Have you noticed how effectively Coca Cola marketing employs social media? When choosing to learn from others social media strategies, it is always helpful to choose one of the top dogs in social media … like Coca Cola.
We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble solutions.
– Lee Iacocca
Meet Coca Cola
Coke has been successfully executing their social media marketing plan since the first days of social media and social commerce. For nearly a decade their strategies have played a significant role in their marketing innovation.
An introduction to Coca Cola is probably unnecessary but here are a few key facts.
They are the world’s biggest drinks company, controlling more than half the global market in carbonated soft drinks as well as a substantial chunk of the somewhat larger non-carbonated segment. It owns four of the world’s five best-selling soft drinks.
Its principal brand is, of course, Coca Cola itself, the world’s best-known and most valuable brand. But the company also sells almost 500 other beverage brands ranging from variants like Diet Coke and sister products such as Fanta and Sprite to a vast range of carbonated and non-carbonated juice-based drinks, bottled waters, iced teas, and coffees. Increasingly Coca Cola has found that its sheer size works against it.
Coca-Cola is undoubtedly one of the world’s most valuable brands. Even if it isn’t the most valuable anymore – its 13 year stretch at the top of Interbrand’s list was broken by Apple in 2013 – the brand continues to carry tremendous weight, as new research from market research insight provider Instantly reveals.
Related: Guinness Marketing Campaign Shows Their Creativity
In our opinion, the company has inserted itself into the American urban landscape more quickly and craftily than any retail company in history. It has forever changed the way companies market themselves to customers. Here is how we feel they have been so successful:
Check out our thoughts on creative marketing.
Coca Cola marketing … the brand
Coca-Cola reveals that their overall strategy — from day one — has been to develop “brand stories” through a conversation model. They want their brand to be associated with stories — so much so, that the brand is brought into everyday conversation. So, it is not enough to create a good ad — the ad must continue the ongoing story that Coca-Cola has in your life.
They are masters at clever and creative campaigns – such as the soft drinks giant’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign which incorporated the social element on a global scale and proved hugely popular.
Brands must move with the times, and modern campaigns not only have a global presence across traditional media but look to include social to form a personal connection between the brand and its customers.
Stories and storytelling
To do marketing more effectively, Coca Cola has developed a “Storytelling Strategy” — to move from one-way storytelling to dynamic storytelling. They define “content” as the “creation of stories that are to be expressed through every possible connection.”
“Liquid” — a key word for their marketing team — is defined as, “elements of content that move freely amongst themselves but do not become separated content.” Coca-Cola has taken these two commonly-used words and redefined these words to suit their marketing purposes — creating a common professional language for the Coca-Cola marketing department.
A simple story
A good emotional story provides a very good connection between the issue and the company promoting their message. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information boring.
Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that they are important to remember. And create a good reason for you to want to back the Coke messages, yes?
‘Share a Coke’ campaign
Coke started the first step of its campaign with product personalization. For the first time in history, 250 of the most popular first names in each country were shortlisted and printed on the iconic red and white Coke labels, instead of the Coke logo.
Coke then used mass media channels like television, outdoors and radio to communicate to users that their favorite drink just might have their name on it. Each bottle also carried a hashtag #ShareACoke to remind users to post pictures of their personalized Coke bottles on social media using the hashtag.
The experience of seeing one’s name on Coke bottles was so novel and addictive that people paid premium prices just to lay their hands on their ‘own’ bottles of Coke and shared them on social media like wildfire.
Images of Coke bottles shared on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with the #ShareACoke hashtag were then plastered across digital billboards, across the country.
Coke also created a microsite – www.shareacoke.com – where users could go and create virtual Coke bottles with the names of their friends and family on them to be shared on social media.
The results? Millions of pictures posted on social media, thousands of virtual Coke cans shared online, nearly three times as many Coke bottles sold in the UK as compared to Pepsi during the campaign period!
Coca Cola marketing plan … design and marketing strategies
Coca-Cola used seven key design and marketing strategies, which made it as recognizable in the streets of Shanghai as in its hometown of Atlanta by the 1920s, says Coca-Cola VP of innovation and entrepreneurship David Butler.
