Coca-Cola, personalising consumer experience for long term goodwill

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Coca Cola launched its global advertising campaign in early 2013 in Europe, where it sells bottles with names common in each major European country to boost sales.

In China, Coke has also altered its labels for the promotion, but put short phrases like “beautiful girl” on the bottles, rather than common names. Online, however, Coke recently took the customisation one step further, and allowed users to order personally customised bottles online through Weibo Wallet, Sina’s nascent social media payment service.

 

• To sweeten the deal, Coke charged users only the shipping fees, 20 Yuan, to support its 5-day promotion.
• Coke also posted pictures of celebrities holding their personalised bottles, and buyers followed suit, posting pictures of themselves holding their personalised bottles to share with their friends and Weibo followers.
• Methodical, logical, and successful, Coke’s flashy and expensive approach to Weibo marketing suits the stature of the multinational beverage corporation, and is conducted in harmony with advertising in other forms of media.

 

With the combination of depicting celebrities holding personalised Cokes and enabling consumers to obtain them at a reasonable price, Coke generated significant Weibo buzz in the form of thousands of personalised images that reinforce the popularity of the brand and its status as a drink of choice for young people.
Although it invested heavily in its marketing push, and sold hundreds of thousands of personalised bottles at a loss, Coke will definitely reap the benefit of such a unique online campaign.