Share A Coke Campaign

The “Share a Coke” Campaign: In the summer of 2014, Coca-Cola began a new marketing campaign, “Share a Coke” which utilized the globally well recognized Coca-Cola logo, font, bottle, and colors. The campaign, which is still in use today, gives consumers the opportunity to share a custom moment with Coca-Cola products that have an individual’s name on the label instead of the traditional Coca-Cola logo. The basic 8, 16, and 20oz bottles started out with some of the most popular millennial names but has recently expanded to less common and even customizable name tags. As for the larger bottles that will likely be consumed by one or more people, they used items such as “Friends” and “Family”. (Telesca, 2014). Rather than traditional marketing

Joshua Schaffer states “consumers who anthropomorphize as a result of advertising begin to associate themselves with the product or brand and (as customers) even associate the particular brand with their own lifestyle. This association exhibits a strong sense of brand resonance; it also often results in customers’ seemingly obsessive or passionate need for a particular brand.” Conventional anthropomorphic advertising has been used throughout the entire 19th century. An example of this includes Coca-Cola’s ad campaign with the polar bears sharing a coke. Recently, marketers have shifted away from conventional anthropomorphic advertising because “contemporary consumers appear to find colorful cartoon characters to be both unsophisticated and irrelevant to complex modern buying decisions.” (Shalit 2000). Today, the shift from conventional anthropomorphic advertising has led to innovative anthropomorphic advertising that is enhanced with social media. This is a subtler marketing process than its predecessor because it is intended to make the consumer elicit anthropomorphic feelings and emotions toward a product instead of using a spokes character. The “Share a Coke” campaign similarly created anthropomorphic feelings of friendship by labeling their products with common names. Giving these inanimate bottles a life like name of someone a consumer knows helps the consumer associate their brand personification with human beings they are close with. “Human relationships are based on attributions of personality and on emotional connections. Logically, then, triggering an anthropomorphic response could support both of these goals.” (McQuarrie, Delbaere and