Coca-Cola "Share A Coke" Campaign

COCA-COLA

When we talk about a brand which mainly focused on sharing happiness, which brand comes to our mind first? Probably 85%-90% people will say that Coca-Cola is the brand which really thinks about the happiness of their customers. Actually, “Coca-Cola: Open The Happiness” says it all. After Apple and Microsoft, Coca-Cola is the most valuable and renowned brand of the world.  Coca-Cola (a carbonated soft drink) is produced by the multinational beverage corporation and manufacturer “The Coca-Cola Company”. Coca-Cola was, invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton in Columbus, Georgia. The Coca-Cola formula and brand was bought in 1889 by Asa Griggs Candler, who incorporated The Coca-Cola Company in 1892. It is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The current chairman and CEO is Muhtar Kent and Joseoh V. Tripodi is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer of The Coca-Cola Company.

In this blog I am going to write about the campaign of Coca-cola "Share A coke" which was designed for Australia.

Target Market

 

IMC TOOLS

 

 

1. Advertising

For this campaign coca-cola basically chose billboards. They advert the whole campaign digitally and interactively. The message was everywhere in the city. In metro stations, bus and phone booths everywhere they posted the message "share a coke". 

                              main print advertise

metro station

normal billboard

                                                                   

On footpath

On bus

Interactive billboard

  

2. Interactive marketing

This whole campaign was basically based on Interactive marketing. They started the campaign by creating a buzz in the social sites such as Facebook, Twitter. While the buzz was creating they were collecting the faces of their campaign from social sites.

Posts on Facebook & Twitter

After the successful promotion of 150 names they started to get request for thousands of names and in response coca-cola offered any name can be printed on the bottle. But the whole campaign went so much viral that people started to queue for hours. They got thousands of requests for names that it was quite impossible to print everyone names. So coca-cola started to take votes. They asked in a poll that with whom you want to share a coke most. Unbelievably, 65 thousand people voted. From those vote coca-cola published 50 new names.

Online voting

They also introduced virtual can. In a virtual can anyone can put their name on and can share it on social sites. 

virtual can

virtual can

3. Direct Marketing & Personal selling:

The main strategy of this campaign was direct marketing and personal selling. The plan of the campaign was to go person and make everyone happy. Printed names on the can is the sign of going person. And with the desire name it has done basically personal selling. The aim was to bring people together on a more personal level and acted as tool to find, connect and share with people they know.

 

Name on the can

when they successfully ran the campaign with 150 names coca-cola was flourished by thousands of request. so they set up kiosk, where anyone one can come and print their name on the can instantly. Here they used personal selling concept.

The Kiosk

Sign up

 

The line

After getting the can with the name

4. Sales promotion

Coca-cola did not use any kind of sales promotion. But they used a feature of listening music on their Facebook page. At the page they featured 150 songs with 150 names.

Music

 

5. Publicity

To make this campaign viral coca-cola used positive word of mouth mostly. First of all they made a hype that something is coming that is close to you. They promote something is coming with your name. And when they started the campaign everyone just felt in love with coca-cola. Besides the sharing of happiness with hash tags the most viral thing happened when everyone started to talk about the product and writing blogs. Everyone felt in love with coca-cola. Blogs and social media played a great role in this campaign. The Facebook page became the most talked about locally and 23rd globally, with an increased traffic of 870%, 121m impressions and 374,946 entries to a win $50k to share with a mate. Young adult consumption increased significantly during the campaign, increasing 7% and 75,902 personalized virtual Coke cans were shared.

OPINION

We all know that Coca-cola is one of the best and well known brand in the world. In their campaigns we can see that every time they are showing something new and innovative. Same goes with the "SHARE A COKE" campaign. I think this is a best way to communicate with the customers, actually this is the most unique and polished way to come close to customers. Marketers now-a-days spend a lot of money on TV commercials. Actually they are not that confidence in social media. “Share a Coke” showed that this new landscape is here. There is still a belief in the marketing world that you need to spend big on media to make sure people see your ideas, but “Share a Coke” proved that your resources which are your own consumers, can be a tool of your promotional tools on building a profitable customer relationship. And if you ask me how the campaign made them fall in love with coca-cola or how were they emotionally attached with this campaign, I would like to show a picture that will give the answer of all your question!

A wife to his Husband who is in military

At last in Coca-cola's word I would like to say "One country painted red" .

Here is the whole campaign :