Coca Cola idea goes global

Melbourne Herald Sun, May 9, 2103


A brilliant Australian idea is moving and shaking the world's biggest soft drink on the other side of the planet.

Remember summer 2011, when Coca Cola ran a campaign with people's names on the labels of bottles and cans? Called "Share a Coke With a Friend", the company put out 150 different names on its packs, and also set up locations where those who wanted others, could have an individual name reproduced.

With the northern summer about to start, that campaign has now been adopted by Coca Cola in the UK and is about to flood the British Isles with bottles called Nicholas and Sarah - again a list of 150 names plus the opportunity of special requests at the big shopping malls.

This past summer saw the concept's first overseas trial, in New Zealand, and found that the idea worked just as well there. The Americans, of course, are watching developments very closely.

The campaign was conceived by agencies Ogilvy and Naked. Having spent a few years of my life flogging fizzy water - not Coke, but in competition with them - I know what a hard job it is. How do you generate interest? Put the kids on a surfboard, next year put them on a skateboard, next chuck them out of a plane with a parachute (one of the great Coke successes was the kids sky-surfing before opening their parachutes. Launched a whole new sport.) But then your competitors do the same thing and it gets harder to differentiate your brand.

After years of doing this, interest in the drink sinks low. It's the opportunity for the competitors to muscle in. So Red Bull and Mother, Gatorade and fruit juices, they all begin to squeeze mighty Coke on the shelves and where it matters most - in the sales.

Putting names on the cans was brilliant lateral thinking. Where soft drinks have always been personalised by the brand, here the idea was to give each bottle its own personality, making it a Mike or a Kylie. Sure enough the kids picked this up - and did the rest themselves through their mobile phones and social media. They connected with friends, swapped bottles in the schoolyard, contacted distant pals to say they had found "their" bottle. And of course they endlessly pestered Coke with "my name, my name" requests. Which there was a system set up to fulfill.

What are you trying to do when you are marketing? You are trying to create an interest in your product, awareness, start a conversation. The spark that lit this campaign - including the sacrilegious invasion of the label space by a "foreign" word - was the research discovery that some 50% of Australian teenagers had not tasted Coke. A few years back this would have been unthinkable, it needed a drastic remedy. Which is exactly what this campaign did. How can anyone resist a cold summer drink with their name on it?

In Britain the local marketers are excited by the prospects for summer. They know that in Australia, consumption was boosted seven percent. Which in a mature market like this, is huge. For years they have had nothing to excite the market. Meanwhile bovver-booted macho brands like Red Bull and even Coca Cola's own Mother have been able to flash their racing cars and motor bikes past the goody goodies in the Coke ads.

Now there will be something to get kids talking about Coke again, and tie it into the Facebook-Twitter conversations, for this summer at least. Those Aussies got some smart ideas, no wonder the Covent Garden ad agencies seem to ring with Strine accents.
ray@ebeatty.com