The Winning Coca-Cola Formula for a Successful Campaign

When it comes to snatching the attention of consumers, Coca-Cola has a proven track record. Remember the “ ” campaign from the 1970s? The one with the iconic “hilltop” commercial featuring people from all over the world?

That’s just one of the many winning campaigns the soda company has launched over the years. Recently, Coke did it again with their “Share a Coke” campaign. But this was a quite a bit more complex than the one from the ‘70s. The marketing team had to launch a global campaign with many moving parts, multiple media platforms, new workflows and partners in 80 different nations.

In the end, the “Share a Coke” campaign raised sales and introduced Coke to a generation that saw the soda as an old fuddy-duddy. We can learn something from the success of the “Share a Coke” campaign.

We’ve spent some time dissecting the campaign and analyzing what actions made it so successful. The insights we’ve discovered mirror closely with the for repeatable and consistent results that we call “ .” It’s a process for success that we identified working with more than 16,000 marketing and creative teams. Let’s break down the “Share a Coke” campaign through the lens of The UDN Task Manager Way’s four disciplines and the actionable insights you and your team can use in your next big campaign.

The Planning Stage

The “Share a Coke” Campaign required alignment between multiple teams and departments worldwide. Australia was the first to taste the campaign, which would eventually hit more than 80 countries over seven years. That required original content in multiple languages and formats, including print and TV ads, billboards, SMS messaging, websites, and social media.

Executive, marketing, legal, design, product, and operations teams collaborated on everything from finding the exact shade of red ink for the labels to building the list of words that would be banned from bottles. A new typeface was designed to prevent any problems with trademarks and intellectual property. The sheer amount of conversations and stats around the are mind-blowing:

The amount of planning that went into this campaign is staggering. Let's look at how this planning fits into the UDN Task Manager Way's own planning stage, which adds further focus and alignment to the team:

The Process Stage

Coca-Cola is no stranger to massive, challenging marketing campaigns. But the “Share a Coke” campaign had such unique needs that the Coke team created entirely new workflows and production processes.

One of the biggest hurdles was changing the product packaging. Each Coke can had a personalized name, and each region had its own names, languages and alphabets. This created all kinds of logistical hurdles.

To help tackle some of the operational challenges, and their high-speed printers. Other process challenges were solved through regular communication, well-defined contingency plans, a smart use of automation, and clearly documented processes that left nothing to chance.

Let’s take these lessons and apply them to the UDN Task Manager Way’s guidance on process so  you can see how to execute at scale:

The Collaboration Stage

The “Share a Coke” campaign would not have been possible without collaboration on a global scale. Of course, there was internal collaboration amongst Coca-Cola’s product, design, legal, operations, and marketing teams. But the soda company also coordinated with external partners and agencies, even joining forces with millennial influencers, such as to get the message to the masses.

Boiling it all down, great collaboration results in the right people working on the right things at the right time. As a team grows, it requires more and more communication to keep everyone on the same page. Add in distributed teams and agency partners, and it’s apparent that a collaboration platform is needed to house all communication in one, organized place. Whether you have such a system in place yet or not, the UDN Task Manager Way offers actionable guidance that ensures you and your team work at peak efficiency:

The Visibility Stage

Data can help us make better decisions, but only if we have access to it.

Collecting data cross multiple international markets is no small feat, but Coca-Cola set themselves up for success in several key areas. The objectives of the campaign were clearly identified in the planning phase, which helped the Coke team establish the metrics of success.

Because there was such a large digital component, the exact numbers of personalized cans could be tracked, measured, and reported on. This led to better logistical planning as the campaign moved into more countries. Lastly, regular and timely reporting on the campaign’s progress allowed the soda company to quickly iterate and optimize, which freed them to pursue the highest ROI activities year over year.

A key part of the UDN Task Manager Way is identifying the right metrics and pulling in external analytics into your work management system . Having accurate and timely data enables quick course correction. The UDN Task Manager Way offers some practical suggestions for using data in your decision making:

The Sweet Taste of Success

The impact of the “Share a Coke” campaign was nothing short of astounding. , consumption among teenagers grew 7% with two out of five people in the country buying a Share a Coke pack. 378,000 Coke cans were printed at kiosks, and overall sales increased by 3%. On social, 76,000 virtual Coke cans were shared, Facebook traffic increased by 870%, and 170,000 tweets were made by 160,000 fans.

After the global rollout began in 2012, over 1,000 names have been printed on cans and bottles and more than 150,000,000 personalized bottles have been sold. #ShareACoke even became the . It’s resulted in over 1 billion impressions. The campaign won seven awards at the Cannes Lions festival, raised after a decade of decline, and continues to be expanded in new and innovative ways that are still driving revenue now.

Execution is Everything

What started as a transformed into a multi-channel, global marketing campaign that continues to perform nearly seven years later. The success of this campaign was no fluke, as Coke’s marketing team continues to repeat these wins over and over again with a clear focus on execution.

"Nowadays marketers can’t just be blue-sky thinkers that sit in their rooms brainstorming creative ideas," says Coke Marketing Director for the South Pacific Lucie Austin. "It does have to be developed."

Large-scale, integrated campaigns across channels, mediums and borders are the future. As the speed of change intensifies along with the on-demand economy’s complexity, executing this new breed of marketing campaign at scale becomes increasingly difficult. No longer is it enough to be a top-performing individual—these campaigns only work when you have a top-performing team. A rock-solid project management methodology and toolset is required to achieve this level of seamless collaboration and deliver results.

The UDN Task Manager Way was built for high-performance, operationally intensive teams so they can achieve these kinds of results. You’ll be able to generate consistent and repeatable results with the best practices distilled from thousands of the world’s leading teams and organizations.

You’ll build unity between people, teams, and departments, transforming your company into a lean, efficient organization. Download the eBook below and get your team executing on a higher level than ever before.