Jul 06
12
“Getting it.” – A Tale of Two Brands
This topic has been blogged heavily, so I will try not to go over too much old material, but here is a brief background:
Enterprising Scientists discover that Diet Coke + Mentos = Big Eruption and subsequently several videos are created demonstrating the practice showcased by several blogs. The clever folks at eepybird.com make a sticky fireworks display video out of the concept and generate over 4 million views at last count of this phenomenon and resulted in Today Show and Late Night with David Letterman appearance, among many others.
Coke’s initial response:
“It’s an entertaining phenomenon,” said Coke spokeswoman Susan McDermott. “We would hope people want to drink [Diet Coke] more than try experiments with it.”. She adds that the “craziness with Mentos … doesn’t fit with the brand personality” of Diet Coke.
Mentos Reaction
“We are tickled pink by it,” says Pete Healy, vice president of marketing for the company’s U.S. division.
Courtesy: The Viral GardenSo both Mentos and Coke are given the opportunity to benefit from this novel use of their products. Mentos embraces it and Coke frets about it. For crying out loud Coke, people are using huge amounts of your product, having fun doing it and publishing their efforts – why are you such a wet blanket about it? Now Coke is of course supporting it, but in a limited “only on our site in promotion of our Coke Show” way.
This can’t help but remind me of the music companies being given one of the greatest technological gifts ever, effectively reducing their distribution cost of music to zero. So they pry open this gift horse’s mouth and subsequently litigate the hell out of Napster and their consumers, fracturing one big enemy into a thousand little ones. They could have just embraced where the community was going and owned it before the genie got out of the bottle.
While Coke has not (yet) gone so far as to sue the consumers promoting their product, they really missed an opportunity to embrace their consumers. Perhaps when I show my daughter this trick, I will use Diet Pepsi instead (which apparently works just as well).