Coca-Cola blurs borders with experiential stunt

Joss Davidge, Business Director of brand experience agency BEcause, continues his weekly search for great marketing ideas.

This week he looks at a campaign from Coca-Cola that drives home the brand’s key “happiness” message by blurring borders.
 
A brand that seems to truly get the potential of experiential marketing as a way to create conversations with consumers and build trust is Coca-Cola. The brand has featured on our company blog and in this Marketing Society blog several times with exemplar campaigns.  Here is another example of Coca-Cola aligning its product with something that resonates at a base level.
 
Continuing the brand’s highly successful “happiness” campaign, “small world” vending machines were installed in two cities – Lahore in Pakistan and New Delhi in India. Due to decades of political tension between the two counties the cities seem “worlds apart”. So Coca-Cola devised a way that people in both cities could share a moment (over a bottle of coke, of course).
 
The small world vending machines enabled consumers to connect across the border via a video link. It tasked the users to complete a few simple tasks on the touchscreen, together in order to receive a sample bottle of the ubiquitous soft drink.

The campaign has all the trimmings of a well devised, carefully executed and emotionally powerful experiential stunt. The fact that the soft-drink giant is demonstrating a will to take its corporate responsibility seriously by working across borders and dealing with a difficult issue with cultural sensitivity means that this campaign was bound to get noticed. The campaign rides on a wave of good feeling, a sense that deep down we are all similar, wherever we are from.  
 
Through viral videos, experiential stunts and online campaigns the brand has linked cans of Coca-Cola with “happiness” with great success. Here are a couple of other notable examples:

Coca-Cola “believe in a better world” CCTV:

Coca-Cola Happiness vending machine:

Read more from Joss Davidge in our Clubhouse.