In the book, “Design to Grow: How Coca-Cola Learned to Combine Scale and Agility (and How You Can Too),” Butler and co-author Linda Tischler explore these seven strategies. Here are three of our favorites from this book:
Coca Cola marketing … the logo
Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, decided that Coca-Cola’s logo should be written in the Spenserian script accountants used because it would differentiate it from its competitors.
The company standardized the logo in 1923 and, like the recipe, decided that while packaging could adjust to the times, the core logo was to be untouched.
It’s resulted in a logo that has had more than 100 years to become imprinted in the minds of people around the world.
Pricing
It’s common today for tech startups to begin by offering a service for free and then charging a higher price to consumers and advertisers once they’ve become hooked. Before utilizing networking effects became a standard practice, Coca-Cola used a similar approach to scaling across the US and then throughout the world.
From 1886 to 1959, a bottle of Coke cost just five cents. A voice using word-of-mouth advertising.
Integrating the elements
All of these strategy elements complement the firm’s brand and messages. The integrating elements? The brand and the client educational element. The key is to have a central theme to the brand. This is the most important part of the strategy.
Tagline and brand
The heart of Coke’s marketing strategy is their brand. The brand is built into and reflected by its current taglines … Refreshing the World, One Story at a Time and Open Happiness.
They clearly understand that their brand is not about them. Rather it is about making customers feel good about themselves. They realize that their brand represents their current and future relationships. Their goal is to deliver an emotional connection to their products. And they are doing it very well.
Coke’s brand promise – To Inspire Moments of Optimism and Uplift – a restatement of Coke’s commitment to putting people first that was founded on the company’s original and ongoing mission.
It is designed to shine a light on the company’s mission to celebrate its customer’s happiness through its superior products.
Website
The website is the physical center of this firm’s marketing. Its design is simple, yet contains the means to integrate all the strategy elements we discuss today.
Recently the soft drinks manufacturer unveiled its new website, Coca-Cola Journey, which more closely resembles a digital magazine than a corporate snoozefest.
Andrew Canter, CEO of the Branded Content Marketing Association, noted at the time: “[Coca-Cola] fully understand[s] the power of storytelling, creating innovative and highly entertaining content which, in turn, translates into more happy customers and brand advocates.”
Keys to successful campaigns: Make Marketing Campaigns Successful: Greatest Secrets to This Success
Social media
Coca-Cola is present on seven main social media channels/platforms to engage potential clients. (Facebook. Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram and YouTube). All channels are used to engage and share all their material in a conversational manner. Always looking to engage.
Standing for sustainability
How does telling stories about sustainability link back to Coca-Cola’s bottom line?
It does two things: It raises awareness, which is important for trust and brand love, but it also raises an internal shift in mindset within the people actually in the business — [like those] running the bottle plants [or] distributing riding trucks.
They start to say, “Hang on, I need to be more conscious of how I’m treating the environment and being conscious of how we’re impacting communities.” If we can impact people’s lives through our business [and] through our value chain, then that’s a lot more responsible as a business approach than not even thinking about it. It just makes good, solid, long-term business sense.
Like many companies, Coca-Cola is constantly experimenting with how to best share and scale their social impact by effectively using social media and new technologies. Doing so for sustainability initiatives includes:
Defining priorities by what not only will have a business impact but also a societal impact.
Setting clear goals and aligning those goals towards a common vision.
Consistently integrating sustainability into the business and proving how sustainability builds brand equity.
By constantly piloting new ideas in different markets, capturing best practices, and scaling successes, Coca-Cola is learning and assessing the new ways in which their sustainability and community impact efforts can make the biggest difference.
The bottom line
Here’s the thing, social isn’t just a new way of marketing, it’s a new way of running a business. Coke has certainly have figured this out and is using their social marketing strategy to rapidly grow their business.
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More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Guinness Marketing Campaign Shows Their Creativity
Secrets to Share on Lego’s Marketing Campaigns
12 Lessons from Ben and Jerry’s Marketing Strategies
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
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