Article

Share A Coke: How a personalized promotion became an e-commerce platform

A single product promotion — Share A Coke — became a multi-product e-commerce campaign driving millions of sales.

Coca-Cola's mission has changed as a result of e-commerce.

April 18, 2019 by Elliot Maras — Editor, Kiosk Marketplace & Vending Times

Brands looking to expand into e-commerce will succeed if they meet a customer need. In the case of the country's leading beverage marketer, the Coca-Cola Company, that customer need was being able to share a sense of themselves on their beverage bottles. What began as a single product promotion — Share A Coke — became a multi-product e-commerce campaign driving millions of sales.

Todd Skidmore reviews the evolution of the "Share A Coke" campaign.

During a session at the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas, Todd Skidmore, senior manager of e-commerce at the Coca-Cola Company in the U.S., described how the company grew its direct-to-consumer Share A Coke campaign from a single SKU promotion to a shopping platform for 6,000 SKUs.

"Connecting our consumers' passions with our brand is always something we wanted to do," Skidmore said. "Being able to do that right on the product — you can't ask for a better experience than that."

The Share A Coke promotion began in Australia in 2011. Fans could visit www.ShareaCoke.com to personalize virtual bottles. The customer visits the website and enters their first name in a search box. If the name is available in the company database, the customer can preview of the bottle with their name on the label and place an order.

When the company brought the campaign to the U.S. in 2014, it was an immediate hit, Skidmore said, but there was one drawback. There were only about 300 names available in the database, and many customers made it clear on social media that they felt left out.

"Obviously if your name wasn't one of those 300 names, you couldn't find your name on a bottle," he said.

A problem becomes an opportunity

To correct the problem, the company loaded 300,000 names into the database using Adobe's Magento platform for commerce integration. There are now more than 800,000 names and phrases for Coke customers to choose.

If a customer enters a name or phrase that is not already included, that name or phrase now goes into moderation system, Skidmore said, where it is checked to make sure it is not trademarked and is appropriate language. Once checked, the order goes back into Magento for processing. Orders are pulled and labels are printed in the morning and sent for application using 2D barcode scanning on to the bottles in the afternoon, and shipped out.

Every year since 2014, the company has introduced new innovations to keep fans coming back — adding more brands, names and phrases.

The consumer offer expands

They also brought all of the company's licensed merchandise to the site, which promoted holidays, themes and organizations, Skidmore said. This eventually included song lyrics from more than 70 musical genres on packages of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Coca-Cola Life, according to the company website.

The company also created bottles and merchandise to allow customers to celebrate special events, such as weddings and NCAA March Madness.

"We realized all of a sudden people were using them to celebrate their occasions," Skidmore said, so the team created a wedding experience on the company's Pinterest page.

"People are posting on that board all the time," he said.

Fans also used the #ShareaCoke hashtag to share stories and photos for the chance to be featured on Coca-Cola billboards, according to the company's website.

"Now you had more of a destination for all things Coca-Cola," Skidmore said.

Personalization options expand

In noticing a tendency of consumers to personalize bottles with nicknames and phrases, the company extended the personal message on the bottle label from 18 characters to 36 characters over two lines. Two-line messages now account for 38% of all custom bottles sold.

To drive sales further, they established an ongoing promotion, $5 off for every 6-pack purchased, which drove an 8% increase in the average number of bottles per order.

"That little bit of loss of $5 is heavily outweighed by the average order value and the production cost we were able to reduce," Skidmore said.

"It was all about satisfying the consumer demand," he added. "It really creates a unique giftable product that you can't get anywhere else."

The company sold more than 2.5 million Coca-Cola bottles from 2015 to 2018, as the campaign grew from one fulfillment center to seven nationwide, Skidmore said.

The total value of e-commerce

One of the most unique aspects of e-commerce is the opportunity to capitalize on peoples' special moments, Skidmore said.

"You can't just set it and forget it when you're building out an e-commerce experience," he said. To allow people to share the company merchandise on social media, the company has to have its marketing materials, its technology and its logistics working seamlessly together, he said.

Where the company long held the goal of making its products within an arm's reach of desire, the new mantra is to have the products available within a click's reach, Skidmore said.

In closing, Skidmore said companies should not launch e-commerce because they have a product to sell, but because they can meet or predict customer needs. "You really need to be solving a consumer need."