The Project

Promotions that inspire dreams also create digital products

Coca-Cola's iconic promotions could not fail to be enhanced by the intense digital transformation process the brand has undergone. For a 135-year-old global company with a history of being a marketing and logistics-driven organization, transforming itself into a truly 21st-century organization with digital products that leverage value delivery to its consumers is a daunting challenge. For decades, unforgettable, nationwide promotions have been the flagship of Coca-Cola's marketing. Over the past five years, we've helped these same promotions migrate online, with digital products tailored to the strategy, circumstances, and viability of each moment.

In the image, from left to right, we see the Christmas, Received, Summer Gas, and Returnables promotions.

The Challenge

Simplifying Fan Engagement

Each promotion launch brings a new layer of complexity. The mechanics change, the technologies used are different, the target audience has new characteristics, the objectives are renewed, and each of these attributes impacts the legal aspects but, most importantly, the design of the user experience. Furthermore, deadlines at Coca-Cola are always very aggressive, meaning the final product is designed on the fly, while the promotions team defines the mechanics, the legal department finalizes the regulations, and the development partner finalizes the implementation details. Maintaining team cohesion, strategic coherence over time, and the delivery of solid, user-friendly products in such a complex, fast-paced, fluid, and dynamic environment is undoubtedly a constant challenge.

The Process

Design and technology expertise aren't the only way to make products for the dreaded "real world."

Over time, the process has evolved significantly. We began with a comprehensive and more rigorous application of our proprietary methodology and, as we strengthened our ties with the client, focused only on the crucial aspects for the flawless execution of a promotion as iconic as they must be for the 135-year-old red giant. For all promotions, the process required sharp communication and precise coordination with the development, regulatory, legal, and marketing teams. In this highly volatile environment, with last-minute changes, overnight resolutions with significant project impacts, and significant legal liabilities to be reflected on promotional websites, any alignment error could pose a critical risk.

Product Key

The Unboxing Metaphor

Defining the product key is the part of the methodology where we determine which details of the product's value proposition we can highlight to make it memorable. In this sense, each promotion has its own specific characteristics that make it unique, but let's look at an example: the Received Goods Promotion. In this promotion, the main concept was the ever-popular unboxing, famous for digital influencers who receive gifts from brands. The idea was to offer lucky consumers the chance to unpack their own Coca-Cola "received goods," and it was precisely this "opening the box" experience that we chose as a metaphor to make the website special. Just like physical gifts, the digital product came out of a box that was, of course, full of surprises.

The Solution

Adapt, unify, and consolidate.

In our first steps in Coca-Cola's digital promotions, we applied outracoisa's proprietary methodology, specifically respecting the objectives, constraints, and audiences for each. Furthermore, each promotion ran on a separate hotsite, due to its specificities. We innovated across channels and created the first WhatsApp chatbot, allowing consumers to participate in promotions through the most popular and most widely used app in the country. In 2020, with greater alignment with other departments of the Company and a complete overhaul of the Coca-Cola website, we created a unified structure within the same product that could encompass the different types of experiences for each promotion, achieving significant gains in efficiency and scale.

The image shows the unified structure we developed to handle the various variations in content and mechanics of each promotion.

Results

With time and effort, synergy abounds!

The main result of these promotions was helping to build a solid relationship with this customer, repeatedly demonstrating to the Company our ability to serve them across a variety of demand types and levels. We ran eight promotions over the past four years, from 2018 to 2021, and at least 10 million consumers participated in them with our products. These numbers contributed to the consolidation of outracoisa* as a strategic partner of Coca-Cola, with highly efficient execution, as demonstrated by the track record of the promotions themselves and the other projects we were commissioned to develop for various brands in the Company's portfolio.