Coca-Cola wants young people in China to grab an ice-cold Coke whenever they need a break.

This might seem like an easy task considering Coca-Cola is already China’s drink of choice during shared meals and socializing occasions.

But breaks – those moments when we need a pick-me-up – are a different proposition.

Breaks is the biggest consumption occasion for ready-to-drink beverages, giving Coca-Cola the greatest headroom to grow. But it’s also a space in which the cola giant is a challenger brand fighting for consideration against coffee, energy drinks, sweetened tea, and other sparkling drinks.

Given our high awareness / low salience in breaks occasions, we needed to go beyond big FMCG brands’ tried-and-tested mass reach + social amplification + in-store display communications model to increase breaktime consumption.

Coca-Cola needed to build an instant association between Coke’s energizing refreshment and uplifting breaks in young people’s minds.

Most young people sip on a drink while scrolling social feeds during the afternoon slump. Hence, social media between 2pm and 4pm was the perfect place for Coca-Cola to advertise its breaks campaign.

But we wanted to go beyond ad impressions to acts that made a BIG impression in order to drive a step chance in salience for Coke.

As we brainstormed how to vividly demonstrate an uplifting Coke break, we realized:

You know who REALLY needs a break? Anyone who never gets to take one.

This simple human truth led us to focus on…famous icons and landmarks in the country’s digital and physical landscape. They’ve been on duty for decades – even centuries – AND are instantly recognizable.

If we could show these figures being refreshed by Coke, our message would spread far and wide. We decided to give China’s hardest working icons the chance to take it easy.

We gave China’s famous digital and physical icons a refreshing Coke break in FIRST-EVER activations that surprised and delighted consumers during their own afternoon breaktimes.

Our ICONIC breaks campaign had three strategic pillars of success:

• FAMOUS CULTURAL FIXTURES: We chose hard-working ‘talent’ that were instantly recognizable to our Gen Z audience.

• GEN Z BREAK RELEVANCE: 80% of Chinese Gen Z open Douyin (Tiktok) and Weibo to take a digital break, so we activated on these platforms to reach consumers during the moment of truth.

• FROM STUNT TO SALES: We closed the gap between association and action by driving digital users to our CRM hub where they could grab a Coke coupon and intercepting city walkers with pop-up Coke Break zones.

As no brand had ever pulled off stunts like these before in China, we got consumers buzzing on social media and reaching for a Coca-Cola during breaktime!

One Thursday afternoon, as 260M Weibo users opened the app to browse, they weren’t greeted by the classic eye logo but by a drowsy, half-closed eye.

A bottle of bubbly Coca-Cola soon appeared asking “do you need a break?” and turned Weibo’s eye wide awake!

People were shocked: “For a moment, I thought Weibo was hacked LOL…then I actually got up and bought a Coke at the canteen!”.

A few weeks later, an AI-generated video of Chengdu’s iconic panda statue drinking a Coke and breakdancing went viral.

Shanghai’s landmark Wukang Building was soon captured grooving, too, and consumers started posting their own videos copying the dance moves.

Our Weibo stunt led consumers to claim a coupon via Coke’s CRM hub and we launched offline ‘break zones’ around the landmarks.

Coca-Cola was the first-ever brand to use Weibo’s logo as our campaign reinvented the concepts of ‘talent’, ‘content’, and ‘media placement’.

Coke gave China’s iconic figures a refreshing break going viral across social media and changing the brand’s position.

We achieved 1 billion impressions and 5.4 million engagements across the three activations smashing our previous records.

We attracted widespread earned media coverage valued at over $1.4M with top marketing publication SocialBeta commenting “this is one of the best campaign stunts in years” and Forbes writing “Coca-Cola made me want to grab a chilled Coke when out for a city walk.”

Our ‘only-Coke-could-do’ activations also built Coca-Cola’s uplifting brand edge amongst our critical Gen Z (age 13 to 29) audience as measured by pre- vs. post-campaign tracking:

· Meets my needs: +10.8%

· Helps me to keep going: +14.5%

· Sets Trends: +12.7%

As more consumers reached for a Coke during breaks, we outsold our cola competition by 40% and grew share by an impressive +1.1points year-on-year during the competitive summer period.