Coca Cola Digital Marketing Strategy

Coca Cola Digital Marketing Strategy

Most multinationals fail to realize the importance of maintaining an online platform to ensure an active engagement with the potential customers. In fact, there are multiple benefits involved in initiating an online corporate presence. Embracing digital marketing as one of the ways to woo online customers is one of the ways that the organization such as Coca Cola can improve its brand (Svendsen, 2013).

Coca Cola's integrated marketing communications strategy demonstrates how the rivaling firms like Pepsi can turn conversations into transactions by employing mobile apps, YouTube, social gaming, Twitter, and Facebook (Mangold et al., 2012). The advertising strategy utilized by Coca-Cola is liquid and linked. For instance, Content 2020 was mainly conceived as a means of moving the firm to content excellence from creative excellence. (Liquid and Linked, the Coca Cola's maiden concept) involves the utilization of relevant and multifaceted stories to provoke and rally conversations that are sustainable and can evolve on their own in the long run. Coca Cola’s marketing strategies figured that such liquid ideas can be contagious thus making it hard to control as they get rooted deeply in online social circles. Still, the liquid ideas are linked innately to the brand agendas, consumer interests, and brand agendas.

Coca Cola’s Objective

Coca-Cola aims to increase its sales and the market base by weaving its brand image into popular cultures' fabric, thus getting an opportunity to engage the young generation in the market. As a market leader, Coca-Cola has already recognized the shifts in the planning of traditional media from global events, celebrity endorsements, and Hollywood to a digital age that prompts the incorporation of bedroom celebrities, location technologies and social sites on the internet. Stories can spread, grow, and scale as per the objectives of interactive digital marketing (Zarrella, 2014).

Strategy

North America’s Coke Team Campaign rolled with the assumption that every individual in the demography is fond of a great story. Therefore, teenagers and young adults cannot be exempted. Advertising via multiple channels in such a campaign offers a more engaging digital media as compared to traditional advertisements. The campaign is characterized by multi-layered and mystique storytelling. It targets the teen's need for interactivity and social recognition by incorporating the elements of customizable, exclusive and hidden content (Constantinides et al., 2014).

 Furthermore, this integrated and interactive social media campaign entails a quest to unearth a secret content (Allen, 2015). Teenagers can roll out Keyhole logo offline for varied opportunities to discover tons of exclusive and clickable content created by Coca Cola. In a YouTube Video (The Secret Out There), for instance, Doc Pemberton, the Coca-Cola inventor is introduced. If a teen clicks on its logo keyhole, it redirects him to a Twitter stream @docpemberton and Facebook’s Ahh Giver application that can be used to send a free Coke or a personalized message to friends and relatives (Kaplan et al., 2014).

The campaign is still running currently. Already, there are 3billion impressions and more than 45 million Coke Team Campaign conversations in the social media circles. Coca Cola’s Facebook account has earned more than 37 million ‘likes’ so far from South Africa World Cup Campaign and the concept of ‘Liquid and Linked’. In North America alone, such digital marketing campaigns have generated an increase in Coca-Cola sales revenue by 5%. 

2014 Football World Cup

In the year 2014, Coca-Cola utilized the planet's biggest football tournament in Brazil to run a digital campaign initiated 5 months prior to the event’s commencement. The Brazil Campaign rallied football fans and the firm’s customers to submit photos via an online platform. Such pictures were then added to a ‘happiness flag’ (Ryan, 2014).. Resultantly, more than a quarter of a million people submitted unique photos for the flag creation. The flag spanned approximately 3000 square meters and was unveiled during the opening ceremony (Hemann et al., 2015. More than 1 billion watched the event hence allowing Coke digital advert to reach a wider global audience.

2012 Share a Coke Campaign      

Share a Coke Campaign is a digital platform marketing strategy launched almost simultaneously in UK and Australia. The company replaced its traditional brand with nearly 150 names of individuals in both countries. During the summer of 2013, Coca-Cola allowed its consumers to have their names printed on Coke labels. People virtually ‘shared a Coke' by sending a personalized bottle to a relative or friend (Radjou et al., 2015). Coca-Cola recommended its customers to tweet information about the person that shared a coke (Freeman et al., 2014). Tweeted messages continuously appeared at London’s Piccadilly Circus.

