How Nestlé Transformed Japan’s Coffee Culture Through Emotional Imprinting

Marketers often focus on persuading audiences through traditional advertising, but the real opportunity may lie in reshaping behaviour itself. Nestlé’s experience in Japan offers a compelling case study in how deep cultural insight and long-term thinking can shift national habits, and provide valuable lessons for brands hoping to influence consumer behaviour.

When Nestlé entered the Japanese market in the 1970s, it quickly discovered that conventional marketing would fall flat. Japan was not only a tea-drinking nation; tea was deeply woven into its cultural identity, social rituals, and collective memory. The company’s initial advertising efforts failed because the issue was never visibility. It was meaning.

Recognising this, Nestlé pivoted from promotion to psychology. Its marketing team worked with psychoanalyst Dr Clotaire Rapaille, who argued that emotional preferences are formed during childhood. The team realised that the Japanese were not rejecting coffee on grounds of taste, they simply had no positive emotional imprint of it.

Instead of trying to convert adults, Nestlé targeted children. The company introduced coffee-flavoured sweets, chocolates and desserts - all non-caffeinated but designed to familiarise young consumers with the flavour in a warm, playful context.

One execution proved especially powerful: KitKat. Pronounced “Kitto Katto” in Japan, its name closely resembles “Kitto Katsu”, meaning “surely win”. This serendipitous phonetic overlap helped the brand resonate in a culture where small gestures of encouragement are cherished.

By the 1980s, the children who grew up with these products entered the workforce. When real coffee was reintroduced, it no longer felt foreign — it felt nostalgic.

In the 1970s, Nestlé’s biggest challenge remained convincing Japanese consumers to embrace the taste of coffee. To address this, the company again turned to French psychoanalyst Clotaire Rapaille. He found that coffee had left no emotional imprint on Japanese people as they grew up. Without this cultural grounding, spending millions on mass advertising was futile, as “they don’t have any emotional connection to the taste of coffee”.

His bold proposal was to “cultivate a love of coffee in children”. Nestlé launched a series of coffee-flavoured sweets, using sweetness as a bridge to help young consumers subtly accept the taste. Notably, this approach “won the love of children” and “sparked the curiosity of adults”.

As this generation matured, they became the primary consumers of coffee. When Nestlé relaunched its coffee products, sales soared. Young people already familiar with coffee flavours began buying coffee drinks willingly particularly Nescafé. The success of this approach demonstrated not only Nestlé’s long-term patience but the value of cultural adaptation.

Today, Japan is one of Nestlé’s largest markets, importing around $2.2 billion or roughly 500,000 tonnes of instant coffee annually. Remarkably, half a century earlier, coffee consumption in the country was virtually non-existent.

Nestlé strengthened this behavioural shift through initiatives like the Nescafé Ambassador programme, which installed free coffee machines in workplaces, helping position coffee as a daily office ritual. The company also embraced Japan’s love of vending machines by launching canned coffee, making consumption effortless and habitual.

The impact is clear. A 2024 Kadence study reports that 42% of Japanese consumers now choose instant coffee for its convenience, while 40% prefer ready-made options from shops.

For marketers, the lesson is unmistakable: behaviour doesn’t change through persuasion alone. It shifts when a product taps into emotion, memory, and everyday routine.

Nestlé didn’t win by competing with tea. It succeeded by patiently building emotional ownership, a strategy rooted not in selling, but in shaping behaviour.