Coca-Cola Light needed to regain salience and market share with its core consumers, women 20-44. The key insight was that fashion is not uniquely identified with a name or a brand, but is a whole world of inter-connected styles and distinctive communication codes, made up of persons, attitudes, locations and media. These, in synergy, build the world which appeals so intensely to women.

The strategy, summarised by the claim ‘8 great stylists dress a unique taste’ was designed to celebrate women through fashion: 8 top fashion designers, all women, were asked to contribute with their own Contour bottle sleeve to generate the key theme. This way we launched an event framed in the Milan Fashion week, a party with 600 attendees among stylists, the press and public stakeholders; where woman-sized bottle models ‘walked’ a life-size catwalk. The bottles became collectibles auctioned by Sotheby’s, display material for OOH and top window shops, design for limited edition productions, and the subject of TV/Print campaign.

1Mio contour bottles were sold during the Milan Fashion Week in the PoS activations, and over 50,000 full-body sleeves in one week at the customised corner at La Rinascente alone. Media covered the launch event with 70 articles in 1 month, with an estimated yield of 48,000,000 impressions. According to Millward Brown trackings, vs. pre-campaign readings, brand awareness and purchase intent were up +10%, while brand attributes ‘It’s a cool product’ and ‘Trend-setting’ gained 30%. Moreover, 100,000 € were collected during the auction in favour of the earthquake victims.

The consumers of CCL were slowly but steadily lapsing. This was mainly due to a positioning which had been growing increasingly unclear, resulting in a loss of saliency and eroding market shares. The opportunity was found in a side activity run for the past 5 years: each year, a fashion stylist was asked to ‘dress’ a bottle with an original sleeve if her design, to be sold in limited editions. This was the perfect way to appeal to the target, and we scaled it up to a fully fledged fashion event, establishing a strong link between Light and top style.