The Wall Street Journal reports that Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a new advertising campaign that will use the word “real” as a tagline to emphasize the product’s authenticity. Also planned is the use of celebrity endorsers; among those being negotiated with are Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, and Robert DeNiro.
- KC's View:
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Okay, we’ll buy Julia Roberts…our eight year old daughter thinks she’s the best thing since sliced bread, perhaps because she’s seen ‘Runaway Bride” about 87 times. Nicolas Cage…okay, that’s a stretch, but maybe it works.
But DeNiro? What’s he going to do, stand in the kitchen looking at a coke bottle and say, “You talkin’ to me? Nobody else here, you talkin’ to me?”
Most of DeNiro’s roles would have him smashing the Coke bottle over somebody’s head, not drinking it…
By the way, if Coke embarks on this campaign it should get ready for the “Saturday Night Live” parodies that compare its “real” campaign with Anheuser-Busch’s “true” ads.
On a serious note, there was an interesting story from Reuters yesterday in which it profiled Coke’s Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Jones. Here are some quotes culled from that profile:
•"The single most important word is relevance."
•”What keeps (Coke’s brand) alive is contemporary dressing so that it connects to consumers, while keeping a core identity.”
•”Our job now is to fit the brand into people's lives."
So here is the questions we’d ask most retailers (and for that matter, every other CPG manufacturer):
Do you seriously and consistently explore every day what you are doing to keep your store/brand relevant to the shopper’s life?
This is such an important question, in our view, that we’re considering making it into MNB Mantra # 3.
