An interesting and in-depth article comes from yesterday’s Jakarta Globe where it discusses Nestle’s Digital Acceleration Team, a group of people stationed in Switzerland that monitor real time conversations about their product lines across the world. One purpose of the year-old DAT is to minimize damage from online criticisms. The company has doubled spending on social media in the last couple of years.
Of particular concern now to the $200 billion food and beverage company that owns a $7 billion bottled water per annum business including Poland Spring, Perrier and San Pellegrino is the criticism it is receiving “that bottled water makers damage the environment when they extract the water, waste resources on bottles and shipping, and take what should be a common good,” according to the piece. Nestle has received lambasting in previous years for selling baby formula in developing countries For example, yesterday’s article garnered criticism from a reader named PakMB stating “sorry Nestle, I cannot forget the baby formula, I avoid bottle water if I can, and nescafe is just so horrible. How can anyone drink it? I always try to avoid Nestle products.”
Nestle is not the only bottled water company taking flak for its business. Other bottled H20 companies including Coca-Cola are taking a hit as well for its alleged practices. To read more of this fascinating article, click on the link above.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/26/us-nestle-online-water-idUSBRE89P07S20121026
