I came across an ad for Coke Blak in my recent addition of Wired magazine. I personally like the taste of Coke and coffee together, but the whole marketing strategy is broken. Two reasons:

ONE: I don’t understand what they are trying to say. The ad says at the top, “Update your operating system.” Okay, you lost me right there. That doesn’t speak to my need to drink this. I don’t drink Coke Blak and think to myself, “I’m really glad I updated my operating system today.” It’s just stupid.

And underneath is the Coke Blak tag line, “Coke effervescence with Coffee essence.” What does that mean? I have no idea. But I do know that someone got paid a lot of money to think that up.

TWO: The packaging is all wrong. Smaller bottles and higher prices. They made the mistake of trying complete with Starbuck’s line of Frappuccinos. Coke is not coffee. Coke is coke. So don’t try to be coffee. And don’t try to compete with coffee. Coffee snobs will never drink Coke Blak.

Be Coke with a coffee flavor. Same bottle size, same price.

Anyway….

This entry was posted on Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 5:56 am and is filed under Marketing & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.