern age: "Mother's milk will always remain the most natural and best food in the first months, and every dutiful mother must breastfeed her child herself if she is in a position to do so. Unfortunately, it has become fashionable for city women to be replaced by wet nurses from the countryside, but they do not consider that two mothers thereby violate their duty," writes Nestlé, "to entrust one's child to a stranger whose way of life one does not know is always a daring thing." And further, "There will never be woman's milk enough for all newborn children; the effeminacy of our customs is to blame for this; we must therefore have a substitute for the missing mother's milk."
"Against dirty banknotes"
"Nestlé's infant cereal" is intended to remedy this shortcoming, and the inventor thinks on a large, even global scale. In Paris, he engaged a capable pharmacist as an agent for distribution, opened a representative office in London and began exporting overseas. He puts the contract partners at the service of his marketing strategy. Whether the agents placed ads in the Neue Badische Zeitung for "Nestlés Kindermehl," in the London Sun for "Nestlés Milk Food," or in La Bandera Española for "La Harina Lacteada Nestlé," the uniformly designed bird's nest was always emblazoned next to the company and product names.
"Like avalanches," says Nestlé, orders poured in after the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71), and he had production in his 30-man operation running at full speed. While in 1868 he had only produced 8,600 cans, by 1874 the figure had risen to 6,700,000, and a year later production exceeded the million mark. The bird's nest has become a global brand; Nestlé's infant cereal is now sold on all five continents. Major markets are Germany (601660 tins), Switzerland (140929) and France (118437); the product from Vevey can now also be bought in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Dutch India (now Indonesia) or the then still existing Ottoman Empire. The company flourished, and its net profit climbed from 3500 francs (1868) to around ten times that amount in 1875.
In this year, Henri Nestlé, who is almost sixty years old and childless, makes a momentous decision: he wants to sell his life's work. The pioneer knows that the upcoming factory expansion would overtax his financial strength, and he decides to exchange "his beautiful business, which had brought him so much honor and money, for dirty banknotes," as Nestlé likes to self-deprecatingly mock.
There are many who are willing to put some banknotes on the table. A certain Isaac Demole from Montreux, for example, who has already agreed with Nestlé on a purchase sum of one million francs. But this Demole is careless. On the train to Geneva, where he intends to settle the financial details, he lets a passenger in on his intentions. Unfortunately, the passenger is the brother of Jules Monnerat, the mayor of Vevey. And the latter, together with Nestlé's long-time flour supplier, Pierre-Samuel Roussy, has long had his eye on the company. It comes as it must: While the former chugs comfortably to Geneva, the latter negotiates with Henri Nestlé on site. And after some hesitation, he agrees. Perhaps because the mayor and the miller offered him not only an identical purchase price but also a splendid two-horse carriage, which even the principled Henri Nestlé was tempted to buy. On January 12, 1875, the Feuille d'Avis de Vevey reported: "Through a sensational sale for our town, the kin-dermeal factory founded by Mr. Henri Nestlé, chemist, has passed into the possession of a group of financiers from our region."
Nestlé draws a line under his life as an entrepreneur: He cedes the Nestlé brand to the buyers, along with the bird's nest, his name and the signature with which he used to sign every single tin of children's flour. He even has to commit himself to signing "Nestlé-Ehemant" in the future, and he takes this with his characteristic humor: "Since I sold my name," he says, "my wife had to help me get a new one."
First merger 1905
By parting with everything, Henri Nestlé makes his name, his company logo immortal. Under the radiance of the Nestlé bird's nest, an 89 billion franc corporation develops with an armada of 250,000 Nestlé employees worldwide (2002), which, through mergers and innovations, continues to add new branded products to its nest. 1905 saw the first major merger with the Cham-based Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company; 1929 saw the second major merger, through which the Swiss chocolate pioneers found their way into the Nestlé empire: François Cailler, Switzerland's oldest chocolate maker, Daniel Peter, inventor of milk chocolate, and Charles-Amédée Kohler, inventor of hazelnut chocolate. Diversification into chocolate production is accompanied by the acquisition of exquisite chocolate brands such as Cailler.
"Marketing is a matter for the boss"
There is a system to this approach: through mergers, Nestlé comes into possession of the Maggi brand (1947); through acquisitions, it acquires brands such as Libby's (1970), Buitoni, KitKat and Smarties (1988), Perrier (1992), San Pellegrino (1998), Häagen-Dazs, Purina (2001) and Mövenpick Ice Cream (2003). And Nestlé also develops numerous own-brand products that do not deny their origins: Nescafé, for example (1938), Nestea (1940), or Nespresso (1985).
