Coca-Cola - A packaging lesson to remember
- brundidier
- Apr 12, 2022
- 3 min read
Coca-Cola is one of these brands that feel like it has always existed.
You have heard of it, you have probably tasted Coca-Cola at least once, and you most likely would recognise its signature bottle shape among many others. In short, Coca-Cola is a well-known brand in your head which that also means you have years of habits and rooted memories and/or opinions on its taste, its various products and campaigns and the brand.
So, here's the dilemma:
If you work at Coca-Cola, as a marketer, you know you have a rather loyal (if not addicted) customer base who has strong and deeply rooted taste preferences. You also know that in an effort to become a greener and healthier company (yes because now sugar is becoming your enemy) you want to offer a product with a long term potential which is also able to trigger a shift in the habits of your existing customers. Yay, turns out your R&D have done this for you and now you have this product to put on the market. So now, how would you market a recipe upgrade in a way that is visible to all, makes existing customers want to try it and eventually become new product adorers (and avoid the New Coke and Dasani water fiascos) and how do you convert new customers?
Their answer: Packaging.
And it's brilliant! Also, perfectly timed (I will get to this)
Why packaging?
First, because it's noticeable. Coca-Cola has been playing with packaging quite a lot in past years. we've seen a new glass bottle design, new Diet Coke labels and several versions of the classic can labels. While it felt like the brand was trying to find itself in terms of design (thank you "Less is more" people at Apple), it was announced in 2016 that packaging should work in favour of creating unity among the products: basically, by standardizing the labels, this would improve identification of the brand, enhance its "iconicity" and this is turn would boost the consumption of other Coca-Cola variants.
In 2021, they've done it again for Coca-Cola Zero, have a look below:
Old
New - 2021
First impressions:
Black is gone.
Red gains far more visibility (I always wondered if this was actually a choice made when they first introduced the drink, aka let's give it a widely different colour and over time, bring it closer to the original colours..who knows..)
Looks a lot more like the classic Coca-Coca label (that's exactly what they want as per their one brand strategy)
There's the "New Taste" visual cue to still remind it's new and exciting
It's clean and places a bigger accent on the colour (which will play a crucial role in product identification)
This design change is important for 2 reasons:
1. It marks the launch of the Coca-Cola unification strategy
2. It's the perfect way to pile up 2 wins for the price of one by introducing a new Coke Zero recipe and get people to notice it
Neuromarketing, hello!
Yes, this is neuromarketing live in action people! What you don't realise yet is that Coca-Cola is updating your muscle memory and also taking advantage of your years of accumulated habits: Red for classic Coke, Black for Coke Zero, Grey for Diet Coke.
With less obvious colour cues, you are more likely to choose the wrong can and therefore taste something new and eventually convert to a new drink.
At the same time, with a new and cleaner label, they are triggering zones of your brain that stored the olds coke label info and hoping that this will in turn trigger curiosity about the drink. They will probably not convert you but at least they will make you think about it for a few seconds and if there's one thing we know, it's that marketers want you to think about their products.
I believe their long term goal is to slowly convert classic coke consumers to Coke Zero and we will see many other recipe updates until we get to the point where there is general consensus on taste among classic Coke and Coke Zero consumers. But that's me placing bets.
Why should you care?
This is a great example of how packaging can boost your marketing effort but
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