What We Can Learn from the Coca-Cola Sales Bump in Romania

Image via the Coca-Cola press release.

Coca-Cola has a proclivity for releasing unique packaging. The brand's "Share-a-Coke" campaign has proven to be very successful for the beverage behemoth, and Coca-Cola continues to use its iconic packaging to connect and engage with consumers in innovative ways. Its latest packaging initiative was detailed in a recent article in Adweek. The creative Coca-Cola packaging, which targeted teens, was released in Romania and resulted in an 11% sales bump.

In a partnership with some of the biggest music festivals in the country, Coke created labels that featured detachable wristbands with a unique, scannable barcode on each one. For some lucky purchasers, the barcode revealed a major prize — tickets to one of the participating music festivals, including Untold, a large music festival in Transylvania.

To find out if a bottle of Coca-Cola was a winner, all the purchaser has to do is buy a bottle, download a special app, detach the wristband and scan the barcode. The wristband did more than give consumers a chance to win tickets to a music festival, however. With eight different designs, it incentivized teens to collect the varying versions. According to the creative agency behind the labels, McCann Bucharest, the wristbands were shared across social media and worn as "fashion statements" by teens.

In a press release from Coca-Cola, Gregory Bentley, packaging engineer at Coke's R&D Lab in Brussels, explained the decision behind the material used for the wristband:

“Initially, the idea was for a fabric wristband incorporated into the label, but this proved too time consuming, expensive and complex to create. That is how we started developing the wristband made from our label and hot-melt glue. This solution seems obvious now, but you have to understand nothing like this has been done before, and we needed to investigate many alternatives before deciding on the most viable.”

Between selfies, trips to the pool, and of course, music festivals, the wristband had to hold up. Bentley goes on to explain the durability of the design:

“When I tried on the first sample for a quality check, the wristband stayed on for over three weeks in which time I ran the equivalent of nearly two marathons and travelled to Japan for a business trip."

The goal behind the campaign was to reconnect teens with Coca-Cola. A video released by McCann states that "40% of Romanian teens never tasted Coca-Cola in the last month," but that "most" of them had attended a music festival during the previous summer. Through the campaign, McCann says that they were able to reach 75% of teenagers in Romania.

According to the press release, Coca-Cola Romania is now working to help scale the concept to other countries.

Packaging Perspective: There are a lot of ways a label can stand out, but an iconic brand turning a label into a fashion accessory while capitalizing on the interests of teenage consumers, is brilliant. By connecting its beverages with something that it knew would garner the interest of music-loving teens, Coca-Cola is working to connect with consumers on a deeper level. It's meeting the consumers on their turf.

Also, as one of my colleagues pointed out, festivals are expensive, and ordinarily, teens don't have a surplus of money laying around. Coca-Cola's offer of possibly getting into the hottest music festivals of the summer, for free, is an enticing one.

And, from a monetary standpoint, for the price of a four-day pass to Untold, you could buy approximately 85 delicious bottles of soda, with 85 chances of winning a free pass to a music festival — a win-win situation.

For a glimpse into the math that got me to that number. Let's assume the wristband would get you into all four-days of Untold. A four-day general access pass to Untold is 385 leu (not including taxes), which equates to ~US$94.74. A bottle of Coca-Cola in Romania is ~4.50 leu (or US$1.11), which means 85 bottles of Coca-Cola would equal ~382.50 leu — less than the pre-tax cost of the four-day pass.

Any way you slice it, the campaign was innovative from a package design standpoint, and obviously was successful in increasing sales in Romania. Brands and converters should take a page out of Coca-Cola's book more often and use packaging not only to grab a consumer's attention, but to connect with them on a more meaningful level. If you begin to develop a relationship with a consumer, you may have a customer for life.