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It's not immediately obvious what KitKats have to do with selling Scotland, but when the Marketing Society gets together, they can turn their firepower on any product.

The link with the Homecoming programme was one reason why senior ex-pats from the marketing of Disney merchandising, Amazon and Nestle confectionery were there to impart some wisdom in Edinburgh at the back end of the week.

I interviewed David Rennie, managing director of Nestle confectionery, based in York - spiritual home of Rowntree chocolate, where there are three factories producing awesome quantities of KitKats.

Since Nestle took over the company in 1988, it has built KitKat into a £1 billion product, with production in every continent; its secret in its ambiguity - neither biscuit nor chocolate bar, quite British but locally appealling in every market.

The "Have a Break - Have a KitKat" slogan goes back nearly all of the 75 years since Rowntree's marketing manager took the radical step of commissioning customer research into the appeal of rival market leader, Cadbury's Dairy Milk.

George Harris found the chocolate bar could be a bit too sweet and a bit too filling, and instead of Rowntree's repeated attempts to find something that matched its rival's lead product, it found an alternative niche with something less sweet and less filling. The rest is marketing history and has featured in countless tea breaks and lunch boxes.

In Japanese, KitKat comes very close to the words for 'good luck' - so it's become the gift of choice for someone about to take an exam. A lot of Japanese kids take a lot of exams. That's smart marketing for you.

So what did David Rennie have to say about the marketing of Scotland?

"Any iconic brand - and that could be a product, a service or potentially a country - has to have some certain things working for it, and it starts with the fantastic product. In the case of KitKat, it was developed specifically to appeal to people with its product form and product shape.

"Without stretching that parallel too far, if you don't have a decent offering, if you don't have something that people really want and value, anything else you do in terms of marketing is really academic and fluff.

"There are lessons for some services and potentially for some countries: what it is we offer, is it something people value? If they do, people will stick it, and you have a chance of developing it. If you're trying to sell something people don't want and don't value, it will never work."

And from York, how does his home country score?

"Scotland from the outside is well managed, but still has some room to grow. Scotland has some amazingly strong characteristics and stregnths. In the past ten years, it has found its voice and is beginning to speak out. What Scotland has to do is ensure as a nation we have to be outward looking and not inward looking and fractious."

You can hear more of the interview if you listen again to The Business, broadcast this morning on Radio Scotland.

Stick around, and next week on The Business, you can find out the secret of marketing branded Winnie the Pooh honey, among Disney's other food offerings, without getting stuck in the healthy eating trap.