Coca-Cola Marketing Law!

When you see this billboard, can you recognize who it is?

I believe most people can recognize this as Coca-Cola at a glance. In a beverage market where 1.4 new products enter the market every day, how has Coca-Cola managed to remain standing for a century?

Initially, Coca-Cola did open up the market through big exposure and channel cooperation, but in order to create a belief-like attitude and following, Coca-Cola has only one secret - emotional drive.

Indeed, any purchasing decision made by a user is driven by emotion. So, how does Coca-Cola use emotional marketing to drive users to buy its products?

1. Brand Personalization

Brand personality has been a key focus that brands have emphasized in marketing in recent years. Did you know that Coca-Cola started building its brand personality in 1931?

Coca-Cola, with its refreshing taste, has always been a best-selling product in summer. However, its sales volume goes downhill in winter, and even advertising cannot save it. After much thought, Coca-Cola decided to do something with Santa Claus, who has a warm and friendly personality.

Before this, the main colors of Christmas were green and white, and Santa Claus came in all shapes and sizes. It is because Coca-Cola collaborated with artist Haddon Sundblom, hoping to combine Coke and Santa Claus and incorporate them into people’s Christmas scenes, that Santa Claus became what he is today with red clothes and a white beard.

Coca-Cola published an advertisement featuring Santa Claus in the Saturday Evening Post in the United States. In the advertisement, Santa Claus is dressed in Coca-Cola red, holding up a Coca-Cola in one hand and saying the classic Coca-Cola advertising language "The Pause That Refreshes".

With the endorsement of Santa Claus' warm and happy personality, Coca-Cola quickly became a source of joy for people, a carrier of Christmas culture, and an indispensable beverage for many American families.

Let’s sort out the practical steps of Coca-Cola brand personification:

1. Reconstruct the image of the original world-class IP to obtain the highest degree of dissemination and trust at the lowest cost;
2. The precise connection with the Christmas festive scene has consolidated the brand value of "delivering happiness", spread Coca-Cola Red to all parts of the world, and raised its own competitive barriers.

2. Make packaging stories interactive

During this year's epidemic, Coca-Cola continued to make a fuss about packaging and launched the "Open to Better" limited-edition theme can marketing. The packaging of its canned cola was printed with a variety of heartwarming copywriting. Unlike the previous name bottles and nickname bottles, Coca-Cola left a blank space on the can this time. Users can log in to the Coca-Cola official website to customize the copywriting and spend $4.25 to take their own exclusive Coke home.

for example:

• I promise to xxx just for you
• You're right, it's time for me to xxx
• I'm not the best at xxx but I'll try.

There are many brands that use product packaging to tell stories, and Coca-Cola succeeds almost every time. How do they do it?

1. Provide strong relevance: In an environment of information explosion, users usually prefer marketing information that is highly relevant to them. Whether it is a ribbon bottle or a gas can, the background and form in which the product story appears are highly relevant to the user. The ribbon bottle uses Christmas as a medium to strengthen its relevance to users. The users themselves have nothing to do with the ribbon bottle, but the ribbon bottle is a product of the sense of ritual in the Christmas scene, and Christmas is one of the most anticipated holidays for users, so users actively recognize and purchase the ribbon bottle to amplify the festive atmosphere. The gas tank is an emotional placebo for users in the context of the epidemic. The words above are more about giving positive spiritual support to users who are feeling anxious during the epidemic.
2. Open participation mechanism: In the era of traditional media, brands are good at telling rational stories about their products on big media. In today's digital media age, everyone can create their own story. When using packaging to tell stories, Coca-Cola pays great attention to the interactivity of the stories, so Coca-Cola opens up the right to create product stories. Take the gas can for example. Users can add their own thoughts and values ​​in the blank space, indirectly participating in the production of the product, and naturally developing a strong liking for the brand.
3. Enhance the shareability: To enhance the shareability of products, it is necessary to turn the products into social currency with strong self-propagation ability. Coca-Cola's ribbon bottle and gas can are superior in terms of appearance. With the unique content attributes, users can express their personality and thoughts through the products and are naturally willing to show them off on social platforms.

3. Symbiosis of social responsibility system

Coca-Cola has become an emotional driver for users because they have done one very important thing: breaking through the shackles of category cognition, building a social responsibility system in which the brand, society and users coexist, telling many stories about social responsibility, enhancing users' perception of trust in the brand, and driving users to become fans of the brand.

First, Coca-Cola not only sells beverages, but also has established its own "24-hour clean water" disaster emergency water supply mechanism . That is, once a disaster occurs, Coca-Cola's mechanism for producing drinking water can be used to switch to producing the most urgently needed drinking water for survival in the fastest way.

After the Ya'an earthquake, Coca-Cola delivered the first batch of pure water resources to the disaster area within 4 hours. Today, this symbiotic mechanism of production chain and social responsibility has benefited millions of disaster victims.

Second, achieve symbiosis between social responsibility and user emotions.

In Dubai, tens of thousands of Southeast Asian workers come here to make a living every year, but the sad thing is that their daily wage is only US$6, and a phone call home costs US$0.91, so many people suppress their longing for their families and do not contact them in order to save money. Based on this user insight, Coca-Cola launched the public welfare theme marketing "Hello, Happiness" in 2015. They built telephone booths and turned Coca-Cola bottle caps into currency. Users only needed to bring Coca-Cola bottle caps to a special telephone booth to meet with their families remotely.

The Coca-Cola case is not only creative but also meaningful in that they have made a perfect link between altruism and sales. That is, users can experience the product at an affordable price, keep the bottle caps, and enjoy happy time talking to their families, which drives product sales and deepens the emotional perception that Coca-Cola can bring happiness to people.

Third, creativity and social responsibility coexist.

In April 2016, Ecuador was hit by a 70-year-old earthquake, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless. Coca-Cola donated money and gifts, contributing the funds that were intended for advertising at the time. In order to help the victims solve temporary housing problems, 380 outdoor billboards were even removed and built into temporary shelters for everyone to use. From the underlying logic, Coca-Cola allows users to see the responsibility of an international brand, but from the perspective of emotional marketing, Coca-Cola has achieved the symbiosis of social responsibility through well-intentioned creativity. While removing the billboards, it has also increased the brand's emotional exposure.

So how does Coca-Cola's social responsibility symbiosis system work in driving emotional purchases?

1. Combined with social issues, we created a war preparedness industry chain and made it known to the society through third-party testimonies on social media . Just like Coca-Cola’s “24-hour Clean Water” disaster emergency water supply mechanism action, although it was not intentional, it was also spread quickly with the help of "Jet Li"’s Weibo.
2. Deeply understand the gap in users' emotional needs and fill it. Human purchasing behavior is driven by emotions. In addition to filling the gap in physical needs, filling the gap in emotional needs can arouse users' long-term emotional desire to follow.
3. Combine brand creativity and social responsibility : Go beyond the confines of companies only being able to donate money and materials for charity, and allow better creativity to express the brand's values ​​while shouldering their own social responsibilities. This is a win-win situation for both the brand and society.

IV. Conclusion

As a world-class brand, Coca-Cola possesses advanced digital marketing technology, but I believe that the reason why Coca-Cola can become a century-old brand is not because of rapid iterative innovation, but because of their advanced understanding of products and users. If we want to learn, we just need to get a principle: establish accurate insights into users' emotional needs, speak human language, let the product speak for itself, continuously output brand values, and form a united front with users emotionally.

Author: Xiaowu

Official account: Brand Reality Institute