17 min readJun 4, 2020

Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke: Social Media Marketing Campaign Analysis

“Social Media Is About Sociology And Psychology More Than Technology” -Brian Solis

Coca-Cola Enterprises is the largest producer and distributor of Coca-Cola products like traditional soft drinks, juices, teas, milk & coffee-based beverages and so forth. They have outsourced it’s production to different companies. Also, the distribution of all the products is handling by different distribution companies of which Coca-Cola Enterprise is the biggest (Kant, Jacks and Aantjes, 2008). As per Fortune 2019 record, in market value, Coca-Cola is ranked 26th on the list of fortune 500 companies (Fortune, n.d.). There was a time when the company used to sell soda for 5 cents, and now it became the world’s biggest soda company (Vincent and Kolade, 2019). Back in 2011, Australia is struggling from the sale of soda, that’s how to Share a Coke came into the picture. According to the statistics, roughly 50% of teens were likely to consume soft drinks (Hardy, 2016). Australian people always like to get suggestions or references over any campaign or advertisement. Hence, it is necessary for Coca-Cola to rebuild the brand value within the hearts of its audience (Ghosh, n.d.).

Lucie Austin, director of marketing at Coca-Cola, admitted that Share a Coke campaign is internally known as “Project Connect” and to inspire people and create a vibe of sharing moments of happiness, that project connect became today’s “Share a Coke” campaign. Initially, there were many agencies to pitch the idea of the campaign, around 15 minutes later, the second agency came up with the same idea that Ogilvy did with current share a coke campaign. Coco-Cola likes to go with Ogilvy just because they worked together for a long time (The Coca- Cola Company, 2014).

In summer 2011, in Australia, Coca-Cola had launched it’s one of the best campaigns. This campaign has gained a tremendous amount of response, that the consumption rate increased by 7% amongst the young adult. Furthermore, as it was a social media campaign, it got a total of 18,300,000 plus media impression. In result, the page likes were significantly grown by 39%, not only that, the traffic on the Facebook page was increased by 870% (Grimes, 2013). In 2013, Coca- Cola brought this campaign to the United Kingdom with 150 of the most popular names in the UK. It was a multimedia campaign including social media sites, TV adverts, billboards, so on. However, social was at the heart of the campaign right from the very beginning. With this campaign, Coca-Cola has replaced their branding with the most common names as per the region with the hashtag #ShareaCoke to encourage the audience to share images, stories and tweet all over the social media (Carn, MacLeod and Vacher, n.d.).

“I rarely see a brand so strong they can remove their own name from the product and come out stronger” — John D

According to Tim Grims (2013), an international research and analytics group, due to this campaign, about 6.8% of rising has seen into Coca-Cola’s Facebook community, globally. Back in 2013, when Coca-Cola has launched this campaign in the UK, there were more than 29,000 tweets were posted with the hashtag, which is quite impressive because during that time (in 2013) there were very less amount of users who were like to use twitter or even any social media (Grimes, 2013). Famous singer Tyrese Gibson debuted his career on a Coke commercial in 1995, by holding a share a coke bottle with a word “Dreamer” printed on the bottle. The response to this video was amazing, with 10 million views and more than 2 million likes on Facebook (Burton, Wilmer, Reed and Holder, 2016).

During the campaign in the UK, around 51% of Twitter users were mentioning Coca-Cola directly or indirectly using name or hashtags; this ends up in the rise of 3% on Twitter. While on Facebook, the traffic rose by 5% (Dodrin, 2013). Resultantly, Share a coke became more successful in the US with 11% of more participation in Coca-Cola’s sale. Moreover, surprisingly over 1.25 million young adults have tried and participate in this campaign (Group and Horse, n.d.). 235,000 tweets of selfies were taken and posted over the Twitter, and around 111,000 campaign followers have responded to these tweets (Ghosh, n.d.). From a brands image perspective, Roberto Ferdman (2015), a food economist journalist for the Washington Post, have admitted that “Coca-Cola is designed to sell happiness. They are not selling a drink. Nevertheless, on an emotional level, you attach to it” (Ferdman, 2015).

