Posts Tagged ‘coke’

Coke Captures a Moment of Happiness

Thursday, January 21st, 2010


I believe that one of the biggest opportunities for Marketing with Meaning lies with brands that are used to spending a lot of money on traditional advertising campaigns that have historically been launched mainly to remind people that the brands exist. Instead, they have an opportunity to create marketing that people choose to engage with and advertising that itself adds value to people’s lives. A few weeks ago I wrote about how brands that lack innovation can win by adding value, and last year this article I wrote in Adweek showed how brands such as Gatorade and Ask.com have hurt sales by continuing to trot out new ad campaigns. One company that is gradually moving forward on the meaningful marketing scale is Coca-Cola—and the video above is just its latest chapter in its next evolution.

Coca-Cola has been one of the biggest traditional advertisers out there, but I do believe it is turning itself into a meaningful marketing machine. In my book I included the examples of its Happiness Factory mini-movies, and its industry-leading Coke Rewards loyalty program. The company got into entertaining iPhone apps quickly. And in Cannes in July I wrote up the example of its new interactive vending machines.

I believe the biggest lesson here is that Coke has focused its Brand Purpose on “Creating Happiness.” If you step back and think about what the Coca-Cola product aspires to do, it tries to create a moment of happiness in an otherwise regular day. Traditionally the company has tried to inspire happiness through its marketing by showing carefully crafted ads with actors playing out scenes in commercials. In truth, this viral video is not too far away from an “ad”—but the key difference is that we see Coca-Cola doing something fun in the real world, and we smile, LOL, and forward this video to friends.

There is another smaller, yet important lesson here around how in-person, guerrilla marketing efforts can go viral and gain scale when you capture them on video. This mirrors the approach by Burger King in its award-winning Whopper Freakout campaign. In both cases the production quality and editing of this piece is fantastic, we see real people and reactions rather than scripted actors, and we actually can see and feel the fun for ourselves.

Of course we have no way of seeing if this video sells six-packs, but the YouTube results suggest this effort was worth the cost of a video crew and handful of props. When I first saw this video on its first day, Tuesday, January 12, there were about 40,000 views. Writing this post on Sunday, January 17 it was up to 400,000. That’s a lot of people choosing to engage with an ad, and coming away with a much more positive connection with the brand. And it’s even more evidence that billion-dollar traditional brands can make the move to Marketing with Meaning.

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment, purpose, video | 1 Comment »

How Meaningful Marketing Can Help a Non-innovative Brand

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

dove_logo

Over the holiday break I got a very interesting email question from Al Samuelian, VP Group Media Director at media agency MPG. He was in the middle of reading my book and paused to ask, in summary: “Can you implement a Marketing with Meaning strategy if your product or service stinks?” I thought it was a great question—and one of the reasons that I love opening up this entire concept to public discussion—so I choose to share our back-and-forth thinking here.

When Your Product Is Poor

My first response was fairly short and simple: No, you cannot win if your base product or service is sub-par. Brilliant marketing can never overcome a product that fails to live up to customers’ expectations. You can look to the movie industry for many examples of big ad budget films that petered out once the pixels hit the screen. And with digital and social media, negative word of mouth travels so many times faster and farther.

Al Samuelian replied with a great story about when a car marketer visited Google recently and asked, “What should I do when I get negative online reviews or social-media chatter about service at my dealerships?” The simple reply by the panel of Google experts: “You should improve service at the dealerships.”

This point is also a good reminder for all marketers that our jobs are not just to make advertising (meaningful or otherwise), but to start with guiding the features and functions of the ultimate product that you have to sell. Marketers should have a say—preferably the final say—when it comes to product benefits, features, retail placement, pricing, customer service, and any other decision that is relevant to how it is presented to the end customer. Al suggested that it might be time for us to redefine the classic “4Ps” for the new world of digital, social, and extreme word of mouth. Not a bad idea!

But I know from my own experience that organizational structures are the biggest barrier to marketing making a difference. I remember my own meeting with a major car company when I was marketing Mr. Clean Car Care at P&G. We wanted to do a joint promotion at the car manufacturer’s national chain of dealerships and repair centers, but the marketer from Big Car, Inc. admitted that she couldn’t even get them to run a national “Buy 3 Tires, Get 1 Free” promotion. The decentralized structure of the network prevented her from managing her business. Now this error, and many others, is part of the reason that the company is tanking.

When You Don’t Have Much Innovation

The other half of our discussion revolved around brands that do not have much innovation to stand on. Sure, it’s easy to do meaningful marketing when you have a breakthrough product such as Mr. Clean Magic Eraser or Nike+, but what about the 95% of brands we work on that do not have much word-of-mouth merit?

In thinking about this question I brought up the model presented by Laura and Al Ries in their book, The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR. The central hypothesis of the book is that brands are first built on innovation—they bring some new news to the marketplace of existing players—and the best way to win is by making the news as big as possible. Hence, the book’s belief on making PR the lead focus of early marketing efforts. Then, after years in market, the strategy becomes simply reminding people that you exist and what you stand for. This is where the authors find that advertising is more effective. For example, Coke and Pepsi haven’t changed their formulas in years, so the cola war is a battle to remind people through advertising.

