A You Tube video to accompany the campaign shows consumers' surprised reactions when they encounter the sharing can, which shaped like a regular 330ml can of Coke, comes apart to form two smaller cans for sharing.
Coca-Cola Singapore ASEAN IMC director, Leonardo O’Grady, told BeverageDaily.com that the successful project – the video has scored 1.31m+ views since it was uploaded on May 29 – marked Coke’s attempt to shift from ‘saying and showing’ to more real actions.
“The traditional model of communication is very much broadcast driven and often one way,” O’Grady said. Increasingly, as we try to come up with authentic and real ways to engage people and have them share the dialogue, we’re looking at different communication models.
“What’s integral to the brand Coke is the optimism, spreading happiness – but this is limited if you’re only doing it in a one-way, two-dimensional way,” he added.
‘It’s fuelled a lot of enthusiasm…’
The executive explained that Coke has a global idea of ‘where will happiness strike next?’, and seeks to proactively engage and surprise people with experiences that disrupt experience, make them smile, laugh, cheer them up.
“We tested how consumers would respond to a piece of packaging like this. Would they love it, would they reject it, and in that way it was a pilot. Seeing how people played with the can, how they thought about it,” O’Grady said.
“For us it’s fuelled a lot of enthusiasm around really making this package into something that is maybe more than a one-off. But there are a lot of challenges around that, so we’re still trying to figure that out.”
Asked whether Coke did have plans to scale-up the project, O’Grady said: “I can’t tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on that one. Speaking purely personally, I hope so. I love the simplicity of it, also the complexity.
“It’s also based upon insights we have surrounding people’s behavior with Coke, particularly with teens or young adults, where there is a tradition or a desire for sharing.”
Looking at potential markets
O’Grady said Coke was now asking how one scaled-up the project in an ‘on brand’, relevant way.
“There are such high demands and expectations for these things. We’re definitely looking at a couple of markets where we could seriously make it happen, but it’s a question of how to make this happen and the financials of it,” he said.
O’Grady added: “You want to make something like this universally accessible – it can’t be a premium one-off thing, given the nature of it as something that is accessible. You want something that people can access, play with, that can be a regular thing.”
Technical challenges in producing the can – launched with the help of Ogilvy & Mather in Singapore and France – involved the inability to produce it on Coke’sexisting canning lines at this stage, O’Grady said.
“Right now we’re trying to figure out how we can take something that is half the size of traditional sizes, and how we can make that work, and reassemble the parts in a way that doesn’t require manual labour and so on.
“We worked with a third-party producer – which we do typically with any of our innovations – some designers and package engineers and took it on a very small scale, just enough to get it out there and capture responses, as well as having a few cans to distribute to some of our technical people who are looking at it,” he added.