While reading Michael Wat’s blog post on Coke’s “Share a Coke” Campaign, I was interested to see some other Coke commercials and their results from the past.

I stumbled across a 1985 “New” Coke Commercial with Bill Crosby. I thought it was quite entertaining, seeing how far Coke has come since then in regards to advertising. In this commercial, Crosby talks about the “new” Coke and then goes on to say that there’s no need to describe it – he downs it and SHOWS how amazing the taste is. I then compared this with another Pepsi commercial with Michael J. Fox from 1985, where Pepsi is also SHOWN rather than described in a rather different way. Though their approaches were different, but both focused on customer experience rather than on product description.

After watching the two, and after chuckling to myself at the difference between the past and present advertising methods, I realized that in fact the difference between these old commercials and new ones are actually not that different. Both modern commercials and these ones tried focusing on the “experience” of drinking colas rather than on trying to describe them. I did chance upon a few older commercials from Coke which tried to describe how Coke was the best, but I definitely think this version was much better. Trying to portray a product experience is much more powerful than trying to describe the benefits – the unsaid details speak louder than anything the commercial could have said – different people will pick up on different aspects that might not have even been in the original marketer’s mind. I am looking forward to improving my skills in this area to effectively advertise customer “experience” rather than just product description!