Japan's Pocky goes global in bid for billion-dollar snack status
The Pocky biscuit maker is serious about building into a billion-dollar brand.
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For the first time in its 92-year history, Japanese snacks maker Ezaki Glico is getting serious about building its Pocky biscuit into a billion-dollar brand.
The company’s 48-year-old stick-shaped, chocolate-coated Pocky pretzels are household names in Japan but elsewhere the marque has stalled, capping the firm’s overseas business at just a 10th of its $US3 billion revenue.
Now, the company is rewriting its branding and marketing strategies for Pocky, targeting a more than doubling in sales to $US1 billion by 2020.
Only 21 snack brands in the world belong to the billion-dollar club, none of them Asian.
The plan involves the adoption of the Pocky name everywhere except Europe, where a joint venture is complicating matters, plus uniform new packaging and a universal tagline: “Share Happiness.”
“The hurdles are high, but if they succeed it would mean a huge boost to profits,” said Tomonobu Tsunoyama, senior analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research Center, the research arm of Tokai Tokyo Securities.
To strengthen the product’s brand identity, global brand manager Tsuyoshi Matsuki has standardised the package design to a red box for regular chocolate-flavoured Pocky.
This year, in Malaysia, he re-branded the snack from “Rocky,” its name there for the past four decades.
Sales in Indonesia quintupled in 2013 as Glico enlisted popular girl band JKT48 to plug Pocky on TV. Pocky’s worldwide sales rose by a third in 30 markets worldwide to around $US400 million in 2013.
Nevil Gibson for NBR Food Industry Week
Fri, 14 Nov 2014
Fri, 14 Nov 2014
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Japan's Pocky goes global in bid for billion-dollar snack status
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