High on Coke - Coca-Cola Embraces Fans' Facebook Page, Effectively Sharing Ownership of its Brand With Loyal Customers

High on Coke — Coca-Cola Embraces Fans’ Facebook Page, Effectively Sharing Ownership of its Brand With Loyal Customers

Was Coke right in sharing ownership of its brand?

Coca-Cola is one of the world’s biggest and most well-recognized brands. It makes me wonder how many billions – or perhaps even trillions – of dollars the company has spent to get there. That’s why it was particularly refreshing to read a recent story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the way the company reacted to the success of a Coca-Cola Facebook page that the company did not create. The page was actually created last year by a pair of 29-year-old Coke fiends in Los Angeles. Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski created the page for no other reason than they were passionate about the beverage. It turned out to be a very popular page. Within a few weeks of its inception, it had hit 75,000 fans. After the first million fans, the Facebook administrators contacted Coca-Cola to see if it wanted to take over management of the page. Fortunately, Coke’s director of worldwide interactive marketing declined. His thinking was that if the company took the page over, it would be seen as an intrusion and it would lose some of its grass-roots appeal and credibility. Instead, the company rolled out the red carpet for the page’s creators and invited them to headquarters for a sit-down. Ultimately, the decision was made to take a collaborative approach to managing the page between Sorg, Jedrzejewski and a small group of Coca-Cola employees. Today the site has 3,365,220 fans and is the second most popular page on Facebook page right behind Barrack Obama’s.

Coca-Cola superfans given the red carpet treatment

In today’s world, a company cannot maintain complete control over its brand no matter how hard it tries or how much money it spends. Brands are being discussed, debated and mutated all across the Internet. And, while companies can’t control their brands, there is still a lot that can be done to influence the discussion. At the end of the day, the key is to for a company to become a legitimate part of the community having the discussion. Relinquishing complete control of your brand can do wonders for your company’s image. Some smart executives at Coca-Cola were well aware of this fact when they addressed this particular situation. This type of thinking may well help Coke become the choice of a new generation.

World's Second Best PR Blog

High on Coke — Coca-Cola Embraces Fans’ Facebook Page, Effectively Sharing Ownership of its Brand With Loyal Customers

Dean Rodgers

KoiFish Communications

Blog Categories