If ever there was a mature industry, cola drinks would have to be it, right? After all, whatever market share Coca-Cola doesn’t have is owned by Pepsi and around the margins the competition is, well, just marginal.
So you might expect that a company that has as much market share as its biggest competitor will yield probably has little reason to innovate in its marketing, especially its public relations and social media. You’d be wrong.
Again and again, Coke continues to innovate in its approach to the marketplace and more specifically, in weaving storytelling into public relations and social media. This approach has had any number of industry observers (including yours truly) blogging about Coke even when our clients and our work take us far from the soft drink industry.
A few months ago, I read an excellent blog by Monica Savut of the UK firm Econsultancy that examined some of Coke’s more interesting storytelling forays at length. I put it aside with a mental note to check in later on some of what Monica related.
In this post, I want to focus on just two points she highlighted – Coke’s commitment to eliminate press releases completely from its PR and social media arsenal; and its commitment to replace press releases with a focus on brand journalism.
When Ashley Brown of Coke told a Ragan Communications audience in November 2013 that the company planned to cut the number of press releases it issues by 50 percent in 2014, and eliminate them completely in 2015, you would think that would have caused quite a stir in the PR world. The trades duly recorded his statement but beyond that, it seems few took notice. Even today, there are only about 5,500 views of the video recording his statement on YouTube.
I’m in total agreement that the press release as a PR institution is either dead or dying, except for specific situations. Yet just about every integrated marketing agency worth its salt has a “PR shop” that does nothing but spam the Internet with press releases and sadly, most of those who don’t really understand the evolving nature of PR and social media hear the words “public relations” and think “press releases.”
In my own experience, I’ve taken to telling well-meaning folks this little story: “Yes, we do press releases. Press releases are like tires on a car. They are necessary for your PR to go somewhere. But nobody buys a car for the tires. They buy it for other reasons, including the engine. Your story is the engine of your PR. Let’s focus on that.”
Most folks get it right away, which is great, because press releases, by and large, rarely serve a beneficial purpose. Don’t take my word for it, though – look at what Coca Cola is doing!
So if you’re going to eliminate press releases, as Mr. Brown, Coke’s Group Director of Digital Communications & Social Media, says the company will, what will replace this tired 20th-century convention?
The answer may surprise you: while Coke still intends to make money from its soft drinks, it intends to make its mark in the marketplace by becoming a publisher. No, not a publisher like those sad, big print publishers that are selling great newspaper names at fire-sale prices; a publisher that focuses on content creation on the Internet, including social media, employing the journalists who often have been let go by the old print publishers.
The focus of Coke’s efforts is a site rebrand it’s calling Journey. In a recent PR Week opinion piece, Mr. Brown demonstrated that what goes around comes around, as Journey was originally an internal print magazine at the company that’s been reborn in 21st-century digital clothing.
Today, it’s the hub of a direct-to-market journalistic enterprise that incorporates staff-written stories, user-generated content, videos and lots of extras. Mr. Brown and his team hired journalists – and lots of them – to help create a daily, digital hub for fresh content that was branded by the company and owned by it while still being engaging to readers in a way that would keep them from viewing Journey as a huge ad in cyberspace.
In his PR Week piece, Mr. Brown gives a sense that, even at a global company with enormous resources, this was not a slam dunk because it required going up against just about every bit of the conventional PR and social media wisdom.
Still, as he said of Journey in his PR Week piece, “those of us who publish it every day are certain that this is career-defining work, and that the best is yet to come. We have so much more to learn, and so many more things to do. This story is far from over.”
If the story is far from over for Coke, what does that mean for the rest of us? Let me know what you think in the comments below. And if you’re interested on our firm’s take on storytelling in this digital age, we have a download for you below.
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