Coca Cola revamps variants' packaging with uniform visual iconography

Coca Cola has rolled out its One Brand strategy in India, where all its different variants - Coca-Cola Original Taste, Coca-Cola No Sugar and Coca-Cola Light Taste No Sugar - will have the same values and visual iconography.

All three products will have the legendary red packaging and iconography with a dash of colour to highlight the different options. It will be 90 per cent Coca-Cola and 10 per cent variant.

The idea extends the equity and iconic appeal of Coca-Cola brands to all its variants - One Brand. One set of Product Benefits. One set of Brand Values. One Consumer Promise, said the company's statement.

Over the course of its 130-year history, Coca-Cola has gone all out to position itself as a brand that appeals to all tastes (Diet, Light, Zero etc.). In doing this consumers started celebrating the sub-brand over the mother. This move, though nothing revolutionary, but is a way to shift the brand love back to Coca-Cola, says Hayden Scott, Creative Director of advertising agency Famous Innovations.

For Ashwini Deshpande, Founder Director of design consultancy Elephant Design, this move shows a clear switch to focus on brand iconicism rather than brand promise. She explains, in the earlier Coca Cola Zero, there was a lot of emphasis on the word Zero with its large font size. It is a brands way to communicate directly to the consumers about its promise of offering zero calories. The use of black colour instead of red was a conscious move by the company to play down its iconic brand image and focus on its product offering.

A uniform brand image is also in line with the current trends as businesses are trying to form their strong digital presence. For brands that are spread widely across the globe, it is important to have a similar presence across all its social media pages so there is no dilution of equity. Different brand packaging design can lead consumer to wonder - which one is the real coke? Or, question the reason behind the difference in packaging, says Deshpande. "This will increase the global equity and the iconic appeal of the brand as it is the same image that will be repeated and recognized in the exact same manner across all the shelves of the globe," she adds.

The company has been making this change in other countries such as the US and the UK and had initiated it in India only this year. The new stock has already started to roll out and will be available pan India soon.