School Legends: Business Model
After receiving the brief from Coca-Cola, we tried coming up with an idea about an app that would become popular for kids aged 13–18 years old, while promoting the sales for Coca-Cola. The trick is that, while the app will be powered by the brand, it has to promote the brand in a roundabout way. The idea we came up with is a quiz game, but one with a twist. Instead of the normal 1v1 games with no end game, and no real interest for kids, we thought of a quiz game where the kids would team up, take over their school and then start expanding to other schools. A quiz game that, despite being played one on one, promotes teamwork and interactions between peers, as well as a competitive spirit during the expansion part.
That was the easy part, but how can a quiz game actually increase Coca-Cola’s profit? Making the game pay to play was absolutely out of question for us, since we believe that that way we limit our range of potential customers, since not many people, especially people from our target group, are willing to actually pay in order to try a new game, not to mention that when creating a pay to play app, there is always the danger of illegal pirated versions of the game circulating, reducing potetntial customers even further. In order to cope with those issues, we decided our app to work under a “freemium” model, where the app itself will be completely free on all app stores, which will allow us to target a vastly bigger audience than a pay to play app, but transactions will be available in game. Still, our objective is not to just make money, as we are not aiming to create a self-sustainable app. What we want to achieve, is to actually increase the sales of Coca-Cola products as well as its brand equity.
In order to accomplish that we thought about incorporating a QR scanner in our app, which would enable our users to actually use Coca-Cola bottles as in-game microtransactions, as an easy, affordable way to gain in game cosmetics for their avatars, as well as small boosts (hints, bonus score for victories, etc) for enhancing their gaming experience. We believe that by using that model, not only can we drive Coca-Cola’s sales in our target group, but we can also turn the bottle of Coca-Cola into a form of currency for young users, who usually don’t have enough money to spend on games, but also in a symbol related to fun, something that actually follows Coca-Cola’s marketing approach.
In a sense, what we aim to accomplish by using the bottles of Coca-Cola as our in-game “currency” is, apart from driving the company’s sales, to increase its brand love. Towards the same goal aims the fact that the user interface of the application will be designed in a Coca-Cola style, using the colors of the brand, as well as a fond that will resemble the company’s logo. Also, avatar cosmetics featuring the brand will be available in-game, allowing the users to customize their avatars, while increasing their bond with the brand. Finally, there will be physical rewards offered by Coca-Cola and it’s collaborators, from free products, to exclusive tickets to concerts and VIP passes to meet artists, which will not only increase bran love, but also allow the users to stick with playing the game.
Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement and we are open to any and all suggestions that can make us improve, both our project and ourselves. At this point i would like to thank the rest of my team Jason Psarras, Vaso Dima and Irene Skoufi for their hard work throughout the semester, Stefanos Nikas and Diana Birba for entrusting us with their project, Spyros Kapetanakis and Katerina Vlassopoulou for their guidance during the classes ( and not only) and lastly Betty Tsakarestou for leading us on another adventure in the ADandPRLab!
