Coke hopes its new ads conjure up the old magic

ALWAYS EVOLUTION
Highlights from Coca-Cola’s advertising over time:


1886 : Drink Coca-Cola

1929: The Pause That Refreshes

1963: Things Go Better With Coke

1969: It’s the Real Thing

1971: I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke

1979: Have a Coke and a Smile

1982: Coke Is It

1990: You Can’t Beat the Real Thing

1993: Always Coca-Cola

2000: Coca-cola. Enjoy

2001: Life Tastes Good

2003: Coca-Cola … Real

2005: Make it Real

2006: The Coke Side of Life

Source: the company


Marketing swagger fades with U.S. sales; last hit slogan in ’93

Advertising owes many of its landmarks to Coca-Cola Co.: There was the 1969 slogan “It’s the Real Thing,” widely considered one of the most effective ever written. And Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” commercial turned a jingle, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” into a peace anthem.

And then there is the recent Coke advertising. Remember the commercial where actress Penelope Cruz guzzled a Coke and belched? How about the sweaty basketball player who stuck a cold can of Coke in his armpit before offering it to his buddy?

“It was painful to watch,” says Kevin Keller, a marketing professor at Dartmouth College, of Hanover, New Hampshire, and a former advertiser to Coke.

Those spots, hallmarks of the doomed “Real” campaign created by maverick ad agency Berlin Cameron & Partners, a unit of WPP Group, were just the latest in a series of advertising mishaps at Coke.

The last time Coke had a hit ad campaign was “Always Coca-Cola,” which it introduced in 1993 and discarded in 1999. Last year, an effort to update the “Hilltop” commercial for Coke Zero was a resounding flop.

Now Coke is trying once again to recapture its marketing swagger with a new global slogan: “The Coke Side of Life.” The first spots in the campaign, created by Portland, Oregon, agency Widen+ Kennedy, are set to air this weekend. Coke plans to deploy the ads in other countries by midyear.

Rarely has Coke had so much riding on an ad campaign. Sales of Coca-Cola classic in the U.S. fell 2% by volume last year, contributing to a 10% decline over the past five years.

But it’s far from clear that a new ad slogan alone can reverse Coca-Cola’s decline in the U.S., as more consumers swear off sugary sodas and turn to bottled water and energy drinks. Coca-Cola’s rival, PepsiCo’s Pepsi-Cola, has reacted to declining demand for sugary soda by emphasizing Diet Pepsi. Coke has had mixed results introducing lower-calorie alternatives.

Coke hasn’t disclosed spending for the new effort, including outdoor ads and online promotions as well as television. Last year, the company boosted its $2 billion global marketing budget by $400 million. Ad spending on Coca-Cola Classic in the U.S., the world’s largest soft-drink market, fell to $124 million last year from $210 million in 2000, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

Behind the scenes, Coke marketers in recent years have been locked in an internal tug-of-war over their 120-year-old brand’s image. Traditionalist executives were determined to preserve the icon, steeped in Americana. New marketers at Coke, including Coke’s former president, Steven J. Heyer, were pressing for a hipper identity.

Mr. Heyer, a Madison Avenue veteran, hired edgy ad shops, including Berlin Cameron, whose sweaty-armpit ad aired for a short time in 2004. The spot brought the behind-the-scenes struggle briefly to light, after veteran Coke executives had it yanked from the air.

Mr. Heyer left Coke in 2004 soon after Neville Isdell was named chief executive and chairman. Mr.Isdell has vowed to return Coca-Cola to its former marketing glory. Last year, the company stabilized its global market share, with fast growth in emerging markets such as Russia and China helping to offset sluggish sales in the U.S.

The marketing ranks at Coke had been thinned considerably by cuts in the work force at headquarters starting in 2000. Mr.Isdell has criticized previous management for cutting ad spending to meet short-term profit goals.

Mary Minnick, president of global marketing, strategy and innovation, is Coke’s fourth marketing chief since 2003. She awarded the plum Coca-Cola account to Wieden + Kennedy following a creative shootout that included Berlin Cameron. The new campaign will be supplemented by ads created in local markets around the world.

Coke announced the new campaign Thursday. Rooted in youthful optimism and the brand’s core values of refreshment and comfort, it seems to signal the pendulum has swung back toward the traditionalist view. A central image of the new ads will be the contoured Coca-Cola bottle. Some commercials close with the fizzing sound of a freshly poured Coke.

The new work “understands that Coke trade dress – the red colour, the ribbon, the contour glass, the logos - are magical icons with immeasurable power,” wrote Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield. “It understands that the fizzing, bubbling sound of a soft-drink pour is one of the most fetching, evocative and appetizing sounds on earth.”

