Why do these incredibly popular brands even need to advertise? For brands that are not yet household names, for example like custom clothing companies, it’s obvious, they want to get their product out there. Companies that are already big do it for different reasons, though. They may want to refresh people’s memories, or say, “This is why we’re the best.”
Coca Cola is a perfect example for this. Some of Coca Cola’s most successful marketing campaigns:
“Share a Coke” with song lyrics
As we talked about before, Coca-Cola was highly successful with their “Share a Coke” campaign where they put people’s names on their bottles. As a spin-off of that campaign, Coke started putting song lyrics on the bottles, telling us to “Share a Coke and a Song.” The diversity of lyrics contains something we can all relate to, with quotes from songs like Queen’s “We are the Champions,” Randy Newman in Toy Story’s “You’ve got a friend in me,” and Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it like it’s hot.” In short, Coke once again came up with a great way to remind us that we might in fact want one of their tasty beverages.
Twitter powered vending machines
In August of 2015, Coca-Cola put a vending machine in three major London Railway stations that dispensed free T-shirts and bottles of the sugary soda. All people had to do was tweet the hashtag for Coke’s previous slogan: Choose Happiness. Regardless of how much Coke ended up spending on the promotion, people loved it, and the positive image of the Coca-Cola brand grew even more.
Coke Zero Sugar promotion
Coca-Cola recently decided to update the ever-popular Coke Zero diet soda with a version called Coke Zero Sugar, which is similar to the old product but supposedly tastes much more like regular Coke. In typical Coca-Cola fashion, the Great Britain sector plans to give away over four million samples of the drink throughout the summer. Previous advertising for diet sodas focused on the sugar-free version as a substitute rather than a main product. This switch in focus is a bold move for Coca-Cola, and what looks to be a great marketing play.
America themed cans
In celebration with Coca-Cola’s 75-year partnership with the United Service Organizations (USO), Coke released specially themed America cans. If you’re an American like myself, you know that Budweiser has done something similar and completely changed their name to “America” up until the presidential elections. Us Americans love being patriotic, and Coke really hit the mark with these promotional cans.
What other brands can learn from Coca Cola
What we should all learn from Coca-Cola is that the key to successful advertising is to advertise an emotion, feeling, or state of mind, rather than just a product. Sure you should probably mention your product somewhere along the line, but the important thing is to make people feel a certain type of way. Make it seem like your product will bring happiness, peace, love, or any number of positive feelings, and you will be giving Coke a run for their money in no time.