Strategy Development Analysis

The ancient Greek philosopher named Aristotle suggested that there are three key elements persuaded through spoken and written communication, and those are, Logos (logic & reasoning), Ethos (the character and reliability) and Pathos (the emotional dimension) (Vincent and Kolade, 2019). As most companies are conducting any campaign in regards to the target demographic audience, unlike other companies, Coca-Cola did not put any limits for the age group. Because today consumers want to feel unique and extraordinary when it comes to serving a product, even, their primary target audience was the age between 18–25, they still open their campaign for any age between 13 to 60 because when you try to hop over the top, every user counts (Grimes, 2013). However, Australian consumers are quite introvert when it comes to trust on to any organisation; also Australian society is known as an egalitarian society, and there is a phrase to describe it; “tall poppy syndrome” which means whenever someone tries to pretend like they are so big, Australians are like to reply by rejecting it (Ghosh, n.d.).

Dr Lynn Connaway and Dr Marie Radford described millennials as a unique generation and stated that classified millennials as practical, result-oriented, impatient, and multitasker. By knowing the personality and behaviour of millennials, it got easy for them to process the campaign. Connaway and Radford stated that millennials are always seeking for more choices and selection with personalisation of the product with the company and customisation with convenience. Furthermore, the #ShareaCoke campaign has looked into it (Ferdman, 2015). Communication is a key factor in marketing, and millennials are a totally different targeted group in a way that they communicate. Unlike the previous generation, they are quite easily accessible via different internet mediums like social media and emails. The problem with the previous generation was that they preferred more face-to-face communication, which caused some hurdle for any company to target the market. As reported by Radford, without social media, Coca-Cola might not connect with millennials. They might have risen the sale up with the help of different marketing strategies, but the personal connection with them could not be achieved (Ferdman, 2015).

The call to action of this campaign is so successful because it engages consumers to act. As Henry Jenkins said: “Success in the stickiness model has always ultimately depended on audience activity that happens away from the site- in other words, from spreadability” and share is the technical term for it. And Coca-Cola has adopted it in their campaign by giving it a name #ShareaCoke. The word “share” draw consumers to buy a product online or offline (from store) and share it with their beloved ones (Windle, 2016). Hoyer and MacInnis (2010), have referred this type of group (teenagers and young adults) as a reference group, this group is kind of a community who are always comparing and trying to refer others to develop their own attitude and personality and behaviour. In 2009, Trusov, Bucklin and Pauwels admitted that today on the Internet, SM sites are one of the fastest-growing network, which became an effective advertising tool for many organisations, and “Share a Coke” is one of the best examples. Also, it gives a platform for sharing ideas to the world, which generates free word-of-mouth marketing without spending any penny (Fetisova, 2015). The organisation who are possible to create distinctive and personalised content are more likely to attract consumers and about 78% of change to build a relationship with them, acknowledged by Hanley Wood (Asmussen, 2014).

As Coca-Cola knows that their target audiences are the one who likes the personal connection toward the company so they needed to create that vibe into the youth. Besides, as per the research, they came to know that Australian call their close one with either their first name or the colloquial word “mate” (Marketing, 2012). That’s how they come up with this brilliant idea, which is simple by taking off the brand name and replace it with 250 most common name (in the US) of the people (Group and Horse, n.d.). The other reason behind teenagers were the target audience was, and they like to sit in the university canteen, cafes, and restaurants to dish the dirt of their friends and family. Also, they are the biggest audience who like to spend money on junk food, and soft drinks are must while having fast food like pizza, burger or else (Ghosh, n.d.). To make this campaign successful, Coca-Cola has started to feature creative selfies all over the billboards, news and websites. This inspired people to share more posts over social media to become famous on a big screen and among their friend circle. This way, consumers became “creative labour force” for a company (Ghosh, n.d.).

