F**k Coca Cola.
Small brand? Then stop taking dating advice from Coke.
Screw Nike’s latest turnaround. Screw the new Coca-Cola campaign. Screw the latest Super Bowl ads.
Seriously, don’t even bother looking at them.
I’m tired of seeing these big case studies trotted out to small brands as if they’re the blueprint. They’re not.
As a small brand, how a giant does marketing has little to no value to you. In fact, it can be downright misleading.
Let’s take Coca-Cola. Everyone on earth, bar some lucky members of a few remote Amazonian tribes, knows how Coke tastes like.
Think of it this way: Coca-Cola has already wooed the masses, had the grand wedding, bought property together in the suburbs, and started a family. They have three kids and a dog.
And now Coke needs to get their high school-aged children together to give a bell to some great aunt or the other once in a while.
You, on the other hand, an absolute stranger, need to get the customer to swipe left, go on a date with you and fall in love, trying to use the same tactics Coke use to get the children to call the great aunt. Because Coke is clearly good at selling sugar water, right?
You’re trying to seduce a customer who has never heard of you before, copying moves designed to maintain a decades-long relationship. See the problem?
Coke exists in a different realm, with a completely different set of motives. Coke’s playbook isn’t your playbook.
But you know what is? Going way back and studying how they got their first date. That would be veeeeery relevant to you.
Sure the times are different. They are boomers and everything was easier back then. Now there are more carbonated sugary water brands than ever wooing the lovely customers. There are dating apps and stuff. But principles of creating attention and desire from scratch stand.
As a small brand, you need to make someone stop scrolling, feel something, and remember you. Not through polished, calculated perfection the giants have to aim for, but through something much more punchy and original.
Just because we used them as examples— I did work for Coca-Cola and Nike (events & collaborations strategy for Nike, and launch strategy for a Coke product), and quite a few other giants. And boy, are they the names that get my small clients most excited, and assured they are at the right place. But they might have been my least exciting, and probably least relevant to them. In the grand scale of things, those projects probably helped to get someone call a great aunt. Small guys, however, need much more than that.
Corporate brand management positions are filled by people with inertia and fear of change. Not out of accident, but out of very conscious choice. And a very smart one at that.
These are complex structures with unfathomable distribution power, endless ad budgets, deep market relationships, and layers of decision makers. They have everything to lose and little to gain by rocking the boat (surprise surprise, the exact opposite of your small brand).
They are not stupid or uncreative. Quite the contrary. They are just better served by protecting the status quo, while adding a few relevancy points here and there.
They don’t need to change the world. They already did. It’s their world, their market. You? You need to shake things up, break the mold with limited means, and make people fall in love with something new. Then why are you helping them maintain the status quo?
So, till you’re a giant yourself that simply needs to remind people it exists, forget the giants, their sterile language, and their latest pseudo-meaningful little campaign designed to not rock the boat in any of the the 200 markets they operate in.