Coca-Cola blurs borders with experiential stunt

Coca-Cola blurs borders
Joss Davidge BEcause

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.

Newsletter

Enjoy this? Get more.

Our monthly newsletter, The Edit, curates the very best of our latest content including articles, podcasts, video.

CAPTCHA
2 + 1 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Become a member

Not a member yet?

Now it's time for you and your team to get involved. Get access to world-class events, exclusive publications, professional development, partner discounts and the chance to grow your network.