Author: Wu Rong
At present, social media has been surrounded by young people, and anyone's words or actions, through the spread of social media, may be out of the circle at any time and bring a new wave of hot trends.
How to really play with young users, provide the social value they need, win their emotional recognition, and be willing to "pay" for brand marketing is an important marketing proposition faced by brands. Obviously, shouting, indiscriminate messaging is no longer suitable, and brands need to think and explore new ways to play.
Recently, we have noticed that sugar-free Coca-Cola has launched a campaign to invite the whole people to be "spokespersons", whether it is an artist or a field expert, as long as you like to drink sugar-free Coca-Cola and think that sugar-free Coca-Cola is delicious, you are the "spokesperson". This strategy is a positive response to the above marketing pain points, that is, to give more young people the opportunity to speak up for their favorite products, sugar-free Coca-Cola provides an "endorsement" platform, based on a common love, young people have also found a social "stratosphere".
Speak authentically
Leo Bednar, an American advertising guru, once said, "To occupy the market, you must first occupy the hearts and minds of consumers." In other words, in this era of consumer-centric marketing, the emphasis is on "seizing the minds of consumers". In March this year, on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu and other cities, sugar-free Coca-Cola set off a "spokesperson trend".
Such an eye-catching way of exposure has attracted many young people to stop and check in. Not only that, when you scan the QR code on the poster and upload a photo, you can generate an exclusive "spokesperson" poster, that is, anyone can become a "spokesperson" for diet Coca-Cola and speak out for the good tasting of diet Coca-Cola.
The material comes from the Internet
When everyone was guessing how many people had officially announced Diet Coca-Cola, the official took the opportunity to claim the topic and issued an invitation to #Super Want to be the spokesperson of Sugar-free Coca-Cola#.
Among the first batch of official "spokespersons" to share the delicious true love fans of sugar-free Coca-Cola, there are many artists and bloggers with high public awareness, but more are ordinary consumers; It can be seen that brands value not only the influence of their social identity, but also hope to attract more consumers' attention through the real voices of "spokespersons".
After the official announcement, sugar-free Coca-Cola also focused on creating interactive topics on social media platforms, stimulating sharing through the mini program "Influence Ranking", and announcing new "spokespersons" every week to stimulate sharing, so that the topic heat continued to ferment and the social volume continued to rise.
It is worth noting that as more consumers continue to join in the tasting, the number of active sharing of the "spokesperson" campaign has also reached a new high. According to the official data of sugar-free Coca-Cola, the highest number of shares shared by a single user of the brand mini program is as high as 1,309 times. It seems that these contents with real feelings and thoughts can influence the decision-making of other users and effectively promote user fission.
At the end of last year, Xiaohongshu and Ipsos released the "Xiaohongshu Food and Beverage Industry Insight Report", which also showed that compared with the planting of big V, people are more willing to believe the real feedback of Internet partners on food and beverage products, and 71% of users feel that mass users are more credible.
At the same time, consumers are generally willing to obtain "stratosphere" suggestions on social media as a reference, and then feed back their experience to their circles through experience sharing, so as to build a "stratosphere" reputation and trust in the community.
This sugar-free Coca-Cola "spokesperson" event is a confirmation of such insights, with the help of the user's acquaintance social circle, to share the real and delicious drinking experience, triggering social communication and fission. That is, let true love fans drive other consumers to become "spokespersons", and then let them influence more people around them to speak out, and convey the feeling of good drinking to more consumers who have not tried it. And when the value of trust replaces the blunt implantation of the past, the purpose of word-of-mouth communication is also being achieved.
AI-empowered
It is worth noting that Coca-Cola has achieved the engineering integration of AI technology in multiple fields in this event, and has achieved a comprehensive technological breakthrough. Through AI technology to reconstruct character expressions, hairstyles, makeup, movements, and clothing, users only need to upload an ordinary photo to get a photo-level "spokesperson" picture.
At the same time, AI learning capabilities are used to process and optimize multiple styles of declaration copywriting in real time according to consumer needs, greatly simplifying the threshold for participation.
In addition, in the offline event, Diet Coca-Cola also set up a video version of AI interaction, so that all "spokespersons" have the opportunity to experience TV advertising co-creation on the spot; In other words, consumers can upload photos on the spot, and their image will appear in the brand's TV commercials that will be broadcast in real time. These technological breakthroughs not only improve the user experience, but also demonstrate the huge potential and transformative power of AI in advertising and marketing.
In a nutshell, the concept of the "spokesperson" of sugar-free Coca-Cola breaks the marketing model of the brand's unilateral output, and allows many consumers to spontaneously express their love for sugar-free Coca-Cola and the feeling of "sugar-free Coca-Cola is delicious", providing an opportunity for consumers who like to drink sugar-free Coca-Cola to speak out, and endowing it with social attributes, making it a kind of "social currency" to infiltrate and envelop users.
It is not difficult to imagine that in WeChat, Weibo and other social fields that are extremely important for young people, when people send their own AI posters to their friends through this kind of gameplay that everyone can participate in, it is difficult for friends not to be attracted and participated, and then take the initiative to choose to try sugar-free Coca-Cola.
This approach is not only in line with young users' pursuit of digital applications such as AI, but also easy to eliminate users' resistance to brand marketing, bringing immersive and deep two-way communication. In this way, the strong penetration of brand information and value can be further realized.
According to iResearch's analysis in the "Research Report on the Application of AI + Marketing in China", many of the pain points faced by advertisers today can be solved to a large extent through the innovative application of technology, including brand positioning, target group insight, and data access. The application of AI in marketing can bring richer user tags, more advanced crowd expansion technology, and optimize the click conversion of target groups, so advertisers should pay more attention to the role of data and technology in digital marketing, so as to solve the pain points and difficulties in digital marketing more efficiently.
At present, digital marketing has become the consensus of many consumer brands, and they have explored with the help of AI, VR and the metaverse, and this wave of marketing of sugar-free Coca-Cola is also a response to digitalization.
In fact, Coca-Cola has been actively embracing AI before. For example, last year, Coca-Cola's global creative platform "Lechuang Unbounded" once again launched a new limited product - the first Coca-Cola "Next 3000 Years" created by AI.
All in all, the new marketing ideas of sugar-free Coca-Cola have brought more thinking and inspiration to the industry.
It's not enough to rely on data analytics tools to get demographic tags and insights, it's about actually reaching real consumers, otherwise these insights are just cold numbers. Diet Coca-Cola's marketing campaign is to activate the loyal fans behind the data, allowing fans to go from behind the scenes to the front of the stage to speak for the brand.
The spontaneous sharing, comments and interactions of a large number of real users have a wealth of consumer insights and market trends, which have become valuable assets for brands to naturally precipitate, and will be the force for brands to further capture the minds of consumers.
Not confined to the traditional marketing ideas of the past and conforming to the trend of digital marketing, the sugar-free Coca-Cola "spokesperson" campaign has become one of the marketing samples worth studying in the industry, and may help more brands seize the opportunity in the future.