In the United Kingdom alone, the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign yielded up to 999 million impressions. There were 235,000 tweets that used #ShareaCoke hashtag, making it one of the most consistent trending topics on the social media during the year. Customers personalized nearly 750, 000 bottles via Coca Cola's e-commerce website. Across Europe, 18,000 virtual name bottles were shared on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In 2014 and 2015, Coca-Cola repeated the campaign due to its initial success (Flores, 2014).

Strategies used in the ‘Share a Coke’ Campaign

Creativity in Online Media Content

The campaign targeted customers that extensively utilize social media in sharing of stories and photos. The corporation offered brand ownership and total creative control to its customers (Thain, 2014). In fact, individuals that were unwilling to promote the company were dragged into the campaign as they participated in social media conversations (Greenberg et al., 2014). In the long-run, multiplatform conversation centered on Coca-Cola as a platform took over in Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. 

Personal Level Connection

The management of Coca-Cola understood that the social media platform is themed on an expression of personalized views. Therefore, the marketing team conceived a campaign that can be integrated easily into the social media (Mathieson, 2011). The consumers expressed themselves freely by participating in the initiative and telling their personal side of the story. In return, they established connections with new friends that shared common interests. For example, when a customer shared a Coke with a name of a spouse, child or parent, they got a notion that they were actually expressing love, respect or honor to the person rather than promoting Coke as a brand (Kaplan, 2011). Besides, the shared photos with #ShareaCoke hashtag resulted in a chain of events hence a viral content.

Calls to Action

‘Share a Coke’ slogan bears an attractive message that lures the customers as a call-to-action initiative. Most customers find it irresistible to buy a physical Coke and share an online virtual Coke as well because of this phrase. It is catchy, simple, and easy to recall thus resulting in the alteration of customer’s change of mindset on how he/she views coke as a product. Therefore, it is evident that the firm adheres to the customer engagement theory (Wind et al., 2011).

Today, experts argue that ‘Share a Coke' is one of the most compelling and outstanding campaigns in the history of the firm and its rivals. The overarching theme employed earned Coca-Cola a competitive edge (Kaufman et al., 2014). The digital media marketing theme attained two goals: it successfully spoke to the customers as humans at a personal level while ensuring that the Coke brand reaches out to a wider public, especially the social media users. Such a success demonstrates that a proper use of personalization as an advertisement tool leads to effectiveness in engagement with the targeted market segment. Coca Cola’s leadership in digital marketing innovation highlights social media as a powerful tool that can wield a greater impact if utilized in a customized manner that suits the needs of the organizations as well as those of the consumers (Nestle, 2015).

Polar Bowl

During the 2012 American Super Bowl, Coca-Cola ran an entirely digital campaign that entailed a real-time reaction of animated polar bears as the games continued (Ryan & Jones, 2013). Framestore Visual Effects Studio produced the videos that were aired live on YouTube. As a result, Super Bowl fans and online viewers had a chance on social media to interact with the polar bears. They sent photos to be held up on an animated iPad tablet (Shank, 2014).

Real-time social exchange ensures communication between consumers and brands at a premium. As in the case of Coca-Cola, social media exchange has heightened the role of authenticity and creativity in the digital marketing. Innovation and creativity remain vital to digital marketing, even as data disruption and technology alters how loyal customers anticipate interacting with product brands. There is a fundamental alteration of the speed that the marketers can showcase their creativity (Davis, 2013). Digital marketing strategists should borrow a leaf from Coca Cola’s successful social media advertisement concept by identifying the existing market trends and how they wield an impact on the organizations’ long-term operations (Charlesworth, 2014). At the base, digital marketers should understand the shoppers and consumers in a meaningful and deep way (Webb, 2015). Coca-Cola is not an exception—its strategists still need to interact with their own brand and communicate core reason. In so doing, it is possible to heighten the standard of creative excellence. Now that consumers own Coca Cola’s brand, the next digital marketing strategy should foster the already established relationship to sustain the strong bond.

In summary, it is clear that Coca-Cola has succeeded in incorporating its digital marketing strategy across key social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (Weinberg 2012). The company’s interaction with the customers is mutually beneficial due to a personal touch in the online adverts. Besides, coca cola’s campaigns such as Share a Coke makes the customers realize the importance of establishing a cordial relationship with friends and relatives through periodic expression honor and respect. In turn, Coca-Cola reaps the benefits of reaching a global audience via viral social media messages (Miller et al., 2011).

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