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BUSINESS: Is Coke's OK Soda the Real Thing...
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, COCA-Cola actually paid its advertising agency to plant that message on a hotline for its newest product. But then, trashing its own claims is just part of the campaign for OK soda, a bubbly, mildly fruity drink for teenagers and young adults that Coke hopes will be its next blockbuster beverage and that the company is testing in nine cities from Boston to Seattle. With OK's deliberately drab cans and pseudo-Zen profundities ("What's the point of OK soda? Well, what's the point of anything?"), Coke hopes to capture a generation that...
What distinguishes Coke's campaign is that few of the global companies pursuing teenagers these days have been so elaborately slick in inventing ways to be unslick. Few, in other words, have gone to such great lengths to convince teens that the corporate voice is sincere. "You have to first and foremost acknowledge that you are marketing," says Brian Lanahan, manager of special projects for Coke's marketing division. Today's teens are "very versed in participating in the commercial world," he adds. "Probably their main area of power is as a consumer...
More than their global peers, however, American teenagers share an inveterate cynicism about corporate messages. This explains why in the OK campaign, Coke has set up an 800 number to let drinkers sound off about the beverage, and thereby define it for themselves. In another understated, low- tech move, the company is mailing out chain letters in target markets that mock the outlandish claims that companies often make for their products...
...Coke argues that its understanding of teens is based on years of study, including the two-year Global Teenager program that employed graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The OK campaign is only the company's latest effort to extend its dominance over the world teen market: earlier this year, Coke launched its highly successful "Obey Your Thirst" campaign for Sprite, which also pointedly refuses to overpromise by suggesting that the drink will not produce beautiful women or athletic victories but only relieve a dry throat...