cant pasta brand to its food interests. However, the role of pasta and Italian
foods as part of Nestlé’s overall food strategy quickly changed and the aim
became to make Buitoni the leading worldwide brand of authentic Italian
food. Nestlé developed a simple but encompassing concept for Buitoni:
Buitoni represents all good Italian cooking. In a few years, Nestlé invested
$400 million in Buitoni to build the company’s competitive position with
pasta, sauces and cooked dishes in a variety of ways such as dry, frozen,
fresh and cooked-chilled.
In early 1992, after several earlier reorganizations, Nestlé refocused its
activities away from a narrow division by product and process technology,
such as frozen or canned foods. The new organization consisted of market-
focused divisions with four key strategic brands plus two product areas.
Buitoni was placed in this reformed structure alongside the Friskies, Nestlé
and Nescafé brands. Along with the reorganization came a new strategic
focus that took advantage of Nestlé’s reach by picking out ‘hit’ or lead
brands such as Buitoni from a country and sowing them across borders.
Buitoni got its own formal strategic business unit structure (SBU) and a
dedicated research facility. It had been operating as a strategic business
unit informally since 1990. The SBU has overall responsibility for the devel-
opment of the brand and provides advice to each marketing unit on mar-
keting, advertising and technical developments of the range.
Focus: United Kingdom
Nestlé chose the Buitoni brand and particularly the UK for an experiment
of new ways of building a brand. At the time, Buitoni was the brand leader
in the £72 million pasta market, with an 18 per cent value share and a 16
per cent volume share. Buitoni’s total pasta business in the UK, including
add-on products, amounted to between £22 million and £25 million. Its
product range included a wide range of authentic Italian products, includ-
ing dry pasta, tomato purée, bakery products, parmesan cheese and spe-
ciality pasta sauces.
Pasta was a small but rapidly growing market in the UK. It grew more
than 10 per cent to £85 million in 1991 and £102 million in 1992, according
to the Pasta Information Centre, an industry association.* Buitoni held the
market share position followed by Napolina, a CPC International division,
with 6 per cent. Napolina was one of the few branded pasta makers that
had started to build a product portfolio around the theme of Italian-based
The customer market domain: Managing relationships with buyers 67
*Market sizes and share estimates varied widely from research company to research
company, including Euromonitor, the Pasta Information Centre and Nielsen, due to
the differences in the year-to-year reporting intervals, the rapid growth but small
size of the market and the differences in definitions of the pasta market.