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Italian shelf brands as digital products

Italian shelf brands as digital products

What a cocoa powder, a diet biscuit, and an Italian cola can teach about digital products

Markets have a way of burying good products without leaving a tombstone. No press release, no farewell campaign. One day, the thing is on the shelf, the next it is not, and the only record of its existence lives in the memories of people who grew up with it.

Italy has its share of these vanished consumer brands: Sprint, a cocoa powder that competed with Nesquik through the 1980s; the Linea Verde range from Mulino Bianco, a low-fat biscuit line that tried to make “healthy” taste like the real thing; and One O One, Sanpellegrino’s cola that launched in 1987 with 20 billion lire in television advertising and a genuine ambition to unseat Coca-Cola in Italy. All three products were decent. None of them survived.

What is interesting, looking at them now, is how precisely their failure modes map onto products we recognize from the digital world. The reasons a cocoa powder lost to Nesquik in 1989 are structurally identical to why Kijiji lost to Subito in 2022. The reason a PayPal-branded prepaid card disappeared from Italian tobacconists is the same reason the Linea Verde biscuits tasted faintly of grass. And the story of One O One trying to break a distribution lock held by Coca-Cola reads almost word for word like Google+’s attempt to unseat Facebook in social networking, a product that was genuinely better in specific ways, reached hundreds of millions of registered users, and still lost comprehensively to an incumbent that had locked up the one thing that mattered most: where everyone already was.

Sprint and Kijiji: when the brand does not stick

Sprint was a product of Plasmon, the Italian company best known for baby food. It launched in the 1970s as part of a diversification push and spent the 1980s competing directly with Nesquik. The product was genuinely good. The packaging was recognizable: a big orange tin with a blue cap, hiding collectible stickers underneath. For a while, Italian children were divided into Sprint families and Nesquik families, and the split felt meaningful.

By the end of the 1980s, Sprint was gone. The product had not changed. What had changed was the competitive landscape. Nestlé had resources that Plasmon could not match, distribution that was deeper and more reliable, and a mascot that children recognized instantly. Sprint fought with gadgets and nostalgia; Nesquik fought with scale. Scale won.

Kijiji followed an almost identical script. Launched in Italy in 2005 as an eBay subsidiary, it operated for years as a classified ads platform in a market where Subito was already the instinctive first choice. Both products did the same thing. Both worked fine. But “Subito” is an Italian word meaning “right away,” which is exactly what you want from a classifieds platform. “Kijiji” is a Swahili word for “village,” which is a lovely concept that means nothing to someone trying to sell a secondhand sofa in Milan on a Tuesday afternoon.

Kijiji had eBay behind it, just as Sprint had Plasmon. Large corporate parents, real budgets, genuine commitment. It was not enough. In 2021, Adevinta acquired eBay’s classifieds group, which included both Subito and Kijiji. It shut Kijiji down on May 31, 2022, migrating its users to Subito. The stronger brand absorbed the weaker one. The pattern is identical to what happened thirty years earlier with cocoa powder.

The lesson is not subtle: when two products are functionally equivalent, the one that people remember wins. Brand recall is not a soft metric. It is the whole game.

Linea Verde and the PayPal prepaid card: when the product contradicts the brand

Mulino Bianco built its entire identity on one promise: that industrial baking could still taste like something made by a family in a farmhouse. The advertising, the packaging, the fictional mill in the Sienese hills, the Ennio Morricone soundtrack — all of it pointed at the same idea. Warmth, authenticity, pleasure without guilt.

The Linea Verde range, launched in the 1990s, asked consumers to accept a different deal: the same brand, but with the fat taken out. The product was technically honest about what it was. The problem was that removing fat from a biscuit in the 1990s required substituting ingredients that degraded the texture and introduced off-flavors. People who remember the Baiocchi from the Linea Verde describe them as tasting faintly of something green, something not quite right. The brand said “pleasure.” The product said “discipline.” Those two things cannot live in the same biscuit tin.

The PayPal prepaid card in Italy made the same mistake with more moving parts. PayPal’s entire brand equity rests on being frictionless, digital, and instant. You click a button and money moves. That is the promise. To issue a physical prepaid card in Italy, PayPal partnered with CartaLis, a Lottomatica subsidiary, and distributed the card through a network of over 8,000 tabacconists and lottery points. You could top it up at the corner newsagent, which sounds convenient until you try it and discover that the offline infrastructure has a different rhythm than the PayPal app. The card and the PayPal account did not communicate cleanly. Loading money was one process; spending it online through PayPal was another. The interoperability that would have made the product seamless was never fully there.

