[lovemenot]

I work with some Nestle folks in Japan. One of them told me that they have 200 kitkat varieties nationwide. The idea is to align to local taste and pride in the "meibutsu" of each region. (e.g. pickled plum in Nagasaki). Nobody else does this, to my knowledge. The kit-kats are imported though as there is no local production. This marketing has been successful. KitKat is the #1 chocolate bar in Japan. Anecdotally, I was told that many consumers believe Nestle is a Japanese company.

[scardine]

From the accent I guess Japanese language don't has the L phoneme, so any brand with an L in the name would look foreign.

[thaumasiotes]

Japanese has just the one liquid phoneme; in terms of english they don't distinguish L from R. It's traditionally romanized with an 'r', but it can be pronounced as an L.

All that seems a little beside the point, though; they have their own (terrible) writing system. I'd kind of expect any brand using roman letters to look foreign.