The global corporation has remained true to its Vivis roots, which were once laid by the quality-conscious tinkerer and intuitive brand founder Henri Nestlé. It is no coincidence that Helmut Maucher, long-time Group CEO and Chairman of Nestlé S.A., published a book in 1992 entitled: "Marketing is a matter for the boss." If this word had existed in the mid-19th century - the phrase could have come from Henri Nestlé.
You can't replace my nest with the Swiss cross. The nest is not only my trademark, it is also my family crest. Everyone has the right to use a cross, but no one can use my coat of arms.
Anglo-Swiss relied on its milkmaid, while Nescafé refers to its origin in the logo.
The original Nestlé logo, dating back to 1868, has only been slightly revised a few times in over 150 years: in 1938, 1966, 1988 and most recently in 1995.
Cailler and Maggi came into Nestlé's "brand nest" as a result of mergers.
Figurative marks - Milestones in brand historyThis article on Nestlé's brand history is taken from the book "Figurative marks - Milestones in brand history".
In it, René Lüchinger presents twelve successful figurative marks: Apple, Globi, Lacoste, Mary Long (BAT), Meissen, Michelin, Mövenpick, Nestlé, Shell, St. Moritz, UBS, WWF. The book is published simultaneously in German, French and English. The publisher is Thomas Hermann, Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Zurich. It is published by Orell Füssli, Zurich, ISBN 3-280-05077-4, Fr. 39.90 (WW).
Book vernissageOn October 20, René Lüchinger's book "Bildmarken - Meilensteine der Markengeschichte" will be presented at 11:30 a.m. at Haus Konstruktiv in the ewz substation Selnau in Zurich. In addition to the author, contemporary witnesses and direct descendants of creators of the advertising icons of our consumer society will be present, including Warja Lavater (90), who designed the Bankverein key (now the UBS logo), and Archie Dickens (95), to whom Mary Long (BAT) owes the woman's head. Registration at thomas. [email protected] or by fax 01 252 79 42. (WW)
René Lüchinger
retraces the genesis stories of twelve logos - one of which deals with the life's work of the Swabian chemist Heinrich Nestle.
A bird's nest, a chemist: Nestlé. Perhaps it is intuition, perhaps divine providence, that Heinrich Nestle no longer likes his name when he appears on the shores of Lac Léman in 1843. The pharmacist's assistant, who was not even thirty years old, changed his name to the francophone Henri Nestlé - undoubtedly a melodious neologism for the scion of a family from Württemberg, which had gone by the names "Nästlin," "Nästlen," "Nestlin" or "Nestlen" in the annals. Today, Nestlé is a global brand of a global company, a brand jewel of priceless value, a multilingual name - no other of the officially documented family names could have developed such a potential.The first entrepreneurial attempts of Henri Nestlé are as numerous as the name variations, since he bought the property "En Rouvenaz" in Vevey, Switzerland, for 19,000 francs, an industrial property including a few machines. Henri Nestlé tries his hand at producing mineral water and lemonade, sells oil and vinegar and also makes mustard or liqueur, trades in artificial fertilizer and liquid gas. He does this with great diligence and reasonable commercial success. Admittedly, it is not the big hit.
Infant flour for premature baby
Perhaps it was intuition that Henri Nestlé began using the professional title of "chemist" in addition to "merchant" in 1845, set up a small chemical laboratory and immersed himself in the research of the great German chemist Justus von Liebig, who had, among other things, dealt in detail with nutritional issues for infants. In order to tackle the high infant mortality rate in Europe in the 19th century - depending on the country, up to 25 percent of infants died in their first year of life - Liebig developed a food that was close in composition to mother's milk. When Nestlé married Clementine Therese Ehemant, a native of Frankfurt am Main, on May 23, 1860, he also gained a strong personal motive to continue working on nutritional issues. Clementine's father was a doctor for the poor, and the daughter knew from her own experience about the tragedy of infant mortality.
The newlywed throws himself into work and continues to tinker in his laboratory. It takes years to find a recipe that meets the high standards and can be produced on the company's own machines: Henri Nestlé finally uses sugar, to which he adds top-quality Swiss milk. He condenses this mixture in a vacuum until it is as consistent as honey. In parallel, he makes a rusk-like bread from wheat flour, which is ground into powder and mixed with the milk concentrate. He dries this mixture completely at a constant temperature and adds potassium bicarbonate. The powder is ground and sifted again - and Henri Nestlé's children's flour is ready.