PayPal stopped selling new cards in May 2019. The remaining cards were run until expiry, and the service was formally wound down in December 2023, when Poste Italiane acquired LIS Pay and reorganized the network. A significant volume of cards had circulated through the market for years. None of that translated into a lasting product. The brand said “digital simplicity.” The distribution model said “queue at the tobacconist.” Those two things cannot live in the same wallet either.

One O One and Google+: the structural wall

Of the three Italian consumer cases, One O One is the one that deserves the most sympathy because it did not involve brand confusion or product-brand mismatch. It failed because Coca-Cola had constructed a distribution system that effectively locked competitors out of the market.

When Sanpellegrino launched One O One in June 1987 with a genuinely massive advertising push, the product reached a 2% market share in its first year. Then sales fell. The reason, as documented in subsequent litigation that Sanpellegrino brought before the Milan tribunal and the European Court of Justice, was that Coca-Cola’s contracts with Italian retailers offered favorable discounts in exchange for an exclusive commitment not to stock competing cola products. Shopkeepers who tried to carry One O One received letters from Coca-Cola warning them they would lose those discounts. European competition authorities eventually fined Coca-Cola. The fine was smaller than the benefit of maintaining the monopoly. One O One survived in niche markets in Calabria, Puglia, and Sardinia for decades before Sanpellegrino finally discontinued it in 2020.

Google launched Google+ in June 2011 with a structurally similar ambition and considerably greater resources: to build a social network that was genuinely better than Facebook, backed by the most-visited company on the internet. The launch was striking. Within two weeks, Google+ had 10 million users. Within a year, 90 million. The Circles feature, which let you organize contacts into distinct groups and control what each group could see, was objectively more sophisticated than Facebook’s privacy model at the time. Hangouts offered group video calls before they were standard. For users interested in niche topics — technology, photography, science — the signal-to-noise ratio was noticeably better than on Facebook. I used it myself for a period, particularly for tech discussions: the conversations were more substantive, the communities more focused, the content less cluttered with the noise that makes Facebook exhausting. It felt like a better-designed space for people who actually wanted to talk about ideas.

And yet 90% of Google+ sessions lasted less than five seconds, according to data cited in Google’s own internal assessments. The problem was not the product. The problem was the same as the one One O One faced: the incumbent had something the challenger could not replicate, regardless of product quality. For Coca-Cola, it was retail shelf access. For Facebook, it was the social graph — the irreplaceable, years-deep web of connections every user had already built. Switching to Google+ meant asking not just yourself but everyone you knew to move simultaneously. That is not a product problem. It is a network-effects problem and structurally identical to a distribution lock.

Google tried to force the issue in ways that ultimately backfired. It integrated Google+ into YouTube, requiring users to hold a Google+ account to leave comments. It tied Google+ to other Google services, pushing the platform to users who had not asked for it. These moves inflated the registered user numbers — at its peak, Google+ claimed 540 million monthly active users — but they could not manufacture genuine engagement. Forced adoption and organic adoption are not the same, and users can tell the difference. A security bug disclosed in 2018 exposed the profile data of up to 52.5 million users, and Google accelerated the shutdown rather than invest in repair. Google+ closed on April 2, 2019.

The niche communities — the photographers, the developers, the tech enthusiasts — mourned it genuinely. They had built something real inside the platform. But a social network that works beautifully for an engaged minority and fails to hold the attention of everyone else is not a viable business. One O One survived in Calabria and Sardinia. Google+ survived among photographers and Linux users. Neither survival was enough.

What connects all of this

Three Italian consumer products and three digital products. Different decades, different categories, different technologies. The same three failure modes: losing on brand recall when the product is fungible (Sprint, Kijiji); contradicting your own brand promise through the wrong distribution model (Linea Verde, PayPal prepaid); and running into structural market access barriers held by a dominant incumbent (One O One, Google+).

None of these products was bad. Several of them were genuinely loved. The market does not owe its survival to products it loves. It owes its survival to products that solve the right problem, in the right way, for the right brand, in a market where the entry path is actually open. When one of those conditions fails, the product ends up as a memory on a nostalgia forum or as a line item in a venture capital portfolio review.

The shelf and the app store have more in common than we usually admit.

Sources

Chiara Bonifazi