How Coca-Cola Makes Life More Bearable During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Coca-Cola recently announced a technology, contactless pouring, that makes it possible for people to choose and pour a drink from a Coke Freestyle fountain machine without needing to touch the display screen. With contactless pouring, consumers choose flavors and pour drinks by using their mobile devices to scan a QR code on the dispenser display. The news generated a few eye-roll responses on social media, including one doubting Thomas who wondered what all the fuss was about:

But I don’t think it matters how innovative or critical the technology is. A contact-free Coke machine is all about making us just a bit more comfortable with life during the COVID-19 pandemic. As I told Adweek, “We’re living in unbelievably stressful times, and if Coca-Cola launches a mobile interactive technology that reduces our stress even a little bit, then more power to Coca-Cola.”

The Freestyle dispensers are usually found in restaurants or workplaces. After their widespread rollout in 2019, they made it more fun for people to select fountain drinks by using a touchscreen to choose from 100+ different Coke products. Part of the joy was exploring all the different flavors in a machine and creating your own custom-flavored beverage (I have always loved combining Fanta Zero Fruit Punch and Peach with Sprite Zero Cherry). But exploring all those flavors also means standing in front of a Freestyle machine and touching a screen, usually multiple times – which has no appeal while the pandemic continues indefinitely. So with people slowly returning to restaurants in fits and starts, Coke created a workaround: just point your phone at the machine and make your favorite mixes without needing to touch a germy screen (and presumably you can have more control over where you stand):

A contact-free Freestyle machine is not going to save the world; touching a surface is not even the primary way the virus is spread, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the customer experience may give us some peace of mind and a sense of normalcy sorely lacking at a time when people’s routines have been altered radically. Life might be upended, but you can still have some of the little routines that are part of your day, such as pouring a drink from a dispenser. As such, contactless pouring addresses one of the troubling impacts of our times: the strain on our mental health caused by COVID-19. 

Consider all the threats to our mental well-being that the pandemic has triggered: the stress of waking up each day knowing that a deadly virus with no vaccine continues to rage; weeks at a stretch lived in lockdown this past spring with the possibility of lockdown returning; parents of children forced to become home schoolers while they hold down their jobs; and millions of people losing their jobs during a recessionary economy. Any of those factors alone would create widespread tension, fear, and anxiety. And we’re enduring all of them and more.  

The stress is taking its toll. In April, nearly half of U.S. adults surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that their mental health had been hurt due to worry and stress over the virus. At the time 72 percent of U.S. adults surveyed by Newsweek said that they would hit a mental “breaking point” by early June if coronavirus stay-at-home orders extended through the start of summer – and we were only weeks into lockdown then. The Lancet summed up where we are now in the dry but still potent language of academia:

COVID-19 has resulted in an increase in known risk factors for mental health problems. Together with unpredictability and uncertainty, lockdown and physical distancing might lead to social isolation, loss of income, loneliness, inactivity, limited access to basic services, increased access to food, alcohol, and online gambling, and decreased family and social support, especially in older and vulnerable people.

And people expect businesses to relieve the strain. More than three quarters of the general population surveyed by Kantar said they would like to see brands talk about how they’re helping people adapt to the new reality of life during COVID-19. Seventy-seven percent would like brands to inform consumers about their efforts to combat COVID-19.

Businesses have responded quickly, sometimes in profound ways, as with Apple and Google collaborating on contact-tracing technology. In the retail and restaurant industries, businesses have focused on making the shopping and dining experiences safer and more comfortable, installing plexiglass shields at check-out lanes, adopting curbside pick-up services, and requiring that shoppers wear masks inside stores. These actions are meaningful on two levels:

  • They could help save lives, especially those regulations requiring that people wear masks.
  • They make us feel more comfortable by giving us a sense of control – thus easing the burden of the life we’re living now,

The contact-less Freestyle machine brings to mind something that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said about the growth of Netflix’s subscribership during lockdown: “Our small contribution in these difficult times is to make home confinement a little more bearable.”

We still have difficult times ahead. Businesses cannot stop the coronavirus. But they can make our lives a little more bearable. And in their humble way, Coke Freestyle machines are doing just that.

With IGTV, Instagram Targets the Mobile Generation

The cool kids don’t hang out on Facebook anymore. So Facebook wants the cool kids to hang out on Instagram.

When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, Instagram had less than 100 million users. Now the app counts one billion users, most of whom are millennials and digital natives, the demographic Facebook covets. Instagram continues to grow by making it easy and fun for users to tell visual stories, the language of the digital generation. Sometimes, Instagram copies Snapchat features as it did with the creation of Instagram Stories. Now Instagram is taking a page from YouTube’s playbook by offering longer-form video through the recently launched IGTV feature. Instead of having video limited to 30 seconds in length, users can create videos that are as long as 10 minutes (or an hour for larger, verified accounts). And Instagram is adding an important twist: the content is optimized for mobile.

A Mobile-First Experience

If you’re already creating Instagram main-feed videos and Instagram Stories, IGTV should be a snap to use. You simply hold your mobile phone vertically and record a video. Then you tap on the IGTV icon on your Instagram account and follow the prompts to upload and label the video. Note that when you record your video, you don’t hold the phone in horizonal fashion as you are probably accustomed to doing. That’s because IGTV is designed specifically for the way we naturally hold our phones and view content via the vertical format. IGTV videos look naturally rendered, taking up the entire screen rather than being bracketed by ugly, thick black borders that typically appear if you hold your phone vertically and create a video (which looks hopelessly uncool).