My belief is that Marketing with Meaning can work well for non-innovative products and brands in two ways. First, the marketing can itself bring innovation and PR news to the brand in ways that the product itself cannot. Charmin creating a mobile app that helps you find public restrooms is an incredible new way to innovate, and has earned the brand more than 500 million free news media impressions. This idea of using marketing as a way to apply innovation could open up entirely new ways of thinking for brand managers who have struggled for years with doing something new with product development. Making changes to a product formula and assembly line can take millions of dollars and thousands of hours. But cranking out an iPhone app can be done by a small team in a matter of weeks.

The second way that Marketing with Meaning can help non-innovative brands is by serving as the “memory jogger” as described by Laura and Al Ries, but in a format that has a much higher chance of earning customer attention and loyalty. My favorite example is the story of Unilever’s Dove brand. You know by now that the brand was struggling to find a new positioning in the marketplace until it seized the high, unoccupied ground of standing for “Real Beauty.” What you might not have thought about was how this happened with virtually no product news or innovation. By using its marketing to create a cause, Dove reminded people that it existed in a meaningful way.

This second point is where I believe many, many companies should be moving their marketing dollars quickly. As I wrote in this Adweek article a few months ago, the old model of ordering up a new ad campaign is not enough, and as I wrote in this post a year ago, the brands that are able to be remembered and relevant are those that actually do something rather than just saying that they stand for something.

I recently read that Pepsi has chosen not to advertise in this year’s Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years. Instead, the brand is planning a $20 million marketing effort to “refresh” society in real ways. Not much is known yet, but this could be a big step in moving the marketing world away from interruptive reminders and further toward meaningful connections. Stay tuned for more…

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Posted in Organizational Behavior, customer service, innovation | 3 Comments »

Unique Coke Cannes Delivery

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009


This week I’m spending some time catching up on sharing some of the best, most meaningful marketing to be awarded in the annual Cannes Advertising Competition. Our President, Jay, and Chief Creative Officer, Peter, both came back raving about an incredibly powerful vending machine for Coca-Cola that was put up in the bottom floor of the Cannes conference. It ended up winning a Gold Lion in the Design category. Check out the video above for a glimpse of the experience.

The biggest lesson for me here is a reminder that everything your brand does with the consumer is a kind of marketing, whether it’s customer service, packaging, delivery trucks, or vending machines. And every consumer touchpoint in this broad view of marketing can be made much more meaningful. In this case, Coke has taken the boring, predictable, exchange-focused vending machine and turned it into something remarkable, entertaining, and fun. I also love how this delivers on what the Coke brand and drinking experience is really about: a few minutes of fun and enjoyment. Instead of just advertising to people on TV with equity spots that are meant to help trigger a feeling of enjoyment hours or days later when the drink is consumed, this makes entertainment and happy feelings happen at the moment of truth of refreshment.

I think there are some other really interesting things about these vending experiences. First, they are completely measurable (obviously, because they sell product). Second, they could allow Coke to charge more and achieve wider margins (say, charging $2 or more for the machine experience and fancy bottle). Third, they draw attention in public places, which attracts more users, buyers, and observers.

I am most interested to see what happens from here with the vending machines, and whether they will truly roll out broadly. Sure, it’s easy to create a concept such as this, install it in a few malls, and win an award at Cannes. The challenge is selling this in broadly and getting distributors around the world to embrace the concept. This is where the marketing department often bumps heads with the old-school crowd, finance guys and general bureaucratic commitment to not making waves.

“Marketing” sits in a skyscraper in Atlanta, Georgia, making ads, while “Sales” is out on the streets making sure machines and store shelves are full. Placing ads and maintaining fancy machines is not their job, nor in their budget. Coke distributors are used to paying $X for a basic vending machine that needs almost no service. But what happens when “headquarters” forces them to pay $5X for this special machine? Who’s going to fix them when they break? Anyone who has worked in a large company can play out this tragic scene from hours in boardrooms and conference calls. A quote that I developed in my days as a big marketer was, “Doing anything new is hard.”

My congrats to Coke on a killer idea, and our hopes are with you as you try to take this meaningful idea outside the ad-award world.

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Posted in Awards, Entertainment, Experience, Outdoor | 1 Comment »

The Year of… Equity Campaigns?

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

It’s 12:18 a.m. as I write this. I’ve been continuing work since putting the kids down for bed at 8 p.m. But something is keeping me awake—marketing WITHOUT meaning. It will keep me up even later if I don’t address it now!

In the past few days, I have run across several examples of big, powerful brands that are attempting to correct falling sales by simply launching a new TV campaign. All are losing opportunities to actually do something for people, rather than simply talking about themselves (see last Friday’s post for a good review of “do”). The script is usually the same: Sales are down; CMO and ad agency are fired; new ones are hired, and they need to recast the brand in a more relevant light. Solution: a brand-new ad campaign (preferably with celebrities) and a few hundred million to put it on air (preferably during the Super Bowl).