Ms. Minnick told analysts and investors at a December meeting, “We have one objective and that’s to make choosing Coke a purposeful act.” Still, she has cautioned that Coke can’t “go back to yesterday” by recycling old slogans.

But Jack Trout, a marketing strategist based in Greenwich, Connecticut, recommends that Coke literally feature some creative device in commercials to take young consumers back in time to 1886, when an Atlanta druggist concocted the secret Coke formula. ‘“They should go back to ‘the Real Thing,’ ” he says.

Even that couldn’t work in the modern media environment, argues Tom Pirko, of consulting firm Bevmark, of Santa Ynez, California. Coke’s best-loved ads aired when consumers had far fewer beverage choices and were much easier to reach through mass-market TV commercials. He doubts the “Coke Side of Life” will register. “Marketing magic cannot be recreated,” he says.
“It has to be created with an original thought that is breakthrough.”The data at the top comes from the Coca-Cola Co.


This article was written by Chad Terhune in Corporate News for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – Asia, published Friday – Sunday, March 31 – April 2, 2006.

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China projects gradual slowdown

Central bank expects 8.9% growth for ’06 after 9.9% last year.

CHINA’S ECONOMIC growth is expected to slow to 8.9% this year while consumer prices will rise about 2%, the central bank’s research department said in a report published in March.

The report, carried in the China Securities Journal, predicted gross domestic product would grow 9.2% in the first quarter from the same period a year earlier, 9% during the second quarter, 8.9% in the third and 8.7% during the fourth. It expects consumer prices to rise 1.5%, 2.1%, 2.1% and 2% for each quarter, compared with the comparable quarters a year earlier.

China’s GDP grew 9.9% last year, while consumer prices rose 1.8%.

The forecasts assume the global economy will grow 4.3% this year, China’s fiscal expenditure will rise 12% and China’s interest rates will remain at current levels, the report said.

“Generally speaking, China’s GDP growth will slow down gradually in the future, but will remain at a relatively high level,” it said. “There won’t be major fluctuations in consumer prices in the future, and the growth will be relatively stable.”

China’s fixed-asset investment will continue to grow at a relatively rapid pace, which may put upward pressure on the prices of producer goods and raw materials, it said.

However, overcapacity in various sectors, such s steel, cement, coke and automotive, will exert some downward pressure on consumer prices, it said. The government should take measures to expand domestic demand and set a high entry level for certain sectors, it said, adding that commercial banks should strictly control lending to sectors with overcapacity to minimize financial risks.

Meanwhile, China’s National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on its Web site yesterday that value-added industrial output in February rose 20.1% from the same month last year to 547.3 billion yuan ($68.16 billion).

China’s industrial output for the first two months this year rose 16.2% to 1.111 trillion yuan, the National Bureau of Statistics said earlier this month. The country’s export-delivery value rose 29% in February to 370.4 billion yuan, and was up 24.2% at 745.4 billion yaun in the first two months, it said.

Output of coal, electricity and petroleum rose steadily in the first two months, while steel, construction materials and nonferrous metals’ output growth also rose, the bureau said.

Chinese coal output in January and February was 266 million metric tons, up 9.6% from the year-earlier period, it said. China’s electricity output for the two months rose 11.2% to 402.5 billion kilowatt-hours.


Contributions by Zheng Jin and Zheng Xiaolu for WALL STREET JOURNAL – Asia, Tuesday, March 28, 2006.

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On cavemen crooners, survival

In STEVEN MITHEN’S imagination, the small band of Neanderthals gathered around the caves of Le Moustier, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, 50,000 years ago were butchering carcasses, scraping skins, shaping ax heads - and singing.

One of the fur-clad men started it, a rhythmic sound with rising and falling pitch, and others picked it up, indicating their willingness to cooperate both in the moment and in the future, when the group would have to hunt or fend off predators. The music promoted “a sense of we-ness, of being together in the same situation facing the same problems,” suggests Prof. Mithen, an archaeologist at England’s Reading University. Music, he says, creates “a social rather than a merely individual identity.” And that may solve a longstanding mystery.

Music gives biologists fits. Its ubiquity in human cultures, and strong evidence that the brain comes preloaded with musical circuits, suggest music is as much a product of human evolution as, say, thumbs. That raises the question of what music is for. Back in 1871, Darwin speculated that human music, like bird songs, attracts mates. Or, as he put it, pre-linguistic human ancestors tried “to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.”

Some scientists today share that view. “Music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display,” Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico argued in a 2001 paper. Like Darwin, he bases that conclusion on the belief that music has “no identifiable survival benefits.” If a trait doesn’t help creatures survive, then it can persist generation after generation only if it helps them reproduce.

