Coca-Cola Marketing

Marketing a Drink, but Never by Name
COMMERCIALS for Coca-Cola are sometimes so completely shrouded by storytelling that viewers can make a game of brand-spotting. The game — let’s call it “Spot the Coke Can” — takes a particularly long time during the cinematic spots in movie theaters.

[pic]

In the global advertising campaign called Open Happiness that was introduced in January, the Coca Cola Company takes the game to a logical last step by omitting any reference to the brand in a catchy song it created and sold last winter.

With the title “Open Happiness,” the song is an advertisement by association.

•

Coca-Cola signed a crew of well-known band members and performers to record the single. It also produced several different language versions for other countries.

On Thursday morning, the song will take another promotional step forward when MTV is expected to show the premiere of the music video for “Open Happiness.” Coca-Cola said it did not pay MTV for the showing.

As is the case with the song, viewers of the video will be hard-pressed to spot the Coca-Cola brand. “I studied the video like the Zapruder film,” said a Coke spokesman, Petro Kacur, and the Coke reference “is so super-fast that you really have to be looking for it.”

Umut Ozaydinli, the global music marketing manager for the Coca-Cola Company, said the upbeat song pulled consumers into the Open Happiness campaign, rather than pushing it on them like traditional advertising.

“Coca-Cola is such a strong and magical brand that we can come out with something with no branding or very little branding,” he said in a telephone interview from Turkey on Wednesday, where the company plans to release a Turkish-language version of the song. “All the communications we are doing around the song enable consumers to connect the song with the brand.”

While Coca-Cola has produced songs in the past — before the Summer Olympics in Beijing last year, the company released eight song remixes by... [continues]

Read full essay