A brand reading
Coca-Cola.
Innocent A world in harmony.
Coke’s longest-running brand idea is that it produces, at the moment of consumption, a sensation of universal goodness. The product is incidental; the feeling is the brand. The 1971 Hilltop spot is the Innocent at its most expansive.
The five-layer reading.
- 01 Motivation
- Innocent. A world in harmony.
- 02 Mind
- ESFJ
- 03 Temperament
- Sanguine
- 04 Persuasion
- Pathos
- 05 Expression
- Expressed (occasionally distorted)
Warm, optimistic, universalist. Argues by feeling. Distorts when it overpromises (the multiple New Coke and global-harmony missteps over the decades).
Famous spot
Hilltop / I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke, 1971