A Jar of Nutella Went to Space. The Brand’s Response Is a Stellar Marketing Lesson |
A Jar of Nutella Went to Space. The Brand’s Response Is a Stellar Marketing Lesson
The company’s senior VP of spreads said the ‘phones lit up’ after Nutella appeared in the Orion capsule.
BY ANNABEL BURBA, EDITORIAL ASSISTANT @ANNIEBURBA
Photos: Courtesy Company; Getty Images
Nutella is giving “to the moon” a whole new meaning. Just before NASA’s Artemis II mission set the record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth on Monday, its livestream showed a very recognizable jar of hazelnut spread floating around the Orion spacecraft.
“When the clip started circulating, our phones lit up,” Noah Szporn, senior vice president of spreads at Nutella parent company Ferrero North America, told AdAge via email. “Fans were emailing us, sliding into our DMs and tagging us everywhere. It was impossible not to feel the joy of it.”
So Nutella jumped on the once-in-a-lifetime moment—which, according to Szporn, was not a paid product placement. The brand’s first move was to repost the livestream clip on X, TikTok, and Instagram superimposed with the words, “Nutella is out of this world.”
Then, it launched what seems to be a space-themed giveaway by posting a picture of a Nutella jar and asking customers to “Tell us the one thing you’d bring into the cosmos for a chance to have your name written in the stars (or on a custom Nutella jar).” The brand also changed its social media profile pictures to an image of a Nutella jar in front of the moon and added the phrase “Spreading smiles all the way to space” to its bios.
How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder
Thanks to the free NASA promo and its own social media moves, Nutella achieved a 910 percent increase in brand mentions between April 6 and April 7 compared to the prior two days, according to data Sprout Social provided to AdAge.
Szporn told the outlet that Nutella plans to “keep the momentum going because it’s genuinely a great story,” adding that “you’ll see us leaning into this across social and beyond.”
Nutella isn’t the only branded product the Artemis II crew is using. On April 4, astronaut Christina Koch appeared to be searching for The Honest Company hand lotion on NASA’s livestream. “I thought we had some on board, but we just haven’t come across it yet,” she said, according to footage posted by the brand on social media.