What Does Coca-Cola Do to Their App?
From adding different names to different Coca-Cola products to increase people’s sharing of their products, to using interactive AR and sensing technology to create Drinkable Advertising, The Coca-Cola company always makes unique innovations in the field of marketing. With the development of mobile devices, people are increasingly relying on them instead of traditional web pages. In this article, I am going to discuss what innovations Coca-Cola has made for its own app and what it lacks.
Interface and Design
The app keeps the consistent design style of Coca-Cola. The red icon, red and white color tones and the unique curved bottle. The App is mainly divided into three parts: Homepage, Experience and Freestyle. The homepage is used to promote the latest products and related campaign activities. Experience is mainly used for loyalty programs, while Freestyle is used to create their own Coca-Cola family product formulas. There are no more than 3 sub-pages in the App, which makes the user interface very simple. When I first opened the App, I knew instantly what I could do from the navigation bar at the bottom. This simple design and harmonious color tone not only improved my speed of use, but also allowed the App to be more accessible to users. The aesthetic design has never been a weak point of Coca-Cola.
User Experience
The operating system of the App seems to work very smoothly for me while using it, and the code scanning function also made me feel that the App and product are closely connected. The concise description and design style made me enjoy the browsing process of the app. I did not find the AR technology that was introduced in the ad in the App. I think this function is designed for entertaining the users for the short term, but this function is useless in the long term. The sub-page of Freestyle interests me the most. You can formulate your favorite Coca-Cola recipes and transfer them to the drink machine, which can be seen in cinemas, via QR Code to help you produce this customized drink. This feature meets the needs of personalization to a great extent, and makes everyone to become a drink master. There are also problems with the function. It is a personalized design that reflects personal characteristics, but it does not have any external sharing function. With the rich social media platforms, don’t the consumers want to share their drink recipes with friends who are about to go to the movies?
The only thing that confuses me is the code scanning function in Experience. You need to scan the code on the bottle of Coca-Cola products for the chance to participate in sweepstakes. However, you need to re-scan the code for each event, which increases the workload of people. From what I observed from the comments, not everyone can use the camera recognition, so that they need to enter the 14-digit product code tediously. Although I agree that the use of interactive design will increase users’ dependence on the app, this technical glitch will greatly affect the user experience. This could potentially turn their advantages into the cause of users’ negative reviews. Think about why people choose to download this app. Some people love Coca-Cola products, and they want to look for more promotional offers. It won’t be a good thing when the promotional interface is so tedious.
Comparison to other Apps
While researching the Coca-Cola app, I wondered what features a high-ranking App owns that Coca-Cola does not have. From the ranking on Google Play, I found that the top 50 apps in Food & Drink all possess strong practicality, which means that are designed to solve existing problems for consumers’ convenience. For example, McDonald’s, which ranks at #34, provides order online services. This allows the consumers to order foods even if they are not at the physical store, which saves their time of waiting. In addition, they offered exclusive coupons in the App so that people can easily save money. In comparison, I think Coca-Cola App lacks similar functions which could make the App to be more functional to users.
Thoughts
For Coca-Cola, I believe that they should focus on developing more practical functions on the App. For example, they can offer in-App purchase methods, customized bottle design, and Coca-Cola themed products. Finding problems and solving them needs to be considered before each application is born, rather than bringing more problems. This inspired me to learn more about people’s use behaviors. I think that the creation of a product always comes from people’s needs, and we can discover more about the secrets of apps from the perspective of psychology.
