Yesterday I have finally finished
all my projects for this semester, and I have to admit that the infographic one
for BC3403 was the most enjoyable one I've done recently. At least I could do some artistic design, instead of programming all the day :P .
The infographic was mainly about
the Ahh Effect campaign that was first launched by Coca-Cola in 2013. The
campaign is still on going. I've really learned a lot while analysing this campaign, and not all the considerations were put into the infographic or report, so I
want to talk about it here.
Opportunities or risks? Teenagers and rising health issues
When we were doing the
situational analysis, we've found that although the company was still the leader in the soda market, the whole industry was actually not in a positive
trend. This is mainly due to the inherent health issue of the soda itself. When
it comes to the teenagers, the society seems to be more serious about the
issue. It is true that the teenagers should be the main market target for such
a cheerful and energetic brand, but it is also true that a popular campaign may
result in a worse reputation if the ethical issue was not addressed to
properly. It might be thought in a way that this
campaign doesn't make my product less healthy, but it does make my brand lovelier.
The fact is that although there was no instant sales boost, the number was not
falling at least. Most of the people would understand that solving the product
problem would be a long-term effort. Before the result comes, the marketing
goal should be: when people suddenly want a sip of soda, the Coke would be the
one that they are thinking of.
A low-cost large scale campaign
I’ve seen some bloggers said that
this campaign has very low cost: It’s just some domain names, and is like
pocket-money for Coca-Cola. Of course that might not be the main cost, but what
they meant was that the campaign is very cheap overall. As mentioned in the
infographic, the company has involved several other partners besides Wieden + Kennedy,
including Alloy Digital and Break Media. These were two famous media groups,
but they were planning to merge together when the campaign was launched. Therefore
it should be a good deal for Coca-Cola to cooperate with a new brand that could
provide experienced solutions. Regarding the celebrities, they were popular
ones for teenagers and were mainly web celebrities, but not superstars. It
would not be costly to ask them to record a small video for their fans. Lastly,
as a CS student, I’d like to say that the games were really easy to implement!
Timeline too long?
Yes, the campaign is still there
if you enter www.ahh.com in your browser,
given that it was launched in 2013. There are still new games coming out this
year. Compared to other online marketing campaigns, this might be too long. However,
in my opinion, this is a good strategy. Information changes extremely rapidly,
so the short-term campaign would be flushed out by new campaigns, no matter how
popular it was. But for a long-term campaign, there would be a place for it on
the internet, and it would create impact once there is any update. In addition,
it would be much easier to add new content on an existed platform. It is true
that the impact might become smaller and smaller in the future, but the
dimensions could always be updated, and even the strategy could be changed if necessary
one day, since it is not costly to maintain the campaign assets.
B2C or B2B?
Our group has recommended that
the activities that could generate more purchase intent could be added to the
campaign, for example a redemption activity. I personally have not considered
that Coca-Cola is a B2B company, which makes it rather complicated to realise
the redemption scheme in all or even some of the franchisers. Nevertheless,
there is a possibility of purchase intent improvement in this campaign.
Thanks to the course, I
appreciated the opportunity to discuss the case with my group members, and we
enjoyed the process of figuring out the design and flow of the infographic. I
feel greatly contented when our work was printed out and well-presented and appreciated
by the instructor. The works of other groups were also creative and amazing! It
was so nice that this course ended up with this interesting project!
