Coke pins China hopes on Beijing blitz

In 2005, the Olympics still weren't on many marketers' minds. That's when Brooks' team started planning. "For me to be dreaming up what would be happening in 2007 and 2008, I think some people thought I was somewhat crazy," Brooks recalls.

Coke ramped up its own Olympics ad agency, dubbed the "Red Lounge," in 2006. From a Shanghai office, staffers from 10 existing agencies worked alongside Coke brand managers to develop ads, Web sites and other marketing initiatives.

• Multimedia: Chinese beverage maker takes on Coke

Adidas started its big Beijing Olympics marketing push in December. McDonald's -- Coke's largest fountain-drink customer -- began last August. Thanks in part to Coke's early start, sales volume for all its drinks in China got an 18% jolt in 2007.

"What Coke realized early on is that their competition wasn't just Pepsi. It was the other Olympic sponsors," said Greg Paull, the principal of R3, which consults for Coke and a dozen other Beijing Olympics sponsors.

Brooks and his team concluded that any marketing program would have to reach into China's populous provinces, as only a tiny fraction of China's citizens live in Beijing. A national marketing campaign, blared from the capital, wouldn't do. He thought Coke should use the Olympics to engage people in the largely untapped provinces.

That, Coke hoped, would help it gain traction against Pepsi and other brands. Annual average per-capita consumption of soft drinks in China was a mere 35 8-ounce servings in 2007, according to Beverage Digest, which tracks global data. That leaves a lot of room to catch up with Western markets such as the United States, where per-capita soda consumption was 789 servings last year.

Brooks' team latched onto a single word -- shuang -- to convey a degree of street credibility among Chinese youths. "Shuang" is akin to "awesome" or "cool" in English, with a bit more of an edge. "It represents intense physical and emotional refreshment," Brooks said. "How was your dinner? Shuang. How was that ride on the roller coaster? Shuang. I say shuang about a thousand times per day." Coke launched its shuang blitz in August of last year.

A focal point of the campaign was the Olympic torch relay. Sponsored by Coke along with Samsung Electronics and Lenovo Group, the relay wound through 111 Chinese cities over a four-month period. When Coke held an online contest to select 1,188 torchbearers, about 310 million votes were cast.

As Coke was strategizing, Pepsi was counterpunching. With a former MTV executive in charge of its China drinks marketing, Pepsi had long been deft at linking its cola brand with singers and Chinese youth culture, arguably more so than Coke.

2007 market share in China:

All beverages	Percent of market
Wahaha	12
Master Kong	7.8
Sprite	4.9
Pepsi	4.9
Coca-Cola	4.7

Last year, Pepsi managed to tap into the wave of Chinese patriotism by swapping some of its iconic blue cans for red ones. More recently, Coke torch-relay staffers complained that in at least two cities local Pepsi bottlers tried to infiltrate the torch route by handing out Pepsi shirts. The moves seem to have been effective: The R3 and CSM research found that more than 10% of Chinese consumers thought that Pepsi was an Olympics sponsor -- a rate higher than actual sponsors Adidas and McDonald's.

PepsiCo declined to comment on market share.

Continued: Warm drinks better for the body

< previous |  1 | 2 | 3 | next >