STUDIES IN NEUROSCIENCE and anthropology, however, suggest music did help human ancestors survive, particularly before language. In “the Singing Neanderthals”, which Harvard University press is publishing, Prof. Mithen weaves those studies into an intriguing argument that “language may have been built on the neural underpinnings of music.”

He starts with evidence that music isn’t merely a side effect of intelligence and language, as some argue. Instead, recent discoveries suggest music lays sole claim to specific neural real estate. Consider musical savants. Although learning-disabled or retarded, they have astounding musical abilities. One savant could hardly speak or understand words, yet he played flawlessly a simple piano melody from memory despite hearing it only once. In an encore, he added left-hand chords and transposed it into a minor key.

“Music,” Prof. Mithen says, “can exist within the brain in the absence of language,” a sign that the two evolved independently. Since language impairment doesn’t wipe out musical ability, the latter “must have a longer evolutionary history”.

In the opposite of musical savantism, people with “amusia” cannot perceive changes in rhythm, identify melodies they have heard before or recognize changes in pitch. Since they have normal hearing and language, the problem must lie in brain circuits that are music-specific.

More evidence that the brain has dedicated, inborn musical circuits is that even babies have musical preferences, finds Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto. They listen longer to perfect fifths and perfect fourths and look pained by minor thirds.

If music is indeed an innate, stand-alone adaptation, then evolution could have nursed it along the eons only if it helped early humans survive. It did so, Prof. Mithen suggests, because “if music is about anything, it is about expressing and inducing emotion.”

PARTICULAR NOTES elicit the same emotions from most people, regardless of culture, studies suggest. A major third (prominent in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) sounds happy; a minor third (as in the gloomy first movements of Mahler’s Fifth) provokes feelings of sadness and even doom. A major seventh expresses aspiration. The absence of a third seems unresolved, loose, as if hanging, notes jazz guitarist Michael Rod, 17 years old.

The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, pre-language human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge.
“If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” Prof. Mithen says, “you have an advantage.”

Music also promotes social bonding, which was crucial when humans were more hunted than hunter and finding food was no walk on the savannah. Proto-music “became a communication system” for “the expression of emotion and the forging of group identities,” Prof. Mithen argues.
Because music has grammar-like qualities such as recursion, it might have served an even greater function. With music in the brain, early humans had the neural foundation for the development of what most distinguishes us from other animals: symbolic thought and language.


This article was published in the Friday –Sunday, March 31 – April 2, 2006 addition of Science Journal of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – Asia. This article was written by Sharon Begley. You can e-mail her at sciencejournal@wsj.com.

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Ask.com's new look scores points against search rivals

Every so often in sports, an underestimated contender rises up to compete with a champion play for play, or even to beat the champ. Something like that is happening in the search business.

Ask Jeeves, a largely failed search service, has been overhauled and renamed Ask.com. I have been testing the new Ask.com against the search champ, Google. I have found that in terms of relevant results and ease of use, Ask holds its own with Google, and even beats the champ on some searches. It has some features Google lacks, including previews of sites it finds, an easy way to narrow or broaden results, and frequent top-of-the-screen answers that lead you to core information.

Ask.com is starting from a low ranking. According to a recent study, Ask.com has about 6% of the search market, compared with 41% for Google and 29% for Yahoo. Yet, Ask.com is improving fast and is capable of playing above its ranking.

In its old incarnation, Ask Jeeves, I never could recommend the service. It was cluttered with ads that too easily confused with real search results and that made the real results hard to find. And it was based on a questionable promise – that it could answer queries stated as English-language questions. While it did that in some cases, it failed in many others.

This year, the name has been changed and the logo has been axed. The whole question-answering approach is de-emphasized. But the overhaul has been far more than just marketing. Ads have been cut back to just three at the top and five at the bottom of each page, and they run on a colored background so you know they aren’t real search results.

In general, Ask’s search-results pages are richer and better organized than typical Google results, and they give greater priority to content over ads.

I did many searches, with roughly similar results. Google usually did a good job, but Ask usually did just as well, and it’s added features made the results more valuable. In a search for a particular digital camera, Ask’s page was topped by a picture of the camera, with links to reviews and price comparisons. Google’s page was topped by ads, followed by links to specific shopping web sites.

In a search on the word Providence, Google offered a map link at the top, then a link the Providence College. Ask featured a Smart Answer box with the start of an encyclopedia article on the Rhode Island capital, and a drop-down list of links to other cities and to the TV show of that name.

Ask also allows you to save any entry in its search results.

Google is still great, and I am not suggesting everyone abandon it. But Ask.com is well worth a try if you want to benefit from some features that go beyond Google.


This article was written by Walter S. Mossberg and published in the Friday – Sunday, March 31 – April 2, 2006 addition of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL - Asia. You can e-mail him at mossberg@wsj.com.

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