Last week I mentioned my travels to Vietnam and looked at a campaign from overseas and how it could be understood internationally. This week I shall look at a brand I think we will all know, Coca-Cola and their Share a Coke campaign.
It hit me recently just how international this brand was when I was walking up Marble Mountain in Da Nang. It shocked me that so far from home walking up this beautiful mountain was a bench with none other than the Coca-Cola logo engraved upon it. Now I’ll be honest I’m not sure if this is a good thing, it being so hard to get away from these brands, but it does show just how far and wide a brand like Coca-Cola reaches.
Coca-Cola doesn’t really need much advertising. For some it’s our default order when eating out, it is for my dad anyway. As much as the product itself doesn’t need advertising the brand and its values still do. One of Coca-Cola’s most notable campaigns is the Share a Coke campaign. This international campaign saw bottles of Coke featuring people’s names hitting shop shelves as well as our social media feeds. Let’s face it, we all looked out for our name on a Coke bottle, for some this was easier than others and didn’t Coca-Cola anticipate this! During the campaign you could also order a bottle with your name on it so no one was left out. As you may know my name is fairly common so it wasn’t too hard for me to find my name but for others in my family it wasn’t as simple as that so my dad ordered some of the glass bottles for those in the family who had a little bit of a harder time finding their more unique name. My dad wasn’t the only one to order personalised bottles, in 2014 730, 000 bottles were ordered from the Coca-Cola e-commerce site.
Through this campaign it wasn’t just names printed on the bottles. Taglines also prompted us to share our Coke with a Sister, Friend, Brother, Family and other relations. This advert released during the Share the Coke campaign shows us how family and friends aren’t always stereotypical but are actually who we perceive as our family or friends, just like in a recent McCain TVC . In this case it is a dad that also wants to be seen as a friend by his son.
This beautifully sound designed TVC may be relatable to quite a few people, that resistance when a parent decides to join a social networking site and send you that request! Do you welcome them to this part of your life or resist? Here we see a teenage boy that seems to be ignoring that request from his dad who gives him a little push with this bottle.
Looking at this we may think it’s a very simple campaign just adding names and relations on to bottles. It’s these simple campaigns that seem to work so well though with ‘Share a Coke’ originating from Sydney, Australia back in 2011. Since then the campaign has launched in over 70 countries, meaning Coca-Cola sure did make its mark with these personalised bottles, which are still available online. Just because it’s a simple idea doesn’t mean it didn’t take a lot of hard work to implement it.
I hope you have enjoyed my brief look into Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign. As always I would love to see your comments below and I’m always up for a discussion on any of my blog topics if you want to drop me a message via LinkedIn or Instagram.
Featured image courtesy of YouTube/TechWise007.
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