From May 2013 and throughout the summer,
Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign inspired consumers to share a bottle of Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero with their loved ones across the continent. The campaign took one of the world’s most iconic logos and replaced it with some of Europe’s most popular first names, with each participating country tailoring bottles with its country’s most popular 250 names. Due to the winning combination of personalization and social media, the campaign found great global success in Europe, whilst capturing consumers’ imaginations, globally.
In Great Britain this summer, 500 ml Coke, Diet Coke and Coke Zero bottles featured 250 of the UK’s most popular names. The campaign was designed to enable consumers to discover the bottles on-shelf for themselves a week before official marketing around ‘Share a Coke’ began. At the same time, Coke sent personalized bottles to key influencers online, which, coupled with consumers discovering the bottles for the first time, created huge excitement online ahead of the ‘big reveal’. From Twitter to Instagram, the nation was waking up to their names on supermarket shelves around the country, then sharing the news far and wide via their social networking accounts. A week later, Coca-Cola officially launched the campaign at a star-studded event, which celebrated the theme of ‘sharing’, in London.
Coca-Cola wanted to engage the whole nation to ‘share’ via this dedicated campaign. Even if a name didn’t feature on the list of the top 250 popular names, Coke still made it possible to ‘Share a Coke’. In the second phase of the campaign, a personalization tour made its way up, down and across the country to festivals, shopping centers and Tesco supermarkets, allowing consumers to personalize a bottle with their name or the name of a loved one, on the spot. In total, the Share a Coke tour made an appearance at more than 100 stops in Great Britain.
The campaign exploded on social media, with more than 120,000 tweets to date from people who have used the #shareacoke hashtag after finding or receiving a personalized bottle. Coca-Cola also encouraged consumers to visit its Facebook page to create and share
a personalized virtual Coke with family and friends.
The campaign launched in Europe this summer after a successful run in Australia, and it will eventually appear across 32 countries worldwide. The personalized labels have been produced by HP Indigo presses, who have to date, created more than 800 million labels featuring at least 150 of the most popular names in each country. To bolster excitement, Coca-Cola developed a fully integrated campaign that combined country-specific television ads that featured real consumers and their sharing stories of who they’d like to Share a Coke with, with online media.