Have a Coke and a smile… Right? Well times have changed and the messaging behind Coke’s most recent campaign has changed too. This new campaign revolves around the social era in which we live today. Instead of simply drinking a Coca-Cola product and enjoying the experience individually, the new campaign focuses on the social interaction involved when you share a coke with a friend. Tapping into a market that is so deeply entrenched by “sharing” everything they do, Coca-Cola made the logical decision to make a personalized product with the intention to share.
When thinking about it, it’s very similar to what we do in our everyday lives. As humans we are unique individuals and we share our lives through the enormous offering of social media, so why not create Coke labels that have your name on them with the intention to share a drink with your friends, whether that’s in realty or digitally over the web? To date, 353,000 virtual bottles have been shared through Coca-Cola’s website and the numbers continue to grow. Additionally, whether consumers are sharing a Coke offline, it lends naturally to commenting about it online.
To make this venture even more appealing to the teen and millennial generations, Coke decided to use the top 250 names from the generations, as opposed to using names from older generations. This makes sense, because the teen and millennial generations are more inclined to share their Coke experience online. Coca-Cola did their due diligence in understanding how the population would react to this campaign by first releasing it in Australia in 2012. Then releasing it in 50 other countries before it made its way back to the United States. Coke developed a social media listening metric to track the results and they have returned a rather favorable impression.
Coca-Cola took two things that humans all love, which are friendships and themselves, and paired them together beautifully in this campaign. The next great idea is out there, we just have to look at ourselves first and see what speaks to us.
