Mini Episode 3 - Why do cans of Coke, diet Coke and Coke Zero all suddenly look the same?

Bianca from Prahran wants to know what's behind Coca Cola's gigantic packaging u-turn.

Dan: 00:17 Hey, and welcome to Bad decisions mini episode three. I'm Dan Monheit, Co-Founder of Hardhat, and for those new to the party in this mini episode format, I am getting down to the bottom of why we do the weird and wonderful things that we do. Today's listener question is from Bianca in Prahran.

Bianca: 00:33 Hey Dan, it's Bianca from Prahran. Yesterday I went to Woolies to grab some Coke and almost accidentally grabbed a zero sugar one. What's the deal with the packaging being so similar? Isn't it confusing for customers?

Dan: 00:47 All right. I am so excited to get to the bottom of this question, but to do it justice I think we need to have a little bit of historical context first. So I'm just going to wind back the clock a little bit. 1937, Coke launches in Australia loud and proud in that distinctive Coca-Cola red we all know and love. Cruises along by itself for 45 years until boom, 1982. Everybody's wearing leotards, doing aerobics, starting to think about living healthy lifestyles, Diet Coke launches, and of course, it's going to look skinny, it's going to look futuristic, what better choice, silver.

Dan: 01:29 So we're cruising along until the new millennium and the good folk at Coca-Cola realize that Aussie males have decided that Diet Coke is maybe a little something for the ladies, and let's be honest, Diet Coke advertising absolutely took that and ran with it, and instead, Aussie males a little bit health conscious are deciding to max their thirst with Pepsi Max. So the good folks at Coke say anything you can do, we can do better, and 2005, we see the launch of Coke Zero complete with an $18 million marketing spam and the now the stinky black can.

Dan: 02:05 So here we are 2005. We have trusty Coke in red. We have Diet Coke in silver. We have Coke Zero in black, and the world makes sense. Until 2015 when Coca-Cola decide that after decades educating the world on the fact that Coke is red, Diet Coke is silver, Coke Zero is black, after billions and billions of dollars making ads ensuring that every person over the age of five knew this, everything changes. Coke strip away these three distinct identities. They instead put everything in one, almost identical can, a red Coca-Cola can save for a, let's call it 15% band across the top of the can, which has a colored strip, which denotes which can this is. So a little black strip for Coke Zero, a little silver strip for Diet Coke and a continued red strip for Coca-Cola Classic as it was then known.

Dan: 03:00 For the marketers amongst us, you've got to ask what the hell is going on here? I mean, we have just had some of the world's most distinctive brand assets trashed. We have had brand codes abandoned. We have had icons buried alive, and in their place, just this can conformity red homogeneousness of Coca-Cola cans. This seems like complete madness. Until you consider mere exposure effect. And the mere exposure effect is a behavioral bias that refers to our tendency to prefer something simply because that thing is more familiar to us. Effectively, it's a scientific proof that turning up really is half the battle. Over the years, scientific studies have proven that mere repeated exposure is enough to prefer particular words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures, faces, pictures of faces, you name it. Just turning up over and over and over again is enough for us to build a preference towards something.

Dan: 03:57 Perhaps the most iconic study into the mere exposure effect was done by Robert Zion in the early 1960s. And what Zion did, was he managed to get hold of a whole bunch of fertilized unhatched chicks. It was the 60s. I don't know, anything goes, right? He split these chicks into... Or unhatched chicks, I guess you would call them eggs, into two groups and played one set of tones to each group of unhatched chicks. He then waited for the chicks to hatch, played both sets of tones to both groups and miraculously and wonderfully observed that each set of chicks consistently responded to, I don't know, maybe by dancing or something, responded to the tones that they had previously been exposed to, even though the previous exposure happened when they were still eggs. Now I can tell you that if this works in unhatched chicks, it absolutely works in hatched humans.

Dan: 04:49 The mere repeated exposure, it does two things for us. Number one, it builds a sense of safety. So we think if we've seen something 10 times and it hasn't attacked us, on the 11th time, it's probably not going to attack us either. The second thing it builds is something called perceptual fluency, which is really just a fancy way of saying how easy is it to understand what this thing is. And perhaps not surprisingly things that our brain categorize as safe and easy to understand, tend to be more likable than things our brain categorizes as unsafe and difficult to understand. And mere repeated exposure builds both of those things.

Dan: 05:21 By bringing their cans into line, Coca-Cola get to benefit from the mere exposure effect in an almost exponential way, right? Because every time somebody sees a can of Coke now they also 85% see a can of Diet Coke. Every time I see a can of Diet Coke, they also 85% see a can of Coke Zero, and round and round and round it goes. Given Coca-Cola's insane distribution and very, very prominent shelf space, what this can conformity helps them do is ensure that their most valuable asset, their packaging, is also one of their hardest working.

Dan: 05:52 For all of us working in marketing, we can all benefit from the mere exposure effect by just ensuring that we turn up early, that we turn up often and that whenever somebody sees a piece of communications from us, they know it is from us because our distinctive brand assets be that our colors, our fonts, our distinctive imagery, is front and center. So Bianca, hopefully that explains why Coca-Cola have put all of their cans into line for you. Listeners out there, if you've got more weird and wonderful questions you would like answered, you can hit me up askdan@hardhat.com.au, or I'm all over social media. You can usually find me at Dan Monheit. Looking forward to catching you next time for another Bad Decisions and mini episode.