Coca Cola has positioned itself on ‘happiness’. It wants the world to be happy.
When Coke looked around it noticed that Twitter was a very popular social networking platform. But research done among 50000 Internet users concluded that 47% of all Tweets had a negative tinge to them. It seemed that the world loves to rant, complain, vent their feelings & frustrations & is using this platform to good effect.
Coca Cola decided to do something about it. It created a marketing pro
gram to encourage & reward Twitter users to use the platform to tweet positive & happy message.
To achieve this objective it introduced the world’s 1st Vending machine, which was programed to set the price of a can of Coke based on how positives your tweets were.
This is how the Vending machine worked. Take yourself. When you faced it, you will be requested to key in your Twitter @username. The Vending machine, using analytics, will quickly analysed your tweets & conclude if your tweets are positive or negative – and accordingly set the prices of Coke can you have to pay. If the algorithm determined your Tweets were positive then you have to pay less – even zilch - yes absolutely free. Conversely, if your tweets were deemed to be negative the same can of Coke will be priced dearer for you.
This marketing program has the necessary ingredients to engage young adults, personalize rewards for them & offer them instant gratifications.
Business Lesson for us: 1. Create a marketing promotion, which will reinforce the Position of your brands. 2. It would add value to your brand if it has the power to create ‘buzz’. For that it should be so engaging that customers should talk about it & in extreme cases also brings about a change in their behaviour.
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here
