Nestlé: Grasping the nettle

An object lesson in how to use the medium to stand your corner when your reputation is under public fire.

The Site

Nestlé, the world’s biggest food and drinks company, uses the Our Responsibility section of its main website to give an account of its corporate behaviour in 10 fields of activity. These include Infant Formula, which deals with the controversial sale and distribution of Nestlé’s Infant Formula baby milk in the developing world.

The company sets out its policy on a single page in a series of six ‘Does’, eight ‘Does not’ and one ‘Will’ statements. For example, Nestlé Infant Formula “DOES comply with both the letter and spirit of the World Health Organization’s International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes”; Nestlé “DOES NOT give incentives to its staff based on infant formula sales”.

There are also links to a substantial Nestlé’s Baby Milk mini-site where the history, issues and Nestlé’s activities are recorded and reported. This has an FAQ section asking and answering difficult questions. An online form is provided to ‘Ask a question’ along with a selection of External Links to third-parties such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the independent pressure group, Baby Milk Action.

The Takeaway

The Infant Formula controversy has dogged Nestlé since the early 1970s when a War on Want pamphlet was published in Germany under the title ‘Nestlé Kills Babies’. So it has had plenty of time to respond and map out its position. Nevertheless, the form that response takes on its website is something of an object lesson in how to use the medium to stand your corner when your reputation is under public fire.

Above all, Nestlé marshals the advantages of the web: you can’t be heckled or have rotten fruit thrown at you there and you do have infinite space and time, so you can set our your defence on your terms and in your own way. Nestlé chooses to do this boldly and directly, mixing its own ‘charter’ of commitments with links to independent but interested third parties and even an opposing pressure group.

Some large companies with similar kinds of baggage still argue against giving the ‘oxygen of publicity’ to pressure groups or maintain these are disputes they can’t win so shouldn’t risk inflaming. But the nature of the web means that ‘taking the Fifth Amendment’ itself increasingly looks incriminating. Nestlé has recognised this and followed the trusted management dictum to concentrate on controlling what it can control.

First published on 25 October, 2005