OK Soda

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File:OK Soda - logo.gif
The minimalist OK Soda logo

OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1994 that aggressively courted the Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including unenthusiastic endorsements and even outright negative publicity. It did not sell well in select test markets and was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nation-wide distribution. Their slogan was "Things are going to be OK."

History

In 1993, Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta rehired Sergio Zyman to be the chief of marketing for all Coca-Cola beverage brands, a surprising choice given that Zyman had worked closely with the New Coke campaign, the largest advertising failure in Coke's history. However, after revamping the can design and print advertising campaigns for Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Classic with great success, Zyman was given free reign to design new products with aggressive, offbeat marketing campaigns.

International market research done by The Coca-Cola Company in the late 1980s revealed that "Coke" was the second most recognizable word across all languages in the world. The first word was "OK." Zyman (who also conceived of Fruitopia) decided to take advantage of this existing brand potential and created a soda with this name. He conceived of a counter-intuitive advertising campaign that intentionally targeted people who didn't like advertising. He predicted that the soda would be a huge success, and promised Goizueta that the soda would take at least 4% of the US beverage market.

Incidentally, or perhaps intentionally, "OK" is an anagram of The Coca-Cola Company's NYSE ticker symbol "KO", as well as the middle two letters of "Coke".

Testing

Despite a nationwide advertising campaign and intense media attention, OK Soda was only marketed in select areas, representing different demographic areas during the summer of 1994. This is a common form of marketing research known as "test marketing", in which a product is launched on a small-scale to determine the likely acceptance of the product when it is introduced to the wider market. Some of the testing locations were:

Most soda drinkers found the taste blandly unappealing, and OK Soda never captured more than 3% of the beverage market in any of the target locations, failing to match Zyman's hype. The project was cancelled by Coca-Cola just seven months after its kickoff, and the soda was never widely released to the public.

Cult following

After its failure, OK Soda enjoyed a brief cult following on the internet, including the use of a newsgroup at alt.fan.ok-soda, which was fairly active for several years. Fans would reminisce about the offbeat advertising materials, sell merchandise and intact cans, and trade recipes for home-brewed OK Soda facsimiles. It is still referenced in hipster crowds as an example of large corporations attempting to connect with youth markets and failing; online editorial magazines such as The Baffler and suck.com would reference the drink and marketing campaign well after its demise. The merchandise, cans and advertising material can still be found readily on eBay.

Minneapolis punk band Dillinger Four performed a song called Smells like OK Soda, criticizing the marketing techniques of large corporations.

Marketing

One of the OK Soda can designs; illustrated by Charles Burns

OK Soda has been remembered more for its unique advertising campaign than for its fruity flavor. The name and advertising campaign attempted to poke fun at the "I'm OK, You're OK" pop-psychology of the early-90s. OK Soda was intentionally marketed at the difficult Generation X and Generation Y markets, and attempted to cash in on the group's existing disillusionment and disaffection with standard advertising campaigns; the concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it. Its indirect advertising was a form of rebel advertising similar to the McDonalds commercials for the Arch Deluxe. The campaign was designed by Portland based advertising powerhouse Wieden & Kennedy. Spokespeople for the company and their advertisers were very frank about the fact that they were marketing the drink entirely on the "feeling" rather than the taste.

The general public did not respond to the offbeat campaign, and most critics point out that the campaigning was too overt in its courting of the youth and teen market. Most teenagers surveyed found the campaign "confusing".

800 number and TV ads

In addition to regular video and print advertisements, OK Soda had several 800 numbers (1–800–I–FEEL–OK and 1–800–4–OK–SODA) that you could call and leave messages with the disclaimer "your comments may be used in advertising or exploited in some other way we haven't figured out yet". They also had TV advertisements with messages ostensibly left on this answering machine, with mildly enthusiastic responses, off-topic messages and even angry tirades against the advertising campaign. One of the more famous television ads featured the message: "Ah, this is Pam H. from Newton, Massachusetts, and I resent you saying that everything is going to be O.K. You don't know anything about my life. You don't know what I've been through in the last month. I really resent it. I'm tired of you people trying to tell me things that you don't have any idea about. I resent it. ((Click!))". The hotline received millions of calls from curious teenagers, but ultimately did little to actually promote the sale of the soda.

Can design

Both the cans and the print advertisements for the soda featured work by popular Fantagraphics illustrators Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, known for their low-key and blandly realistic style. Unlike the brightly colored Coca-Cola cans, they were decorated in drab shades of grey, with occasions of red text. In addition to the primarily two-tone illustrations, the cans would feature a special code that could be entered at the given 800 number as well as a "Coincidence", which was usually some odd bit of trivia about some town in the United States. They would also sometimes contain messages from the OK Manifesto, which was a series of platitudes about OK-Ness, pithy thought-reform sayings with no real meaning, much in the style of doublespeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, mocking traditional advertisement slogans or catch-phrases.

Manifesto

Excerpts from the OK Soda manifesto were printed on the cans, and were also available for a short while on their website. Some of the sayings were:

  1. What's the point of OK? Well, what's the point of anything?
  2. OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is.
  3. The better you understand something, the more OK it turns out to be.
  4. OK Soda says, "Don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything."
  5. OK Soda reveals the surprising truth about people and situations.
  6. OK Soda does not subscribe to any religion, or endorse any political party, or do anything other than feel OK.
  7. There is no real secret to feeling OK.
  8. OK Soda may be the preferred drink of other people such as yourself.
  9. Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of "OK" brand soda.
  10. Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK.

Backlash

Many artists were particularly irritated by the hypocrisy of anti-corporate sentiment in advertisements for a product distributed by The Coca-Cola Company. They felt that the existing post-grunge art movement was being exploited for corporate gain. Obey Giant creator Shepard Fairey noted that the color scheme and font were strikingly similar to his signature "Obey" stickers which were catching on at the time and made it his personal mission to sabotage the advertising campaign in Providence, Rhode Island. He made several custom-sized posters that said "AG" instead of "OK", and plastered them over all of the ads he could find.

Composition and taste

OK Soda had a more "citric" taste than traditional colas. Reviewers described the taste of OK Soda as a combination of orange soda and flat Coca-Cola, and other reviewers ackowledged that the soda was "slightly spicy". In contrast to earlier beverages from the 1980s that are also noted for their marketing campaigns, such as Jolt and Red Bull, OK Soda did not emphasize the amount of caffeine in the product. A 12-ounce serving of OK Soda had only 40.5 milligrams of caffeine, a slightly lower amount than that of Coca-Cola (45.6).

Many OK Soda fans have attempted to recreate the taste of OK Soda from memory. Though the actual formula is unknown, a generally accepted recipe for the approximate taste is:

  • ¼ orange soda
  • ¾ semi-flat Coca-Cola
  • a splash of Dr. Pepper

References

  • Greising, David (1998). I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke: The Life and Leadership of Roberto Goizueta. The Big Brand Machine, pp. 233-235. New York: Wiley. ISBN 0471345946.
  • Pendegrast, Mark (2000). For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. Global Fizz, pp. 400-403. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0465054684.
  • Zyman, Sergio (2000). The End of Marketing as We Know It. Marketing is Science, pp. 47-49. New York: HarperBusiness. ISBN 0887309836.


See also

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