The inventor is well aware that he does not deserve all the credit: "My product is prepared entirely according to Liebig's principles," he confesses, "only I achieve the same end by other means." And he also knows the quality of his invention - but how does he teach this to the mothers who are now to buy his product? It is fate that shows him the answer. It happened one September evening in 1867, when he received a call for help that he could not ignore. "As a result of his mother's serious illness, little Wanner was born a month premature," Nestlé later recalled, "the weak child accepted neither mother's milk nor any other nourishment. All hope had already been given up when my friend, Professor Schnetzler, presented the case to me and asked me to make a trial with my infant cereal." From then on, the 15-day-old premature baby was fed Nestlé's infant cereal, and soon the all-clear was given: "He has never been sick until now and is now a strapping boy of seven months who already stands up in his cradle all by himself."
Word of the little one's rescue spreads among mothers, midwives and doctors in the area. Several people made a pilgrimage to Henri Nestlé's to see for themselves that there really was a "strapping boy" in the factory owner's cradle, and of course the visitors also took the opportunity to buy a few kilos of infant cereal. Sales increased without Nestlé having to advertise - only the local newspaper Journal de Vevey published a thirty-liner on July 16, 1868 about "une découverte utile" made by "un chemiste suisse, Henri Nestlé, de Vevey".
The episode with little Wanner is the initial spark for a rapid development of his business, and Henri Nestlé, the merchant, chemist and entrepreneur, now develops into a gifted marketing expert. He switches the company's production to infant cereals and relies - in new German terms - on a single-product strategy. He marries product and family names to create a brand name: "Nestlé's infant cereal." In 1868, when he launches the product in Switzerland in Vevey and Lausanne and in Germany in Frankfurt and immediately starts exporting it, he creates a figurative trademark - long before the term even exists. The ingredients are of captivating simplicity: the Nestlés' family crest consists of a bird sitting in a nest. Henri Nestlé took this pictorial idea a step further: one bird becomes four, one of which is the mother bird feeding her three little ones in the nest on an oak branch. A strong visual symbol for a company that produces baby food.
Criticism of the modern age
Nestlé puts the packaging of its 500-gram cans of children's flour - initially made of cardboard, later of tinplate - entirely at the service of marketing. The product and family names are clearly visible, as is his signature as a personal promise of quality, and Nestlé's bird's nest is emblazoned in the visual center. He also endeavored to imbue his invention with the higher consecrations of "scientificity": he had his preferred professional title of "chemist in Vevey" printed on every can, as well as easy-to-understand instructions for use written by the respected French chemist G. A. Barral; and he was not above doing some public persuasion work himself. On June 6, 1868, an article "on the feeding of children" by "Henri Nestlé in Vevey (Switzerland)" appears in the Frankfurter Familienblätter, which reads like a critique of the modern age: "Mother's milk will always remain the most natural and best food in the first months, and every dutiful mother must breastfeed her child herself if she is in a position to do so. Unfortunately, it has become fashionable for city women to be replaced by wet nurses from the countryside, but they do not consider that two mothers thereby violate their duty," writes Nestlé, "to entrust one's child to a stranger whose way of life one does not know is always a daring thing." And further, "There will never be woman's milk enough for all newborn children; the effeminacy of our customs is to blame for this; we must therefore have a substitute for the missing mother's milk."
"Against dirty banknotes"
"Nestlé's infant cereal" is intended to remedy this shortcoming, and the inventor thinks on a large, even global scale. In Paris, he engaged a capable pharmacist as an agent for distribution, opened a representative office in London and began exporting overseas. He puts the contract partners at the service of his marketing strategy. Whether the agents placed ads in the Neue Badische Zeitung for "Nestlés Kindermehl," in the London Sun for "Nestlés Milk Food," or in La Bandera Española for "La Harina Lacteada Nestlé," the uniformly designed bird's nest was always emblazoned next to the company and product names.
"Like avalanches," says Nestlé, orders poured in after the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71), and he had production in his 30-man operation running at full speed. While in 1868 he had only produced 8,600 cans, by 1874 the figure had risen to 6,700,000, and a year later production exceeded the million mark. The bird's nest has become a global brand; Nestlé's infant cereal is now sold on all five continents. Major markets are Germany (601660 tins), Switzerland (140929) and France (118437); the product from Vevey can now also be bought in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, Australia, Dutch India (now Indonesia) or the then still existing Ottoman Empire. The company flourished, and its net profit climbed from 3500 francs (1868) to around ten times that amount in 1875.
In this year, Henri Nestlé, who is almost sixty years old and childless, makes a momentous decision: he wants to sell his life's work. The pioneer knows that the upcoming factory expansion would overtax his financial strength, and he decides to exchange "his beautiful business, which had brought him so much honor and money, for dirty banknotes," as Nestlé likes to self-deprecatingly mock.
