dO bRanDinG the #ShareaCoke wAy

Yesterday i was privileged to attend a summit on branding at the Intercontinental Hotel. The seminar had leading Communication and Marketing Execs from the Banks, Major Online companies,  and more and for me it was a 50-50 experience partly, not too many new things were said for me, I also probably got irritated at the fact that some of the presentations were just half researched scripts off the internet. This brought me to one conclusion, 'We still have a lot to learn about the concept of branding' as we are yet to scratch the surface of branding in country. I decided to use a case study of a recent Cocacola campaign (#ShareaCoke) to educate some aspiring entrepreneurs on how best to build a global brand-

Cocacola, the world’s most recognizable brand has been around for about 125yrs. It is also the 3rd most valuable brand w/ a brand value of $54.9B behind Apple and Google.

with over 500 brands across 200 countries, the company has a market cap. of $177.89B as of this morning and with a staff strength of over 136,000 the current CEO is Muhtar Kent.

without going into too much history, let me share a little about a recent campaign they embarked on  which they titled #shareacoke. 
In 1881 Cocacola barely sold just 9 bottles, fast forward to 2010, they sold 1.6Billion bottles, the #shareacoke campaign basically involved exchanging the world’s most recognizable brand with  popular consumer names. In other words the company through a process of co-creation worked with fans to create personalized versions of the coke bottles with their names on it.

The "Share a Coke" campaign was first launched in Australia in 2011, with the local executives and the ad agency Ogilvy coming up with the idea. Before then,  about 50% of teenagers and young adults had not tasted a coke in Australia. since then the campaign has spread to over 70 countries. The  campaign was a clever and bold attempt at brand ‘co-creation’. This campaign had mass personalized product, consumer involvement, implementation timing (summer) and social and offline strategies as its major strengths. Though this campaign was largely successful and helped boost sales it made some consumers unhappy (especially because they were made to feel inadequate because their names were not deemed popular enough to make the cut), it was also costly to implement according to some sources. The company hasn't come out with an official figure for the cost of the campaign.

In Australia alone- 5 agencies, 25 risk assessment meetings, 4000hrs of talking to Cocacola Armadale stake holders, 4weeks to find the machine that could print the names on the can, 225 trademark searches, 2,302 artworks are just some of the resources that had to be invested to make the campaign come alive just in Australia. After more than 10yrs of steady decline in sales, sources say turnover is up 2.5% from this campaign. Cocacola had an Ad budget of $3.3B in 2013 and has decided to increase its budget by 1B in the next 3yrs. lets take a look at some of the direct benefits this campaign had on the brand-

-Online- over 29,000 online posts, 12million media impressions, and Cocacola Facebook traffic was up 870%

-Offline- Free Press & ample word of mouth

-There is no doubt the campaign humanized the brand & gave teens a positive impression about cocacola. In summary the #shareacoke campaign had key underlying attributes:

1. sharing

2. Measurability

3. Personalization/Relationship

So for aspiring entrepreneurs i felt the need to use this campaign as a case study to help us build generational global brands instead. First of all we all need to come to the realization that global brands are no longer in the business of managing perceptions in branding but managing meaning. So here are 5 lessons from the campaign we can all adopt to build our global brands:

1. Have a clear vision and Message of your brand for your team and the world.

2. Engage your customer base via Co-Creation to help build a stronger brand

3. Design your brands ideology to be global and then localize your brand expression for each location you operate in.

4. Let all your chosen brand visualizations tell the story of your company.

5. Deliver on your brand promises no matter the costs.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, kindly let me know your thoughts in the comment box below.

- @gozzim

Sources: Adweek, Youtube, Cocacola, Interbrand