Enjoy Coke-ness
Tuesday, March 6th, 2007
Tonight I stumbled on the Coke Zero website and ended up being sucked in for a while. It’s an interesting approach. Instead of the “diet” premise, they are playing on the idea that Coke Zero is a case of taste infringement of regular Coke. The website spins up the taste infringement concept in some entertaining ways. Some of the videos on the site are purported to be real lawyers being fooled. Hummmm??? And there’s a “Ruin this Man’s day” section as well as “Sue a Friend”.
I did a bit of searching and quickly found a New York Times story from Monday on the overall effort.
“The campaign is based on an oddball thought, that the executives at Coca-Cola who sell the flagship Coke Classic brand want to hire lawyers to sue their co-workers who sell Coke Zero. The grounds for the imaginary lawsuits would be “taste infringement” — that is, it annoys the Coke Classic executives that no-calorie Coke Zero tastes so much like their sugared soft drink.
In one commercial, a person identified as an actual lawyer who is not in on the joke, tells two actors portraying Coke Classic executives: “It’ll be dismissed. You’ll be humiliated.”
From the NYT article, it sounds the marketing angle they’ve taken with Coke Zero (designed to taste like a no-calorie version of Coke Classic) is paying off — “45 percent of Coke Zero sales are incremental” rather than borrowed from Diet Coke.
The campaign was created by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.