Coca-Cola, the drink, may be fighting harder than it ever for market share in so many of its established markets, but Coca-Cola, the brand, has just become a whole lot bigger. It is now the master brand for classic Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Coke Life. The change will commence in the UK (Europe’s flagship market) immediately, and before it is extended. The only 'next' markets identified so far are Northern North West Europe, Nordics and Iberia. These will take up the One brand marketing from May.
Coca-Cola’s brand equity will embrace the other three variants. In packaging, this means that although each variant will continue to have a distinct colour – red, black, silver and green respectively, the branding on pack will be uniform with the Cola-Cola trademark made larger and more visible.
After thirty years of packaging and promoting its variants as single brands, the company has concluded that this has been getting in the way of communicating what’s actually in the product.
“We haven’t communicated the tastes of our drinks that well and as a result people aren’t making informed choices,” Coca-Cola marketing director UK, Bobby Brittain, noted.
There are, no doubt, other significant factors. Coca-Cola has never faced such a fast growing array of competitors. "What's actually in the product" has never been so aggressively debated. And attitudes to soft drinks have changed - to Coke's detriment.
Text will be added to the front of Coke Zero, Coke Life and Diet Coke to enable consumers to better understand the range of products and the distinctive attributes of each.
Coke Zero stands to benefit most by having its attributes clarified. UK research identified that that 50% of consumers there did not realise it is a no sugar Coke. It will now wear the words, "zero sugar – great Coke taste," in the foreground of its cans. Diet Coke will be identified as “no sugar no calories”.
The new packaging will also feature colour coded front-of-pack labelling showing fat, saturated fat, salt, sugar and calories, to respond to shifting attitudes about health in general and the healthy qualities of soft drinks in particular.
Less is more is the new design mantra. The Less is More approach will mean that communications will balance everything that has made Coca-Cola brand famous with the core product benefits of each drink. Ads will focus on the emotional qualities of the master brand at peak times in the year; creative work in which the drinks are lined up next to each other and their differences highlighted; and product-specific messages that communicate the attributes of a single drink.
All marketing will now carry a logo of the four contour bottles and use the Choose Happiness strapline, which is an update of the company’s long-running Open Happiness theme.
Coca-Cola will double its marketing spend for Coke’s low and no sugar products under the one brand banner. From May, brand campaigns for Coke Zero will be scrapped and will assess phasing out brand campaigns for Diet Coke. All advertising campaigns in Northern Europe will then feature all four products, with the lower and no sugar Coca-Cola variants presented in the final frames of all Coca-Cola television advertising.
Although all four will feature in future campaigns, Coke will be able to "hero" whichever variant is relevant to the campaign, as shown below.
For the first time, Coca-Cola will use its sponsorship of a major international sporting event, Rugby World Cup 2015, to promote all four variants of Coca-Cola and to ‘hero’ Coca-Cola with zero calories. “We know that if we make people more aware of the choices that are available to them and exactly what’s in all of those choices then there’s not doubt that they will buy more…
“It is in our own self-interest that we’re doing this because we’re convinced that there is more growth to get from the segment. But it is also in the interest of our customers because when we do this right there will be additional interest, involvement and excitement in a segment that has shown modest growth.”
