No more Mr Nes guy

As an incurable fan of manga and a barely grown-up schoolboy at heart, Golgo13 is perhaps my greatest guilty pleasure. I have a large and much-loved collection of his comic-book adventures that stretches back over 20 years and along yards of bookshelf: when each new tome comes out, I knock children out of the way to get to the news-stand.

I say "guilty" because I know that the stories are really very nasty indeed. They appeal to precisely the same part of the brain that causes addiction to Grand Theft Auto, Resident Evil and the Bourne Trilogy.

For the newcomers, Golgo13 - the working name of Duke Togo - is a professional assassin par   excellence. In over 400 stories, he has never, ever failed to hit his mark. He has travelled from the seething jungles of South America to crumbling African dictatorships to thriving Iraqi biological warfare factories (I did mention this was fictional, didn't I...) and killed someone at every stop. Usually with a head-shot. Men or women. Black or white. Young or old. Married or Single. Rich or Poor. It doesn't matter: if he takes the contract, he makes the kill.

Along the way, however, he does get into a few scrapes. Scrapes which inevitably end in tears, violent sex, plumes of blood or all three. Something, one might say, of an anti-hero, Golgo merrily rapes, stabs, batters, shoots, and slices his way through the twilight world of espionage and organised crime, inflicting his amoral code on more or less everyone he meets. (On the right is a charming frame of him punching a woman in the face).

Religious and political leaders of all creeds, culture and race are depicted as villains or buffoons. He has been both victim and inflicter of torture and a voracious user of hookers. Everyone around him screws, swears and subverts. Oh, and he's a heavy smoker, the swine.

Odd, therefore, that Golgo13, should have been selected as the new "face" of Nescafe in Japan.

But lo and behold, he has appeared in a limited edition range of can coffee drinks that hit Japan's vending machines and convenience stores just as the summer "soft drink wars" are about to begin in earnest.

Now, Urban Dirt has never claimed to know a lot about marketing, but I know a company that does. So, in an attempt to understand this little gimmick a little better, I turned to Nestle's own document on the subject - the consumer section of its Corporate Business Principles brochure.

Principle 7 says: "Consumer communication should not exploit violence, bad manners or profanity. Its content must reflect good taste in a given country and culture. It should not depict attitudes that are discriminatory or offensive to religious, ethnic, political, cultural or social groups."

Which naturally makes the murderous protagonist of a series that depicts rape, misogyny, racism, sex, corruption and religious violence the perfect choice.

Excellent. But I wonder if I am missing the point somewhat. Perhaps Nestle really does want this association with uncompromising violence as the company - one of the world's biggest food processors -confronts a global mayhem of rising commodity prices, aggressive "grain diplomacy" and gloomy forecasts that wars will eventually be fought over rice, corn and wheat.

You see. For all of its advertising imagery of pink-cheeked babies and cheery-looking African mothers, Nestle is already standing squarely in the front-line of the world food and water crisis. It is already competing with car engines for the raw materials that make biofuels. It knows full well that the water tables are draining faster than the world's oil wells. It is already aware of milk shortages, soaring palm-oil prices and the insane cost of fertiliser. It is already working out the level at which commodity price rises can be passed onto consumers without starving them. It knows that the world of food is turning very, very nasty and doing so at some pace.

All sorts of activists dislike Nestle for all number of reasons. It is a player that has prevailed through many years in a tough and brutal game. But the company has always managed to put on the Mr Nice-Guy face in its communications with the outside world. Perhaps the blond locks and goody-goody image of the Milky Bar Kid is no longer quite what Nestle needs as the food wars begin. Maybe, by selecting an assassin to advertise its coffee, we are subtly being told that the nice-guy days are finally over - that the bulge in Nestle's pocket is no longer a Kit-Kat but a Smith & Wesson.

Comments

[Caspar]

Given the violent sexual nature of Mr Togo (and, one could argue, some of Nestle's 'sharper' business practices over the years), that bulge could be something else entirely...

[The pil]

I wonder if what Nestle is really saying is that one day they will hire assasins like Golgo to potect their corporate interests.

[A Nanawa]

It could've been worst. Nestle could've gone with Crying Freeman. At least he could shed a tear after killing people.