There are many who are willing to put some banknotes on the table. A certain Isaac Demole from Montreux, for example, who has already agreed with Nestlé on a purchase sum of one million francs. But this Demole is careless. On the train to Geneva, where he intends to settle the financial details, he lets a passenger in on his intentions. Unfortunately, the passenger is the brother of Jules Monnerat, the mayor of Vevey. And the latter, together with Nestlé's long-time flour supplier, Pierre-Samuel Roussy, has long had his eye on the company. It comes as it must: While the former chugs comfortably to Geneva, the latter negotiates with Henri Nestlé on site. And after some hesitation, he agrees. Perhaps because the mayor and the miller offered him not only an identical purchase price but also a splendid two-horse carriage, which even the principled Henri Nestlé was tempted to buy. On January 12, 1875, the Feuille d'Avis de Vevey reported: "Through a sensational sale for our town, the kin-dermeal factory founded by Mr. Henri Nestlé, chemist, has passed into the possession of a group of financiers from our region."
Nestlé draws a line under his life as an entrepreneur: He cedes the Nestlé brand to the buyers, along with the bird's nest, his name and the signature with which he used to sign every single tin of children's flour. He even has to commit himself to signing "Nestlé-Ehemant" in the future, and he takes this with his characteristic humor: "Since I sold my name," he says, "my wife had to help me get a new one."
First merger 1905
By parting with everything, Henri Nestlé makes his name, his company logo immortal. Under the radiance of the Nestlé bird's nest, an 89 billion franc corporation develops with an armada of 250,000 Nestlé employees worldwide (2002), which, through mergers and innovations, continues to add new branded products to its nest. 1905 saw the first major merger with the Cham-based Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company; 1929 saw the second major merger, through which the Swiss chocolate pioneers found their way into the Nestlé empire: François Cailler, Switzerland's oldest chocolate maker, Daniel Peter, inventor of milk chocolate, and Charles-Amédée Kohler, inventor of hazelnut chocolate. Diversification into chocolate production is accompanied by the acquisition of exquisite chocolate brands such as Cailler.
"Marketing is a matter for the boss"
There is a system to this approach: through mergers, Nestlé comes into possession of the Maggi brand (1947); through acquisitions, it acquires brands such as Libby's (1970), Buitoni, KitKat and Smarties (1988), Perrier (1992), San Pellegrino (1998), Häagen-Dazs, Purina (2001) and Mövenpick Ice Cream (2003). And Nestlé also develops numerous own-brand products that do not deny their origins: Nescafé, for example (1938), Nestea (1940), or Nespresso (1985).
The global corporation has remained true to its Vivis roots, which were once laid by the quality-conscious tinkerer and intuitive brand founder Henri Nestlé. It is no coincidence that Helmut Maucher, long-time Group CEO and Chairman of Nestlé S.A., published a book in 1992 entitled: "Marketing is a matter for the boss." If this word had existed in the mid-19th century - the phrase could have come from Henri Nestlé.
You can't replace my nest with the Swiss cross. The nest is not only my trademark, it is also my family crest. Everyone has the right to use a cross, but no one can use my coat of arms.
Anglo-Swiss relied on its milkmaid, while Nescafé refers to its origin in the logo.
The original Nestlé logo, dating back to 1868, has only been slightly revised a few times in over 150 years: in 1938, 1966, 1988 and most recently in 1995.
Cailler and Maggi came into Nestlé's "brand nest" as a result of mergers.
Figurative marks - Milestones in brand historyThis article on Nestlé's brand history is taken from the book "Figurative marks - Milestones in brand history".
In it, René Lüchinger presents twelve successful figurative marks: Apple, Globi, Lacoste, Mary Long (BAT), Meissen, Michelin, Mövenpick, Nestlé, Shell, St. Moritz, UBS, WWF. The book is published simultaneously in German, French and English. The publisher is Thomas Hermann, Managing Director, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Zurich. It is published by Orell Füssli, Zurich, ISBN 3-280-05077-4, Fr. 39.90 (WW).
Book vernissageOn October 20, René Lüchinger's book "Bildmarken - Meilensteine der Markengeschichte" will be presented at 11:30 a.m. at Haus Konstruktiv in the ewz substation Selnau in Zurich. In addition to the author, contemporary witnesses and direct descendants of creators of the advertising icons of our consumer society will be present, including Warja Lavater (90), who designed the Bankverein key (now the UBS logo), and Archie Dickens (95), to whom Mary Long (BAT) owes the woman's head. Registration at thomas. [email protected] or by fax 01 252 79 42. (WW)
René Lüchinger
