interested in innovation and creativity

Coke and Second Life – More Social Media and CGC Experiments

Posted: April 18th, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer-Experience, Marketing | 7 Comments »

DancingexperienceCoke is working with new marketing company Crayon to launch a competition in Second Life, the name of the project is VirtualThirst and involves the general public and residents of Second Life designing Coke vending machines that deliver “experiences”. As it turns out you can submit ideas as written descriptions, images, videos, or of course jump in world and design “drop” your design off at their location in SL. I’m pretty sure that this will do better than their video competition megaflop “the coke show”, to start with they have gone to a place where people are creating stuff already, and are trying to connect with “creatives” there. I’m not sure this passes my “who cares” test, but I guess that will depend on the output of participants. In many ways “design a new coke vending machine that vends experiences” smacks of something that sounds great to marketers, and a huh? from the general populous… maybe.

"imagine a world in which a simple vending machine could dispense - not Coca-Cola - but the ESSENCE of Coca-Cola: refreshment, joy, unity, experience"

Seriously? who talks like that and who believes that the essence of coke is refreshment, joy, unity, experience; apart from the vp of marketing.

Anyway, what have they done right:

  • They’ve gone to where people are creating
  • They’ve involved the community in the judgeing
  • They are going to let people use the winning in Second Life for free in their homes etc
  • the publicity they get from just doing something in Second Life will be an additional return on investment

They also have a myspace page, delicious page, flickr page, and a youtube page

Other coverage:

  • http://blog.rebang.com csven

    I think they’re also doing something very wrong: treating a community of creatives as their own personal (and poorly-compensated) design team. Sad.

  • http://www.virtualthirst.com Steve Coulson

    Cvsen, I seem to be stalking you across multiple blogs tonight, as you’ve left comments on a lot of the stories I’ve found on Virtual Thirst :) Rather than reply here, I’ll try and address your concerns over at Rebang.

    Steve from crayon

  • http://experiencecurve.com Karl

    I don’t think I was against it as a whole, I was just being a bit critical, I just tried to take a balanced view, rather than just automatically praise it. I think there are plenty of things they did right and it’s miles ahead of “the coke show” :-)

  • http://blog.rebang.com csven

    At some point Steve, as you’ve managed to misspell my name more than once now, I hope that you manage to get it correct (it’s “csven”; first initial, middle name).

    More importantly, I hope this failing isn’t indicative of a broader issue… or two.

  • http://mediaflock.net/131 MediaFlock

    코카콜라 meets Second Life…

    코카콜라는 VirtualThirst 라는 컨테스트를 Second Life를 통해 개시했다. : 일반 유저로 하여금 Second Life 내에서 자유롭게 ‘체험’할 수 있는 콜라 자판기를 디자인해보라는 것 (작품들은 위 사이트…

  • http://www.web-jungle.com/2007/04/29/links-news-290407/ Web Jungle – A Weblog on Advertising, Digital Marketing and Web Culture » Links & News, 29.04.07

    [...] has started a virtual promotion with the guys at Crayon, as you can read at Experience Curve. It’s called virtual thirst – [...]

  • http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com Lisa McNeill

    I have mixed emotions about it too. My concern is that companies are turning to Second Life to be able to say they are in it. It may raise publicity, but it seems some form of strategy is being disregarded.

    Companies with large spending like Coke certainly have room and money to experiment. And while they’ve not broken any “rules” or ethics of social marketing, my only question is how many people will really get engaged with this. Will it be worth their large investments?