The Coca-Cola Company says its personalised pack campaign, which returned earlier this year, is driving single-serve transactions, despite an overall fall in volume sales for the trademark.
The Coca-Cola Company has highlighted the sales impact of the relaunched ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, despite its volume sales declining in its most recent quarter.
Earlier this year, the brand announced it was bringing back its Share a Coke initiative, which features personalised cans and bottles of Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.
The campaign, which was first launched in 2011, has been “reimagined for the next generation” the business says, with the relaunched initiative featuring digital tools, such as ‘Memory Maker’ where consumers can personalise their own memes and videos, designed to engage people beyond buying a Coke with their name on it.
The Coca-Cola Company has highlighted the sales impact of the relaunched ‘Share a Coke’ campaign, despite its volume sales declining in its most recent quarter.
Earlier this year, the brand announced it was bringing back its Share a Coke initiative, which features personalised cans and bottles of Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero Sugar.
The campaign, which was first launched in 2011, has been “reimagined for the next generation” the business says, with the relaunched initiative featuring digital tools, such as ‘Memory Maker’ where consumers can personalise their own memes and videos, designed to engage people beyond buying a Coke with their name on it.
This time around Share a Coke is running across more than 120 countries with over 30,000 names on around 10 billion bottles and cans, CEO James Quincey told investors in a conference call today (22 July). The business said the campaign had “contributed to single-serve transaction growth for the category” but did not provide exact figures.
While the business claims Share a Coke contributed to growth, it in fact saw its trademark Coca-Cola sales decline 1% in its most recent quarter, which ended 27 June. The business indicated that the impact from its Latin American segment offset positive results in other regions, including Europe.
When Share a Coke launched in the UK in 2013, the brand’s volume sales (number of litres sold) leapt 2.9% year-over-year to 272.17 million in the three months after the initial campaign debuted (year ending 23 June 2013), according to data from IRI (now known as Circana).
Across its entire global portfolio, Coca-Cola saw volumes decline 1% in the quarter, while its revenues rose by 1% to $12.5bn. Quincey expressed a desire to return to volume growth in the second half of the year, but stressed the company’s overall strategy is on track.
“Our granular action plan to win back consumers with contextually relevant advertising, more focused value and affordability initiatives and close customer partnerships is working,” he said.
Ongoing marketing transformation
Coca-Cola’s margins were lower in this quarter, as it chose to upweight its investment in marketing. While it is investing more in marketing, the business says that spend is working more “efficiently” as a result of its ongoing marketing transformation plan.
“We’ve been on a journey for the last few years on the marketing transformation, which is not just about the effectiveness and the digitisation of the advertising and the segmenting of the advertising, but also about the efficiency of both producing [creative] and buying the media,” Quincey said.
One benefit from the years of transformation work cited by Quincey is the ability of the global business to export ideas to different markets at pace.
“Our marketing transformation allows us to more quickly test ideas, share learnings and scale successful campaigns,” he said. “For example, to mitigate consumer pressure in Mexico stemming from geopolitical tensions, our teams implemented tactics similar to those developed last year in Türkiye, tailored to local needs.”
The business is also focused on ensuring its marketing function does not exist in a silo from the rest of its operations. Quincey spoke about the importance of revenue growth management (RGM) in segmenting consumers and offering the right product choice at the right time.
“We’re increasingly integrating the capability with our marketing expertise to drive transaction growth, to step up our capabilities,” he noted.