Coca-Cola has divided its functions into four parts which perform daily; focus on the market, work smart, behave like owners, and be the brand. To achieve this, they rely on seven different value, likely, leadership, collaboration, passion, quality, diversity, integrity and accountability (Burton, Wilmer, Reed and Holder, 2016). There was one couple who announced pregnancy news by making a campaign video (image as below) which got 1 million views in just a few days (Youtube, 2014).

“Nowadays marketers can’t just be blue-sky thinkers that sit in their rooms brainstorming creative ideas, It does have to be developed.” Says Coke Marketing Director.

As cope up with the innovative world, Coca-Cola has collaborated with Amazon. In response, users now able to claim their personalise coke with their name on it for free. Users just have to say “Alexa, share a coke” command to any Alexa unable device, and it will deliver for no cost (Cameron, 2020). In terms of SWOT analysis of this campaign, Strength of the campaign describe in few words as, the brand which is always evolving with its presence in more than 200 countries; Fun, Freedom and Refreshment are the key promises. The company who always like to stick with the personal level to its consumers, and many more. As a weakness, the biggest challenge is the quality of the product. There might be the same ingredients that Coca- Cola is using for ages, but the water, which is the vast portion cannot be the same geographically. In Opportunity, in the era of technology, there is diversity everywhere. More diversity equals more opportunities. In Threat, as we all know that this campaign is a social media campaign, and social media as a platform is more harmful to any company or individual than its beneficial to them. Abusive words and violate the cultural trend could be the biggest factor to ruin the whole image (Burton, Wilmer, Reed and Holder, 2016).

Implementation & Monitoring Analysis

To have a Coca-Cola in your hand with your name may influence anyone, and teenagers are the one group of age who is always looking for something new and personal. Moreover, they are the one who is the most active users on social media sites, and this campaign has influenced many teenagers through point-of-purchase advertising (Fetisova, 2015). To support this campaign, Coca-Cola has teamed up with Oligvy and Master Australia, advertising agency (Heble, 2019). When planning for the campaign, the marketing team already knew that people would use vulgar languages; hence they tried to block as nearly as 5000 words (The Coca-Cola Company, 2014). From executive to marketing, legal, design, product, and operations teams associate on everything from making a list of abusive words to finding exact colour and shades for the bottle as well as cans (Codella, 2019). Key motivations behind this incredibly successful campaign are (Ghosh, n.d.),

Increase the sale
Rebuild the brand value
Make their place into the heart of Australians

To reach the target audience, Coca-Cola has used one of the traditional promotional tools, named, Event sponsorship, by using catchy slogans like; “A refreshing tradition” and “Unbottling a bright future” (Fetisova, 2015). Multichannel broadcasting, encourage consumers to share content online, connecting with people, strong call to actions are main strategies that Coca-Cola has implemented (Heble, 2019). Basically, the differential segments that make this campaign unique than others are twofold (Group and Horse, n.d.),

Influenced packaging which helped this campaign to hit hard to owned media.
The Captivating hashtag #ShareaCoke has filled an energetic juice into the campaign which influenced a lot of people especially teenagers to get involved and amplify the idea.

Australia was the first to taste the campaign, which also got a huge hit from the targeted audience and became one of the successful campaigns in the history of Coca-Cola. To scale it to the other side of the world, they need alignment between numerous teams and sectors worldwide. Not only that, but they also required original and unique content to attract consumers with different languages and formats, which was one of the biggest hurdles to any organisation. Because of any person, their culture means a lot and no company want to violate their trust. To print names, they collaborated with HP (Codella, 2018).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJlyZwWfjM&t=

In this link, the story behind the success of the campaign described by Coca-Cola, which gives brief knowledge.

