“Share a Coke” 2014 American Campaign

Analyzing marketing campaigns to determine audiences, effects and influences

Share a Coke with friends, families or loved ones fighting overseas and they will feel remembered, loved and community. A 20 oz. Coke bottle with a name on it became the gift to give (and receive) over the summer. Teenagers and Millennials snapped photos with Coke bottles that featured their name and posted it to their social media with the hashtag: #ShareaCoke. The “Share a Coke” 2014 American campaign reached thousands and put a smile on a whole lot of faces. Unfortunately, definite numbers have not yet been released to see how the campaign did, but if the original “Share a Coke” campaign is any indicator, the interest in Coke and its sales are sure to have soared.

The “Share a Coke” campaign invited people to find bottles that had a name that meant something to them.

In 2014, Coca-Cola had been around for 128 years and was considered one of the world’s most valuable brands. Despite the success and a reported net income of $7.1 billion in 2014, Coca-Cola was facing a change in American culture. Michele Simon, a public health lawyer, spoke in 2014 and reported that, “Coca-Cola’s sales are slipping, and there’s this huge political and public backlash against soda, with every major city trying to do something to curb consumption.” Consumption of full-calorie sodas by the average American dropped 25 percent in the last two decades.

To combat these downward trending numbers, Coca-Cola launched the “Share a Coke” campaign in America. When the campaign debuted in Australia in 2011, it won seven awards from the Cannes Lions festival and was one of the first campaigns with social media at its heart. Their campaign seemed to have worked: 250 million bottles and cans were sold among the population of 23 million people, eventually spreading to 70 other countries to personalize the brand elsewhere, encouraging people to “Share a Coke” with their friends worldwide. But its social media effort paled in comparison to how the 2014 American campaign capitalized on its consumers social media habit.  

“Share a Coke” focused on teens and young adults in order to reconnect them with the brand. Bottles of Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero featured 250 popular names on their labels, allowing consumers to find their name. The bottles also included nicknames like “Grill Masters,” “Bestie” and “Legend.”

The bottles also featured more generic titles like “Friends,” pictured here.

If consumers could not find their name, then they could stop at one of Coca-Cola’s 500 traveling kiosks to customize mini Coca-Cola cans for themselves and for those near and dear to them. This allowed for a physical platform that the audience could interact with more so than bottles in a store. Consumers were encouraged to post about the Coke bottle on social media with the hashtag #ShareaCoke.

Additionally, fans who had the Coca-Cola Freestyle app on their phone could scan a QR code and send their friends a $1 coupon for a 20 oz. can of Coke. Fans could also use the hashtag #ShareaCoke to make a post appear on an interactive billboard. The website shareacoke.com allowed people to send personalized Cokes to friends and family all around the world.

However, Coca-Cola did not just let its consumers do all the work in promoting the campaign. It supplemented its campaign with its own posts as well as ran a nine-week ad campaign featuring new TV commercials, cinema ads, social and digital engagement, digital billboards and experiential activations across the country. According to Stuart Kronauge, senior vice president, sparkling brands, Coca-Cola North America, the campaign focused on “self-expression, individual storytelling and staying connected with friends.”

During the three month campaign span (June to August) there were 125,000 posts about the campaign across all social media channels according to Coca-Cola , with 96 percent of the consumer sentiment toward the campaign as either positive or neutral. More than 353,000 virtual bottles were created through the website and shared with friends and families. In contrast, the Wall Street Journal reported that there were 500,000 photos on social media with the hashtag, one million personalized mini cans printed and over 6 million virtual bottles were created.

A Facebook post from Coca-Cola for the #ShareaCoke campaign.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that Coca-Cola’s soft-drink sales in the U.S. increased by 2 percent after the campaign. The summer of 2014 was the first time that the decade-long decline in Coca-Cola consumption was reversed.

Jeremy Rudge, creative excellence lead, said that “people were buying Cokes to show people they cared for that they missed them… from soldiers overseas in Afghanistan, to loved ones in hospital, to long-lost friends.”

Rudge explained further that the success of the campaign was because nothing is more personal than your name on a Coke bottle, “it can’t get more personal than that! The campaign capitalized on the global trend of self-expression and sharing, but in an emotional way. Coke is big enough to pull off an idea like this, which speaks to the iconic nature of the brand. Who would want their name on a brand unless it was as iconic as Coke? “Share a Coke” found the sweet spot by making consumers famous through the most iconic brand in the world.”

Some of the great parts about this campaign include how personalized it was. If people could not find their name on a store-bought can (like Emma could not do), they could create one virtually or go to one of the roving kiosks. Also, by using terms of endearment on the can as well, the campaign encouraged giving or receiving a coke and making that gift just a little more special.

The act of searching for Coke bottle with your name on it or making one with whatever word you want on it, gives the consumer something to interact with. As Rudge said, there is nothing more personal than seeing your name on one of the most valuable brands in the world. By having there be almost this “hunt” for the correct bottle, Coke was making an active connection to their audience instead of a passive one. After consumers went on the hunt for their Coke bottle, they probably thought about the campaign after their purchase, something that not all campaigns can easily achieve.  

One of the great things about this campaign is that it meshed online and offline media. By posting online with #ShareaCoke, the online media could appear offline on an interactive billboard! This further personalizes the campaign and product and is an incentive for people to share online. Who would not want their post on a billboard?

While social media might have been at the core of this campaign, what made it able to reach such a wide audience is the offline component. Viral social media campaigns generally have a “one and done” sort of deal and are rarely able to sustain the campaign over long periods of time. Because there was the more traditional media through the TV ads, the guerrilla marketing with the kiosks and the outdoor ads with the billboards, “Share a Coke” was able to sustain itself.

However, in comparison to this is an entirely online, free campaign like NASA’s #GlobalSelfie campaign on Earth Day in 2014. NASA produced a simple flier people could print out and take a selfie with in honor of Earth Day.

English version of the flier for Earth Day in 2014.

This campaign lasted 24 hours and did not have any paid media and very little media focus. It also did not have a super targeted audience, looking instead to simply capitalize on its unpaid social media reach. Despite no bought media, NASA was able to generate over 50,000 photos from across 133 different countries and every continent (including Antarctica)! (However, when considering NASA’s 13.4 million followers on Twitter, this number is a little disappointing.)

NASA took 36,422 of the selfies from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr and used them to create an entire Earth, symbolizing how everyone on this planet is a part of it.

The Global Selfie comprised of over 34,000 selfies taken on Earth Day in 2014.

This campaign, while not generating as much buzz or media hits as the other campaigns, is also one that does not have as measurable a goal as well. The Coca-Cola campaign can look at increases in sale and in profits, but NASA launched this campaign for spreading awareness; it did not end up calculating an increased awareness.

What both campaigns did right though, was give their audience a direct call to ask, something to do. Coca-Cola wanted you to take photos of your Coke bottle and share online, and NASA wanted you to take photos with its #GlobalSelfie sheet and share online. By giving someone a direct call to action, both campaigns succeeded in generating buzz for their respective social media campaigns.

One of the #GlobalSelfies share with NASA on Earth Day in 2014.

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