Nestlé’s top selling chocolate bar has been telling consumers for nearly 70 years to “take a break” but its marketing team is doing anything but take a break as it aims to grab the attention of Gen Z.
Shannon Wright, who leads Nestlé’s confectionary marketing in Australia, said that company recently built a framework to cater its marketing efforts more to Gen Z culture, including novel activations for the gaming and student communities.
This approach runs in conjunction with broader mass market activity, including bringing to life Nestle’s sponsorship of Formula 1, including the Australian Grand Prix this weekend.
“We still run campaigns for years and years that are consistent around ‘Take A Break’, but we have started to build a plan to add a bit more dynamism to the consistency targeting younger consumers,” Wright told B&T.
“Gen Z is really interesting and they are big snackers. I think they have around 24 snacks a week, and they are growing their buying power as well. This is a big opportunity for us as a business but we have to take a different approach.
“Their expectations of creative and how they consume media is fundamentally different to millennials, so that really triggered a change in the way we were doing things.”
Two standout campaigns that illustrate KitKat’s Gen Z approach include creating a study video and a KitKat sponsored gaming chair.
In 2025, KitKat partnered with major gaming streamers and provided them with a KitKat chair and QR code.
The brand discovered that gamers would stream for up to ten hours without a break, so it launched ‘Break Chair’.
When streamers took a break, viewers who scanned the QR code on the chair were rewarded with a bespoke KitKat bar.
The campaign won a gold Effie Australia award for Innovative Media or Channel Solutions and a silver Effie for Youth Marketing.
“We weren’t really inserting ourselves in gaming or sponsoring gaming by putting a logo on a game,” Wright said. “We wanted to encourage the break for streamers and viewers. When streamers invariably need to go off and snack or go to the bathroom, people still sit there and stare at an empty chair or game on another screen, they don’t have a break.
“That insight informed the crux of the campaign.”
Viewers who stopped and had a break for two minutes would receive limited edition KitKat bars designed by the streamers.
Another innovative campaign targeted university students.
“YouTube is the second biggest studying tool behind class notes,” Wright said. “They study for extraordinary lengths of time and would do stuff like have a YouTube video called ‘study with me’, which was just another person studying to make them feel less lonely while studying.”
KitKat’s ‘Ultimate Study Guide’ is based on the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method that recommends breaking up work into 25-minute bursts with five minute breaks.
The video reminds students to take a break after 25 minutes of calming music.
“That one was quite fun for me because we all felt we could do some real good but we still needed to feel a little bit tongue-in-cheek and Kit Katty,” Wright said.
KitKat’s current marketing activity is focused on its global sponsorship of Formula 1, which revs up this weekend at the Australian Grand Prix.
KitKat has installed a pop up at the event, and launched a special F1 car shaped chocolate bar that can be bought at Woolworths and Coles.
“We’re not a sponsor that’s just going to put our logo on it,” Wright said. We’re going to activate this in a way that feels disruptive and right for the brand.”
Although KitKat is finding novel new ways to engage with target audiences, it is also staying true to its ‘Take A Break’ mantra, one of adland’s most enduring marketing slogans that has been around for 68 years.
“I work for a brand with some of the most extraordinary brand assets in the world and that is a true privilege,” Wright said.
“KitKat inherently stands for something so deeply in a way that not many brands do. And it’s a great starting point to have such distinctive assets and build on that consistency in market.”
Wright, who reports to Nestle marketing chief Anneliese Douglass and manages a team of six in confectionary, said that the creative challenge for KitKat is to find innovative and fun ways to bring ‘Take A Break” to life.
The team works closely with its agency partners, which include VML, Eleven and WPP Open, to come up with fresh ideas.
“We have a very strong shared vision,” Wright said. “It’s really inspiring watching people in the agency village have the same sense of energy behind the work,”she said. “One thing that’s critical is to be hard on the work, and kind on the people.”
Undoubtedly, that would involve taking a break every 25 minutes for a KitKat.
