Always in the mix

If you’re going to spend your career in advertising, you could do a lot worse than to spend it slavishly aping the ways and actions of the great Coca Cola company.

Note I refer to the company as great, not the product, which is diabetes-inducing, tooth-loss causing and completely lacking in the ‘enlivening’ properties that one would look for were it still to contain the extracts of the kola nut and the coca leaf.

That said, at the right time, in the right place, nothing quite beats an ice-cold coke…

I am not an expert on Coca Cola, I have never worked on or for it, but I have observed it closely as a brand, consciously in recent years and unconsciously since some time in the late 70’s.

It appears to me that Coca Cola, in terms of it’s advertising, has a very simple two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, it’s communication is exceptionally functional, about as functional as it can get, whilst on the other hand, every once in a while, they roll something out that’s designed to warm the heart and make you fall in love all over again with the great purveyors of sweet dark fizzy flavored water.

The example shown here I saw yesterday whilst in the queue at Nakumatt, a most unusual experience for me. This is a classic example of Coca Cola’s functional ‘product-association’ strategy. If you observe you will see that a Coca Cola bottle is only ever shown alone if it is raised to someone’s lips, with said someone having their head thrown back and eyes closed as they enjoy a moment of unadulterated bliss (what I believe is known as appetite appeal).

At all other times a Coca Cola bottle will be shown placed in context either in association with food(s) and/or a social eating-based scenario.

Thus here we have Coca Cola with Urban Bites (Sugar, Salt and Fat). Replace Urban Bites with fried chicken, chips funga, hot dogs, burgers, pop corn (kwa cinema) or ‘nusu mkate’ and you begin to get the picture.

Nobody ever said that advertising is the work of angels. This is cold, calculated and ruthless mental manipulation. This is the use of images, and to a lesser extent language, to condition your mind into believing that a satisfying meal can only be satisfying if it is accompanied by a (ideally cold) coke. Given that the process of this conditioning begins not long after birth, and can be expected to continue for the vast majority of ones adult life, it should come as no surprise that one brand above all others has dominated the soft drinks category for the best part of a century (which in historical terms means that it is beginning to move into the category of ‘empire’).

Just as coke are the masters of relating their brand to a wide variety of meals, so to are they equally adept at relating and associating it with that quintessential human social activity – meal times.

Close you eyes, you can see the ad already. Mum, dad, three children, guka, cucu, niece, uncle, dog and two cats, all seated around a table, said table positively groaning under the load of heaped foodstuffs, everybody smiling and grinning (especially mum, who is the core target of the ad), and a big prominent bottle of coke (always full) placed front and center at the heart of everything.

Always remember when you look at an ad – there is what it says (superficially), and there is what it means. What the ad above would probably say is ‘Mealtimes taste better with Coke’. What the ad above actually means though is quite different: ‘mum, that super-special family moment that you are trying to create, surrounded by all the people that you love and hold dear, is not complete without a bottle or three of Coca Cola on the table.’

Now please note, I am not trying to portray the Coca Cola company as evil, they aren’t. What they are though is extremely and utterly professional. Marketing is a war for share of wallet, and therefore, all’s fair in love and advertising. Coca Cola remind me very much of the US Marine Corp – well funded, well trained, well equipped and well capable of kicking your…

What is more the Corp, I mean the Coca Cola company, is old enough, ugly enough and wise enough to know that occasionally you have to move beyond ‘surgical strikes’, ‘flanking maneuvers’ and ‘fire suppression’ and spend a bit of time and money winning ‘hearts and minds’. That’s why every once in a while they’ll go find a hot agency and get them to churn out a genuine ‘hit’.

Thus a while ago we had ‘Brrrr’, which was a phenomenon, but which it must be said was still at the end of the day simply a very creative way of expressing the key functional benefit of a cold coke – refreshment. More recently we have had ‘A billion reasons to believe in Africa.’ To my mind this campaign was a stroke of genius – nothing to do with coke, but everything to do with the hopes, dreams, aspirations and self-belief of an entire continent. Another generation hooked for life, job done, what’s next…?

So whether you sell coffee or tea, juice or toilet paper, biscuits or crisps or gourmet sandwiches, study the masters - learn from them, copy them and respect them. Just don’t try to beat them at their own game, yet…