Campaign: Taste the Feeling
Brand: Coca-Cola
Company: Coca-Cola India
Agency: Sra Rushmore
The Ad
Entering a supermarket, a sweaty Sidharth Malhotra is guided to the Coca-Cola shelf by an inattentive female cashier. Watching Malhotra on CCTV enjoying his cold drink, the cashier gets tempted herself, lost in her thoughts. She gets caught off guard when Malhotra comes in front of her for making the payment. To cover up, she spontaneously tells him that he is their lucky customer and has won a free Coca-Cola on the condition that he has to drink it there itself. As Malhotra gulps his second bottle, the cashier continues to watch him in awe.
Our Take
After years of creating compelling stories with innovative marketing strategies, Coca-Cola has launched Taste the Feeling as its first global campaign in seven years. But this one seems more of a miss than a hit in India.
The company gets it right by making the product the star, as it showcases Malhotra romancing the feeling of drinking Coca-Cola. This is even represented through the colour of the cashier’s clothes, which are the trademark colours of Coca-Cola.
The shift in positioning from Open Happiness also marks a U-turn back to the core values of the product, of taste and how the drink makes one feel, in a bid to attain more cola drinkers into its fold than showcasing ads that revolve around a social theme.
“The campaign has been designed to celebrate the notion that the simple pleasure of drinking an ice-cold Coca-Cola makes any moment more special,” says Debabrata Mukherjee, vice president, marketing and commercial, Coca-Cola India and South West Asia.
Although the TVC uses the emotional storytelling route long associated with Coke, it lacks a connect with local audiences.
The Indian version of Taste the Feeling is a rendition of the global TVC in English, Indonesian and Spanish — a literal frame by frame adaptation which was an overused strategy by global brands in the ’90s.
But talking about the Indian ad in particular, there is a huge disconnect visually. The idea of a supermarket located in an isolated area seems more USA than India, where a one-off store can be found along highways. Second, an empty store in India is an unlikely situation, unless located in extreme hinterlands, which neither the setting of the TVC nor the casting supports.
Typically, Coca-Cola in India has always been represented as a family brand, showcasing moments of bonding, breaking the ice or happiness between families over a fizzy bottle. The new campaign, however, focusses more on the young population in the country by projecting a ‘first love’ angle.
The new positioning is an improvement over the previous one, but the problem lies in the translation of the global thought in the Indian creative. In fact, the only local connect within the TVC is Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra.
@chandni_mathur