Advertising Age writes in a report:
Mark Greatrex, senior VP-marketing communications and insights, will launch the “Sprite Yard”, a mobile community where its young-adult target can share information, photos and chat. And by using numbers printed under bottle caps, they’ll be able to collect mobile treats such as ringtones, mobisodes and other content. The U.S. launch is June 22; the Yard was launched in China in early June.
Treats? So that is what makes me go and use communities? Interesting. Coca-Cola’s brand Sprite tries to delve into Web 2.0-like community spirit. But they don’t use what is already there, they’re trying to start something new. I’m not sure if this is a mistake. Okay, you can start something new, but then you need to offer something that makes a difference to what is out there. They still haven’t got the right idea about how these things work. Even worse, they think it’s ringtones that makes people participate and start with yet another community site.
“Sprite wants you to participate in its brand new community site!”–“Why should I do that?”–“Uhm, because we’re Sprite?”
I’m not saying it’s going to be that way, but they have to be careful to not come across like that.
My former client wis.dm saw itself as contender on a take of Facebook. Now, one year and six months later, the scene is name-dropping Myspace and Facebook in one sentence. Facebook has become the leading platform among students, whereas wis.dm, well, is nowhere compared to Facebook. Which may be the reason why they changed their product idea just recently.
My consulting for wis.dm (which they politely listened to but didn’t apply) included to incorporate platform connections to Flickr, Twitter etc. Two weeks ago Facebook released new “Facebook apps”, which are exactly that, on a greater scale. You can add content and mashup the stuff you’ve already got on other platforms.
Back to Coca-Cola and their stuck-up marketing thinking. The problem with these big brands is, their owners don’t like the new Web. They don’t like the people either, who don’t want to be consumers anymore but just people. Now they’re trying to cope with a changing situation, but honestly, they don’t really get it. I think it will take a little longer until the generations have replaced the old-school members on the corporate management board.
Online communities are based on people, not on the brands they use. If you’re smart enough, you can be a brand that provides the space people want for their activities. But ringtones isn’t really an activity, is it.
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