Brand Audit Objectives, Scope, and Approach

Objectives: We seek to understand the health of Nescafé’s brand equity and basis of positioning in order to generate strategic recommendations based on this analysis.

Scope: In order to meet our brand objectives we will seek to understand Nescafé’s brand equity, core brand values, and associations in the United States. We believe that analyzing parts of the global Nescafé brand is pivotal to being able to comprehend the brand’s influence in the United States.

Approach: We will focus mostly on secondary research for our brand audit, but we will use primary sources whenever possible. Additionally, a marketing research project was undertaken by the group to assess the brand equity locally within the Washington Metropolitan area.

Background about Brand
The idea to create soluble coffee originated in 1930 when the Brazilian government approached the Nestlé brand with a proposition. (Nescafé 2011) The Brazilian Coffee Institute wanted to create a coffee that was soluble in hot water in order to increase the use of coffee and thus help increase Brazil’s exports. A Nestle executive named Max Morgenthaler set up a team, and it began experimenting different ways to meet that request while still maintaining the coffee flavors that everyone loved. After seven years of research in Switzerland, Nescafé was born.(Nescafé 2011) The name stems from a combination of Nestlé and café, the Italian word for coffee. It was introduced in Switzerland on April 1st, 1938 as the world’s first commercially successful soluble coffee; hugely popular with Allied forces during WW2, it became a runaway success thereafter. (Nescafé 2011 ) In the 1960s Nestle introduced a new brand, Taster’s Choice, in the United States instead of Nescafé. In 2003, the company reintroduced the Nescafé brand to the United States in the form of Nescafé Taster’s