Gatorade first caught my eye with its “What’s G?” ads. A series of black-and-white commercials with voice-over of rapper Lil Wayne scrolls past a who’s who of celebrity athletes. I captured a screen grab above of some other individuals who make an appearance in the ads.

Most people who view the “What’s G?” ads are saying, “What the heck?” Viewers debate on Web forums that it might be for Nike, Guess Jeans, or… God. Some even thought it was the next Saturday Night Live digital short (that’s never good). The brand actually says the mystery was planned. According to spokeswoman Jill Kinney, “Our strategy is to create consumer intrigue and insure everyone stays tuned for more in our quest for G.”

Unfortunately, most viewers have tuned out. Number of YouTube views is the closest thing we have to a measure of a video or commercial’s popularity. It’s a good way to measure meaningful marketing—if people like something, they will choose to engage with it and share it with friends, who will view it in turn. The brand’s YouTube page shows a total of around 180,000 total views across its six posted commercials since its launch on December 23. That’s not exactly a home run.

For comparison, we just announced today that our Working Lunch live improv program for Healthy Choice has gotten 2 million video plays in only three weeks. I can guarantee our budget was a fraction of Gatorade’s! The main difference? Our program actually delivers value—it’s an entertaining program that allows the audience to play a role—while Gatorade is just talking at its audience as usual.

Gatorade is certainly not the only one using this cliche marketing playbook. Microsoft infamously launched its Bill Gates + Jerry Seinfeld “ad about nothing” over the summer thanks to Crispin Porter + Bogusky (who I usually praise here). Honda has hired celebrities to talk about “The Power of Dreams” in long-form ads that are appearing before short videos on ABC.com and Hulu. And Coca-Cola will unveil its new slogan, Open Happiness, with feel-good Super Bowl ads in two weeks.

Let’s compare these to other, smaller brands that have succeeded with something different. Red Bull has gained on Coke and Gatorade by launching events around the world. Scion became the best-selling new car brand by hosting invitation-only underground art shows. Google has never advertised on television; it just keeps pumping out valuable services.

Look, TV still remains the largest stage to get in front of consumers, and each of these brands certainly sells a “mass” audience. But I’m disappointed that none of them is trying anything truly meaningful. I predict that none of these campaigns will make a significant difference in the equity or sales of the brands that launch them.

A new TV campaign is the old success formula and definitely the path of least resistance, but the only kind of marketing that will drive breakthrough results is that which people choose to engage with—and that which itself adds value to people’s lives.

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Posted in Marketing Without Meaning, Television | 2 Comments »

Cannes Day 2: Coca-Cola Storytelling

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Last night was a late one. We were out past 2 a.m. and discovered the infamous Gutter Bar here at Cannes. As noobs to the scene we were walking around looking for a sign for The Gutter Bar, which we heard was THE late- night scene. Our President, Jay, finally asked someone and we discovered we were standing in it. The Gutter Bar opens when the bars around the Hotel Martinez overflow their banks and spill drinkers into the streets. Now you know.

I’m actually embarrassed to even say how late I slept in, but we did manage to get our butts back into the ad fest before noon. My highlight of the day was a session by Coca-Cola and Wieden+Kennedy focused on the art of storytelling and the story of its “Happiness Factory“. Ivan Wicksteed, Global Creative Director of Coca-Cola, shed light on how the company turned a 30-second ad into a marketing platform that is expected to last for 30 years. Now that’s something gutsy to put in your creative brief.

Wicksteed spent time teaching the audience about what makes a good story. Stories need to be timeless, reveal deep characters, have multiple access points, and show us the truth. Further, he spoke about why storytelling should be embraced by brands. He used the rapidly spreading phrase: “It’s not what they buy, it’s what they buy into,” and he spoke about the enduring success of the Coke Santa and Polar Bears, which have lasted 70 years and 30 years, respectively, because they hold storytelling elements.

The Happiness Factory ad was the best tested ad in Coke’s history and has enjoyed more than 100 million views since December 2007. Why? Because it created a meaningful experience for the viewer. Especially when they chose to view it online, or were ready for a movie-like experience at the theater, people laughed, smiled, and developed a closer connection to the brand. Laughs or smiles is really a higher-level benefit that the Coca-Cola product itself aims for. It’s syrup-water, after all, so the brand must deliver something more.

Wicksteed ended his session by promising that much more was to come from the Happiness Factory. He is setting the next stage of its development with a challenge to “become income generating at some point… if people will pay to enter it, you’ve got a pretty good story.” His team is looking at feature-length films, merchandising, and video games, for example. Bottom line: Marketing that people are willing to pay for is another good test for meaning.

Bonus insight: New Directors Shine

We also caught the last half of The New Director’s Showcase, hosted by Saatchi & Saatchi. I really wish I had gotten there a few minutes earlier for the entire show. It spotlighted short films (mostly non-commercials) by several up-and-coming directors. One of my favorites is below. It left me wondering, though, why we don’t have an economy where this kind of talent can make a living just making art – rather than having to find ways to merge an advertisement into it….

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Posted in Connection, Entertainment | 1 Comment »