OK Soda is a discontinued soft drink created in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity. After the soda did not sell well in select test markets, it was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nationwide distribution. The drink's slogan was "Things are going to be OK."

History

In 1993, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta rehired Sergio Zyman to be the chief of marketing for all Coca-Cola beverage brands, a surprising choice given that Zyman had worked closely with the New Coke campaign, possibly the largest marketing failure in Coke's history. However, after revamping the can design and print advertising campaigns for Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Classic with great success, Zyman was given free rein to design new products with aggressive, offbeat marketing campaigns.

International market research done by The Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s revealed that "Coke" was the second most recognizable word across all languages in the world. The first word was "OK". Zyman (who also conceived Fruitopia) decided to take advantage of this existing brand potential and created a soft drink with this name. He conceived of a counter-intuitive advertising campaign that intentionally targeted people who did not like advertising. He predicted that the soft drink would be a huge success, and promised Goizueta that the soft drink would take at least 4% of the US beverage market. Coca-Cola's special projects manager Brian Lanahan explained to Time Magazine that they chose the name "OK" because "It underpromises. It doesn't say, 'This is the next great thing.' It's the flip side of overclaiming." Coca-Cola marketing consultant Tom Pinko told National Public Radio, "People who are 19 years old are very accustomed to having been manipulated and knowing that they're manipulated," and that OK Soda's audience possessed a "lethargy [that] probably can't be penetrated by any commercial message."

Testing

right|thumb|352px|The original four cans used in test markets

Despite a US-wide advertising campaign and intense media attention, OK Soda was marketed only in select areas, representing different demographic areas during the summer of 1993. Four separate can designs were used (with each test market getting all four designs). The Coca-Cola Corporation announced at the time that they would continually update the cans with new designs (later designs can be identified by having an explanatory tag saying that it is "A unique fruity soda"). Some of the testing locations were:

  • Atlantic Canada
  • Austin, Texas
  • Boston, Massachusetts
  • Denver, Colorado
  • Colorado Springs, Colorado
  • Cincinnati, Ohio
  • Detroit, Michigan
  • Fargo, North Dakota
  • Knoxville, Tennessee
  • Little Rock, Arkansas
  • Lynden, Washington
  • Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota
  • Northern Wisconsin
  • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
  • Omaha, Nebraska
  • Portland, Oregon
  • Providence, Rhode Island
  • Sacramento, California
  • Seattle, Washington

OK Soda never captured more than 3% of the beverage market in any of the target locations, failing to match Zyman's hype. The project was canceled by Coca-Cola just seven months after its kickoff, and the soft drink was never widely released to the public.

Marketing

framed|One of the OK Soda can designs; illustrated by [[Charles Burns (cartoonist)|Charles Burns]]

thumb|OK Soda prize can with prizes

OK Soda has been remembered more for its unique advertising campaign than for its fruity flavor. The name and advertising campaign attempted to poke fun at the "I'm OK – You're OK" pop-psychology of the early 1970s. OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X markets, and attempted to cash in on the group's existing cynicism, disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns. OK Soda's own advertisements went so far as to disparage the beverage's taste comparing it to things like "carbonated tree sap".

The general public did not respond to the offbeat campaign, and most critics point out that the campaigning was too overt in its courting of the youth and teen market.

Can design

Both the cans and the print advertisements for the soft drink, created by Wieden+Kennedy creative director Charlotte Moore, conceptual artist Peter Wegner, and designer Todd Waterbury, featured work by popular "alternative" cartoonists Daniel Clowes (Eightball, Ghost World) and Charles Burns (Black Hole, The Believer), Though skeptical of the campaign, Clowes took the job because his work illustrating a couple of cans and a few posters paid more than publishing five books of comics. In an act of subverting OK Soda's already subversive marketing scheme, Clowes gave his OK Soda mascot the facial features of Charles Manson, saying that none of the contracts he signed said, "Don't put a mass murderer on the can."

Unlike the brightly colored Coca-Cola cans, they were decorated in drab shades of gray, with occasional red text. In addition to the primarily two-tone illustrations, the cans featured a special code that could be entered at the toll-free number "1-800-I-FEEL-OK" that led callers through a series of true-or-false prompts inspired by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Cans also sported a "Coincidence" in the form of an odd OK Soda-themed urban legend set in various towns around the United States, each anecdote ending with the statement, "This is a coincidence." OK Soda's marketing team also mailed out these "Coincidences" in the form of chain letters to promote the soda, and in turn these chain letters were read on TV spots for OK Soda.

  • OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is.
  • The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be.
  • OK Soda says, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything." For example, Liquid Death has used similar "lifestyle play" marketing techniques with great success. Meanwhile OK Soda's original merchandise, cans and advertising material can still be found readily on eBay with asking prices sometimes in hundreds of U.S. dollars.

See also

  • Arch Deluxe
  • Crystal Pepsi
  • List of defunct consumer brands
  • Pepsi One

References

  • "Will Teens Buy It? Coke's new OK soda uses irony and understatement to woo a skeptical market" — A critical business perspective from Time Magazine on OK Soda as a case study for marketing to Generation X (May 30, 1994)
  • OK Marketing — A retrospective of the OK marketing campaign by suck.com (February 14, 1996)
  • The OK Soda Page — an unofficial site with comprehensive information (from web archives)
  • observations from a test market.
  • OK Soda Letter A letter from Coca-Cola explaining the end of OK Soda