Calling home is the only way for them to keep in touch with their families. But with rates to the Subcontinent running extremely high, their call home happens just once a week, in off peak times. So, our solution needed to address this problem, while being extremely easy to understand and surpassing language barriers, to give the workers a greater reason to feel positively about Coca-Cola.
The Brief
A large portion of the UAE's population is made up of blue-collar workers from the Asian Subcontinent. These workers earn some of the lowest wages in the country, and by contract, only get to return home every three years. So Coca-Cola wanted to spread a little happiness amongst this segment and increase affinity and love for the brand.
How the final design was conceived
Typically, the workers buy either single serve or 2litre sharing bottles of Coca-Cola, so we decided to extend the use of each bottle by repurposing the bottle caps into currency. We created the Hello Happiness Phone Booth – a special booth that only accepts Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins to make a free three-minute international phone call. The booth was user-friendly, used symbols instead of languages to make communication easier and the design reflected the positive, optimistic and warm brand values of Coca-Cola.
Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market
The booths brought workers a few minutes of happiness sourced directly from Coca-Cola, therefore increasing affinity and love for the brand. Installed across the UAE, they logged over 140,000 minutes, while the online video took the activation even further with over 3 million views, 14,000 tweets, 45,000 shares and 67,000 likes.
In addition, over 820 million media impressions and an estimated PR value of 1.5 million dollars helped contribute to a 13.55% increase in brand love, with 6.7% more weekly drinkers amongst South Asians in the UAE.
Source: Coke Continuous Consumer Tracker 2014 & MEMAC Ogilvy PR (approved by MEPRA).
Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most loved brands. But in the UAE, they are not the market leader. In 2014, we set out to increase brand love for Coca-Cola by targeting one of the country’s largest segments: South Asians. More specifically, the blue-collar workers who make up the majority of our target. In a segment usually only targeted with basic freebies and generic prizes, we had to tap into an insight that the workers could truly relate to.