Ferror Rocher sucks, but their marketing isn’t

every Christmas, my relatives, friends, etc always give Ferrero Rocher as a gift ,and vice versa. as kid, i had no good memory with this kind of chocolate and still doesn’t til this very day. the chocolate is overly sweetened, light weight, and very cheep feeling, mainly due to their plastic containers and sketchy wrappings. recently, i found out these thing also don’t come cheap either.

i am not a very picky eater nor a chocolate snob, but i can’t go for a second ferrero rocher. i know that a lot of people really like Ferrero Rocher as i research about this topic, a lot of Americans and Indians!? (lol, i don’t know why but every results i search for Ferrero Rocher is for the Indian market). maybe i’m the only person who doesn’t like Ferrero Rocher. so let’s go in depth to find out.

1. ingredients

according to Ferrero Rocher’s website US and Canada, their ingredients are milk chocolate, sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, skim milk powder, butteroil, lecithin as emulsifier, vanilla (artificial flavor), hazelnuts, palm oil, wheat flour, why, low-fat cocoa powder, sodium bicarbonate and salt.

i am obviously not a chef or a food scientist, so i don’t even know what lecithin and sodium bicarbonate are. but here is me trying my best to explain it to you.

lecithin is a chemical substance, used for smoothing food textures. A major source of lecithin is soybean oil. lecithin is approved by the FDA to be “generally recognized as safe” for human consumption. for sodium bicarbonate, that is baking soda. in Ferrero Rocher, baking soda is used for leavening, which means it’s for the fluffiness of the biscuit inside (could be).

all ingredients seem normal to me, but is way too normal for a premium brand they are trying to build? a premium chocolatier in my mind should be somewhat traditional and handmade feeling, not manufactured and artificial.

2. pricing

i got this statistic from betterRetailing, here are the price-watch as in 2022. Ferrero Rocher prices ranges from £4.50 to £7.99 as for the most common price. This alone is a lot more than other brands.

one noticeable thing is the price jump between the lowest, most common and the highest price. for other brands, the difference is maximum £1 or less, except for Lindt Lindor. but for Ferrero Rocher price difference is around £2 and even up to £4, just unreal for me.

3. marketing scheme

let’s be real here, i can’t just go on and rant on how bad Ferrero Rocher is, a lot of people just love it. it seems to be very presentable with golden wrapper, a fancy brown cup with sparkling clear plastic container, it is a perfect gift for any occasions, and yet affordable. the affordability is crucial for any brands like this, this is why people choose Ferrero Rocher over other brands. they can go extra fancy and choose legitimate professional chocolatier but why when you have a beautiful, presentable, cheap compared to those fine chocolatiers.

another factor that builds Ferrero Rocher’s fanciness is their branding. the Italian, hard to pronounce and memorize name seems to make the brand more memorable?! it is just that hilarious, costumers will remember their packaging and commercials even more than the name itself. this creates an illusion of a fancy brand as famous brands don’t have there name easy to remember at all, for examples, Mercedes, Peugeot, Toblerone, etc. good luck try to remember how to spell those.

have you ever seen a Ferrero Rocher advert before. here is one for the Vietnam market, it has 4.9M views on the time i am writing this

look how glamorous it is, shiny chocolate dripping all over, fancy flying balls. they are trying to make it looks a lot more than it is. so you may wonder, what is the true cost of these Nutella balls? cause I do question myself that. and to be honest, i don’t even know, but i am certain that with the amount of money i spend on Ferrero Rocher lavish look, i can get more chocolate or higher quality ones.

there marketing scheme seems genius for me, they make the consumers believe that their chocolate is luxurious, and that giving out Ferrero Rocher is fancy, cause they are expensive. their products have a catchy place at supermarkets, and also all the way to the consumers’ home. all of these they try to do, is snowballing , bigger and bigger, making Ferrero a sweet chocolate empire.

so what i am trying to say

Ferrero Rocher chocolate balls are not fancy at all, but their marketing is so good that people actually believe that they are really fancy. no offence towards Ferrero or anyone, i’m always grateful when i receive Ferrero Rocher for Christmas, and i adore their commercials.

at the end of the day, what i learn is their great commercials, branding. how about you, do you like Ferrero Rocher?