You don't own your brands.

I found this article by the Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer of Coca-Cola and thought that it would be interesting to share.

I found the article through someone that I follow on Twitter, and his preview of the article was:
"Accept that you don't own your brands; your consumers do."

In this section, the writer talks about two different things. First, he mentions that Coca-Cola learned that they don't own their brand when they tried to introduce the New Coke in 1985. This is an interesting piece of information especially if we think about all of the other companies who didn't learn from Coke's mistake. The Gap, for example, angered customers with their logo change recently, and almost immediately went back to what they already had.

But what I think is more interesting is that the paragraph goes on to explain that Coca-Cola's Facebook page, which has more than 25 million fans, was NOT started by Coca-Cola. As the author says, "a decade ago, a company like ours would have sent a 'cease and desist' letter from our lawyer" but instead they now work with the original founders of the page to create new content. I think that's great! I doubt the people who started it were trying to make money (although, that does happen too, with people buying up domain names and then selling them to big companies for profit). They were just Coca-Cola fans who got on the Facebook bandwagon before big companies like Coca-Cola realized that they could really be a huge asset to the brand. I'm glad that Coke didn't make them stop, but instead embraced that their customers truly do understand the brand (perhaps even better than the people branding it) and allowed them to continue.


Although this piece of advice about not owning your own brand is really interesting, especially for an advertising class, the rest of the article is definitely worth reading also. It talks about how we must evolve with the customers and learn to adapt to new ways of running a brand.