In a business world, if any company wants to jump high, then you must need collaboration on a wide scale. Coca-Cola also had a partnership with well-known celebrity, such as Selena Gomez, Lupita Nyong’o and Tyrese Gibson who are a big influencer amongst the millennials. By implementing the astounding campaign and with the help of influencers Coca-Cola received a huge impression, which includes, about 7% more teenagers noticed to consume more coke, more than 378,000 cans were printed, 76,000 more coke were shared virtually. This is not it, the Facebook page got a huge hit, and the traffic was increased by whopping 870%, 170,000 tweets were posted over Twitter in 2011 which was a big deal back then, and Coca-Cola’s overall sales increased by 3%, which was a big achievement for the company who were struggling among their fanbase with the sale diminished by less than 50% (The Coca-Cola Company, 2014).

In 2015, to drive the social media campaign bit crazy, Coca-Cola has collaborated with Twitter and W+K agency to create a custom emoji, and Coca-Cola was the first brand who got custom Twitter emoji. The tech-crunch team have taken an interview with Ross Hoffman, senior director of global brand strategy at Twitter, in which they have asked; Whose idea was it for the emoji campaign? Then he replied; “Coca-Cola is a massive global partner of Twitter, and they have been pushing us for some time on building a custom emoji. We know that people love using emojis and usage has been significantly increasing overtime on our platform. This was a perfect opportunity to work with a nimble and smart marketer to make this happen.” (Olanoff, 2015). In 2014, when Coca-Cola brought the campaign to Argentina, they partnered with Anonimo, Mexican marketing agency, to print the name on bottles and cans with Braille to market all the blind community, and distributed at Comité Internacional Prociegos, which is the non-profitable private international committee for the blind people in the Mexico (Perović, 2015). In 2019, Coca- Cola came back to Australia with the same campaign with a little twitch and to give a personal touch to the campaign they also created an advertise with dogs (AdNews Australia, 2019)

Even today, you can customise the bottle with your name using the 14 character limit and can order for $8 + shipping (The Coca-Cola Company). In the US, the sales have risen by more than 2% after the campaign which equals 2.5% rise in the dollar. To reshape the fanbase, Coca- Cola has hiked its budget by $1 billion from $3.3 billion for the next upcoming 3 years (Esterl, 2014).

User Insights

Here I have generated some insights from my research work. All the references which are related to these two images are mentioned in the reference section.

Future Recommendation

As described before, Coca-Cola had re-launched their campaign in Australia in 2019, and again they got a huge hit. So, for the future, they should continue the same trend with slightly new implementations. As we all are living in a technological world, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR) and home automation using AI is a big moment in the 21st century. From my perspective, Coca-Cola needs to adopt VR technology with some gamification twist. This strategy may attract a large number of their target audience who are mostly teenagers. The second is AR, the master plan behind the Share a Coke campaign is to print the name of the consumer on bottles or cans. AR can be a smart move in which customers allow to design their own bottle and cans. This may impact more on a personal level. With the help of VR, the audience may feel the campaign, and with AR, they can personalise the product.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Coca-Cola has started this campaign in mid-2011, and it was so successful that there are no signs of stopping. It is one of the best campaigns in business history. Through this campaign, they attract the consumers at the personal level, which make a huge impact. By introducing the hashtag, they started promoting social media, and they already knew that social media is the future. With the help of hashtag #ShareaCoke, people started creating the content on behalf of Coca-Cola, and in return, they were promoting the best post which gives motivation to consumers to the public more and more content. This campaign is the best example of Word-of-Mouth (WOM) marketing strategy. Other companies have also started adopting WOM, but the way Coca-Cola has implemented, there is no competition. One of the key reason behind the success of this campaign is that Coca-Cola has targeted Happiness, Connection, Youth, and make it Global campaign. Furthermore, they have re-launched this campaign in 2019, which is the sign that in the near future they will come back with a smart twist in the game.

Here is a glimpse of all Agencies who put efforts to make this campaign successful.

Ogilvy: Creative | UM: Media | One Green Bean: Social Media | Pulse: PR | Geometry: Shopper Design | Prefast: Point of Sale | Maverick: Experiential | Satellite: Digital | Labelmakers: Digital label printing | Brewtopia: eCommerce

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“Innovation is not a one-way street where you walk alone! Take your customers on the journey and see the difference” -Kaushal Sharda

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