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said that the mobile format will set IGTV apart. “We’ve reimagined what video is on mobile,” he said in a livestreamed announcement. In a blog post, Instagram pointed out that by 2021, mobile video will account for 78 percent of total mobile data traffic – so a mobile-first video uploading and sharing experience is long overdue. Continue reading

How CMOs Can Succeed with Mobile Marketing

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Good news for mobile marketers: U.S. mobile ad spending far exceeded expectations and grew by 180 percent in the United States alone in 2012. The growth of mobile advertising is a timely development in light of today’s news about the publication of Mobile Marketing: An Hour a Day, co-authored by Rachel Pasqua (who works with me at iCrossing) and eMarketer’s Noah Elkin. Mobile Marketing: An Hour a Day gives CMOs and their teams a detailed guide for how to build brands with mobile marketing. The ethos of the book is this: mobile marketing is about the audience, not the device. The key to successful mobile marketing is creating connected moments throughout the entire purchase journey.

The book covers every aspect of employing mobile marketing, such as location-based marketing via destinations like Foursquare and Yelp or managing a mobile commerce site.

According to Rachel, the book represents a distinct shift in the way marketers are talking about mobile. “Brand aren’t just fixated on mobile apps anymore,” she told me as I prepared this blog post. “Marketers have shifted the conversation about mobile to strategy. They want to figure out how to connect mobile to broader campaigns and social conversations that create sustainable value for their brands. And our answer comes down to this: audience.”

Hence, Mobile Marketer: An Hour a Day focuses on the importance of audience and strategy first, and devices second. For example, the first two chapters discuss mapping the mobile opportunity and creating a mobile strategy. Subsequent chapters show how various aspects of mobile marketing, such as the development of mobile websites and apps, tie back to strategy.

You can get a better sense of Rachel’s “audience first” thinking in a blog post she just published that introduces the book. Moreover, Rachel discusses the growth of mobile marketing more broadly in two recently published posts, Why 2012 Really Was the Year of Mobile and 8 Mobile Marketing Trends for 2013.

How are you embracing mobile marketing in 2013?

Location-Based Marketing Is More Than a Foursquare Game

The next time your boss insists you create a Foursquare scavenger hunt to make your brand “fun,” ask yourself who your audience is and what they’ll get out of the experience. Using location-based services such as Foursquare to build your brand is all about providing useful content like deals and offers, not games and status points, according to Geoff Ramsey, CEO and founder of eMarketer, who hosted a September 19 breakfast, “Location-Based Marketing: Driving Sales in a ‘What’s Around Me?’ World.”

According to Ramsey, eMarketer data show that Foursquare usage is leveling off and that gaming experiences on Foursquare “are getting old for consumers.” In fact, local check-in “is not the huge opportunity that the media was making it out to be.” His discussion suggests marketers need to first understand the audience for location-based services and provide valuable content they’ll care about. The hot areas of opportunity are geo-fencing (e.g., a clothing retailer on Michigan Avenue in Chicago offers you a deal on your smart phone as you stroll past the store on your way to lunch) and in-store (marketing to consumers as they use their mobile devices to browse the inventory in your physical store — and catching their attention with value-added services and deals that encourage immediate purchase).

On the iCrossing Great Finds blog, I provide a lengthier report on Ramsey’s points. Check it out, and I invite your feedback.

Going mobile for the holidays

 

As I mentioned in one of my Black Friday blog posts, holiday shopping is increasingly a mobile experience. Recently Google analyzed consumer shopping trends and arrived at the same conclusion. According to an analysis from the Google Commerce blog:

More and more shoppers are reaching for their phones to compare prices, look for store locations and inventory and find deals. In fact, searches for [mobile coupons] were up 90% over last year’s volume and mobile search volume for retail-related searches on Black Friday this year was up 200% over Black Friday last year.

According to our study, 55% of participants said they will use their smartphone’s location features on some or most shopping trips, while 47% will use a smartphone to compare prices and 42% will use their phone to search for the nearest store.

They might not fit in your pocket, but tablets are a rising device for getting some serious shopping done: 47% of study participants said they use their tablets to search for coupons or rebates and 44% use them to make purchases.

And consumers are turning to mobile apps to manage their increasingly complicated lives during the holiday season. My iCrossing colleague Dana Notman shares some examples in a December 5 post on the iCrossing Great Finds blog, “Manage Your Holidays with Mobile Apps.” On a related note, on the Great Finds blog I also provided live coverage of an iCrossing webinar regarding how brands can successfully  plan and implement mobile apps.

The day is coming soon when no one will be blogging about our embrace of mobile shopping and mobile apps for our holiday shopping. Next year we’ll be discussing how tablet devices have turned shopping (and product research) into a more immersive experience occurring well before and after Black Friday, especially as more bellwether brands adopt Google Catalogs for the iPad. Smart brands will react to consumer behavior by focusing on the mobile experience, not just the shopping transaction.