What You Can See From Coca-Cola’s Digital Marketing Strategy

One of the brands that achieve notable successes in digital marketing, Coca-Cola often creates the most splendid campaigns that take place on top of our minds.

Coke is often associated with happiness and it’s a fact that in Mandarin, Coca-Cola means “Delicious Happiness”. Reflects directly into sentiments, the company’s builds the marketing strategy upon happiness as a concept in a whole and augments the idea in every form of marketing. Just think about that when evaluating the Coca-Cola’s ad campaigns.

The secret to its success is still unknown in formula, yet starting in its first year of operation in 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, creator John Pemberton sold an average just of nine servings of Coca-Cola every day. Today, 133 years later, that daily number has increased to 1.9B servings of the company’s products in total.

So, let’s deep dive into the digital marketing success of Coca-Cola and analyze the unique strategies of the brand.

• Direct Engagement With Fans

Coca-Cola’s #VerdaderoAmigo ad campaign celebrates true friendship, unity, teamwork and happiness by re-designing its iconic wavy ribbon into the “fist bump” symbol. The extensive campaign focuses on friendship by framing it against its opposite—the cruelty, loneliness and isolation that can be worse than ever nowadays because of cyberbullying. With its grand visual metaphor for spreading good vibes online, felt a bit removed from the real social difficulties teens face. By contrast, this new work feels fresh and immediate.

The three web films, two of them have been released, focus on empathy and when true friends really show their colors, through stories about gossip, secrets and isolation caused by bullying and other forms of social cruelty. The campaign suggests that shared moments offer a sense of identity and belonging.

The campaign calls for teens to show not just friendship but “true friendship.” The insight is that a true friend is the most valuable commodity at a time when cruelty is everywhere.

• Targets Millennial Age

Successfully adapts itself to the new technologies and new generation, Coca-Cola is basically a beverage that is composted of caramelized sugar and carbonated water. This explains the target market at all and the company basically acts like a teenage magnet to identify its precise customer data.

Created by Wieden + Kennedy London, shows a woman transported by the taste of Coke back to memories of enjoying it on the beach, at the movies, on a ski slope and more — all accompanied by the supersized tongue. It’s accompanied by a track titled “La La La” that will be released on streaming platforms including Spotify. The European campaign also includes OOH, digital, experiential and PR elements.

• Iconic Product Design

The Coca-Cola Company is well known as the world’s largest beverage company. The company’s operational reach encompasses more than 200 countries worldwide across five operating regions: Asia Pacific, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, and North America.

Whenever there is a major natural disaster, the motto is: “Coca-Cola people are ready.” As Hurricane Dorian, a slow-moving storm started decimating communities in the northwestern West Indies, teams from the company as well as a network of bottling partners mobilized to support relief and recovery efforts. Unless highlighted by the media, these initiatives may go unnoticed but not by the people on the ground who are directly affected.

• Personalized Customer Experience

Tweet with hashtag #CokeMyName to have your name & a unique fact about it star on a billboard in Times Square. After the triumph of the clever drinkable billboard for Coke Zero, Coca Cola’s recent outdoor campaign, lets you tweet to have your name splashed on a big screen, in Times Square. Here’s to taking out-of-home advertising to a whole new level!

Building off Coke’s Share a Coke campaign featuring fan names emblazoned on Coke bottles, the new billboard shows fun facts about names of people who tweet to the sign using hashtag #CokeMyName.

At the heart of the display is a microsite that Coke and Google created together to pull in facts about the 1,000 names the soda company has printed on its cans and bottles.

Coke allied up with Clear Channel Outdoor to build a campaign activated with Twitter. Once someone fires off a tagged tweet, it gets displayed on the big screen in lights. Furthermore, a webcam across the street automatically snaps a picture of the person’s name. Coke’s social media team then tweets back the photo to the person within an hour. So you don’t need to be present in Times Square to see your name in the light. Neat trick, don’t you think?

The activation having been live since two weeks, generates about 200 messages a day with the billboard being the only media promoting the campaign.

• Global Outreach

Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl ad campaign ran globally in 2012 and involved two polar bears that reacted to events on the field in real time. The audience could interact with the polar bears, who were supporting different teams, by asking questions and posting photos to Facebook or Twitter.

When the bears responded they pulled out a smartphone to tweet messages or used a tablet to display images submitted by fans. As well as a dedicated microsite and social media channels, Coke streamed the real time footage to rich media ad banners on ESPN.com and on mobile apps.

Coca-Cola’s global marketing techniques that have contributed to the company’s place as an industry leader, even after 125 years. To see more, you can view more Coca-Cola’s projects.