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Coke Studio (Pakistan)
pop music
by Umair Naeem
August 25, 2008
Coca-Cola has always been a brand associated with youth and exuberance, surrounded by a positive contemporary outlook on life. The marketers behind it must have continued to do something right, as Coke remains arguably one of the most well known brands in the world.
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In Pakistan, however, Coca-Cola has had to play catch-up with Pepsi, which has dominated the beverage industry by capitalizing on the strategic and influential platforms of popular music and the sport of cricket. In recent times though, Coke has made great headway with creative campaigns. Hot on the heels of its successful "Brrrrr" campaign, featuring the likes of Zainab Qayyum (a.k.a. ZQ) and Adeel Hashmi, came Coke Studio: a series of made-for-TV studio sessions featuring the best of Pakistan’s rock stars and classical musicians.
Coke Studio promised a fusion of classical eastern and contemporary western music, and delivered it through four hour-long fortnightly episodes, which went on air at prime time, simultaneously on nearly eleven satellite channels as well as selected cable channels and FM radio channels. Through its unique style and nationwide command over airtime, the campaign created a great stir, and the production was unanimously well received by music enthusiasts.
The website for Coke Studio ties in very nicely with the media campaign behind it, and is one of the better examples of integrating website content into a 360-degree marketing effort leveraged in Pakistan. Enter the website and visitors are met with a maroon background color that is just so "Coke," in addition to visuals that are reminiscent of the atmosphere in the studio sessions. The home page is a nicely balanced blend of easy to load Flash visuals and simple to access content. Aesthetically, the website has a blog-like feel to it (as it uses the Wordpress platform) but it remains easy on the eye, and has a uniform coherent feel.
By continuing to click through the website's well-orchestrated and easily navigable links, guests can access content from the various recording sessions and all four episodes of the Coke Studio sessions. Everything that fans could want is available, from wallpapers and photographs, to videos and audio recordings of all the different performances—all of which are downloadable. The latter fact is something to appreciate, as Coke seems to be relying more on the online accessibility of the music content rather than releasing a future CD/DVD and making money from it.
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Coke Studio Online caters to just about everything a visitor would want. It offers an RSS facility and also allows visitors to leave comments and find out about air times, artists and the concepts behind the shows. But in its simplicity, it misses out on a few things that could have made it a truly complete website. For one thing, there are no live discussion forums. This is something that could have considerably increased fan base enthusiasm and traffic for the site. It appears the developers left this important function to Facebook, as the website features a link for Coke Studio's Facebook group.
A second revelation that strikes visitors upon navigating around the Coke Studio website is that the developers did not really think about value addition. For example, the Artists page has names and photos of all the performers, but no biographical information or further links. The News page only offers air times, and surprisingly neglects to provide news of upcoming events or seasons. This is something that leaves the visitor uninformed and a bit frustrated.
It is clear, however, that Coke Studio is a simple yet effective undertaking that not only showcases a fusion of different styles of music, but also a marriage of ATL broadcasts with effective online content. But the best thing about the website is that it stays true to the popular Coke Studio broadcasts by offering quality music content, and shies away from the allure of being glitzy and obsessing with itself—instead, the website addresses the interests of prospective and current consumers.
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Umair Naeem has an MBA in Marketing from IBA Karachi, and currently works with a leading Multinational FMCG Company in Pakistan. He is also an Editor with CIO Pakistan as well as being a columnist on e-Pakistan for Netxpress Online.
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*Due to the constantly changing environment of websites, some reviews may no longer reflect the current website for this brand.
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