Introduction

For my social media individual assignment, I have chosen Coca-Cola. I have chosen this brand because not only is a globally recognized brand, but according to Forbes, it is the 4^th most valuable brand in the world. Therefore this is an interesting problem that needs to be addressed: how does a brand build brand love in addition to having global awareness? And how does it translate into sales?

For the purpose of this exercise, we are only going to look at Coca-Cola Singapore and its social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Coca-Cola Singapore has run some major campaigns in the past year. In addition to the wildly popular Share a Coke campaign coming to Singapore during SG50, they customize their cans on a yearly basis for Chinese New Year as well as run multiple food themed campaigns in 2015-16. Recently, there was a strategic shift in the brand positioning for Coke from #ShareaCokeSG, #ShareHappines and #OpenHappiness to “Taste the Feeling”. This shift took place because #OpenHappiness, while wildly successful, generated a lot of brand awareness but did not end up translating into sales for Coke. Coca-Cola is a brand that benefits marginally from awareness since it is one of the world’s most recognized brands.

Hence the shift to “Taste the Feeling”. This strategic change was highlighted onto the Coke SG page sometime in mid March. Below are examples of some visuals:

As you can see, visuals are talking less about the brand and more about enjoying a moment with someone, while drinking Coke which gives you a common ground to bond with the person.

Research Question

• Did Coca-Cola successfully translate “Taste the Feeling” successfully to have a Singaporean feel?
• Did Coca-Cola Singapore use social media successfully to build brand love through CRM, community management and content?

Analyzing their content and its performance over the previous few weeks, I have identified the following goals/objectives that Coke SG may be trying to achieve:

• Increase in engagements through paid media.
• Building brand love through visuals that depict Singaporeans instead of foreigners.
• Translating this brand love to sales through adding a call to action on every post.
• Using Twitter to focus more on timely events.
• Using Facebook to gain outreach.
• Using Instagram to connect with their target audience on a more visual base compared to Twitter or Facebook.

Topline conclusion and recommendations

While Coke is doing a fantastic job of using social to build brand awareness and build on this awareness through brand love conversations, I feel that its not doing enough to translate it into sales. There are some things it can adopt:

• Adding a call to action that actually sends people to stores instead of sending them to websites only.
• Targeting people geographically – if you are near a convenience store, you will see an ad on social which will ultimately help you consider purchasing a Coke.
• Using other platforms like Snapchat for Taste the Feeling – considering that the entire strategy is about moments, Snapchat naturally fits in with the overall brand positioning.
• Improving their Instagram presence by using follow ads on Facebook – sharing a post via Instagram that converts people to look at our content on their mobiles from Instagram, thus giving them an option to follow us.

While there awareness is certainly being generated by Coke, it needs to take a step forward and ask itself how to properly turn this into sales. I feel that adding the above recommendations to its overall strategy will be a step forward.