Goodbye Lindt

Es kann ich nicht verstehen/ Je ne peux pas comprendre

Lindt & Sprungli launched a new range of chocolates in the past week, and there were a few things I noticed when I walked into my local Coop and was smashed in the face by the marketing campaign. The new chocolates are called Hello, and they are somewhat of a departure from what you'd expect from Lindt. On their Swiss website, the company claims that they are known worldwide for their leadership in the premium chocolate segment, which I found interesting, because I thought they were known for making an advert that is acknowledged to be cheesier than the Ferrero Rocher advert. But taking Lindt at their word, and assuming they are the leading premium chocolate maker in the world, the new line of Hello chocolates do not seem to reflect this positioning.

For a start the plain black, with supposedly hand stencilled writing is a long way from premium. I suspect Lindt of trying to do the artisanal thing, the packaging is reminiscent of a fudge maker in the UK, Burnt Sugar, which makes genuine artisanal fudge (disclosure: the founder happens to be a friend of mine, but that's not the point). Burnt Sugar's packaging pulls of this look a lot better than Lindt's. I suspect Lindt is also aiming for a hip, young and cool market with this packaging (and I'm sure they'll miss). A marketing campaign relying very heavily on English is further evidence of who they are targeting.

Whatever reason Lindt chose to communicate the proposition in English, to me it is irritating (I've mentioned before how the random use of English is strange). Then again, English speakers don't view English as an exclusive and premium language, because it's their language - French or German work better on us. But the English communication is extensive covering the name of the range, the varieties and the different formats, and it is the sheer amount of English used that worries me, not necessarily it's actual use. After all, Swisscom is called Swisscom, not SchweizKom.

The strap line each of the different flavour is also in English, some of which betray the immense try hard nature of the product by the fact that they are complete nonsense. "Every bit makes grum, grum, grum..." means nothing in English, whilst I appreciate that grum is made up and may be meant to represent the sound of nougat crunching, crunch  or some other recognisably English word would have been better here. Also they should use goes as the verb, definitely not makes.  It's annoying to see my language hacked like that. I don't mind if it happens somewhere like Nairobi, where the English used in advertising is often weird and wonderful, because in Kenya much of the English dialect used daily is a bit weird and wonderful.

The Summer Fruit flavour asks "are you ready for summer feelings?" My response to this question is no! No one in the world, ever, has had "summer feelings". The failure to understand the expression "that summer[time] feeling" cannot be pluralised suggests to me that a clever, non-native English speaker in the marketing department thought this particular strap line up. When their colleagues told them it was awful they somehow managed to filibuster the attempts to change it.  The less I say on this one, the less I'll annoy you dear reader.

Ultimately, whether English is your mother tongue or not, using it to brand products to this extent in Switzerland falls somewhere on a scale between confusing and annoying. It tells everyone, whatever language(s) they speak, that a clever marketing campaign is trying to cover up for a crap product. And that I think, before I've even tried them, is likely to be the crux of the problem of Lindt. I expect the product to be terrible, I'll probably never buy it.