---
title: "Salty and Sweet: The Self-Cultivation of a Good Brand"
description: "In early 2016, Coca-Cola announced a major brand upgrade campaign, unveiling the 48th slogan in its history: \"Taste the feeling\" (Chinese: 这感觉够爽). This replaced \"Open Happiness\" (Chinese: 畅爽开怀), which had been used since 2009. While the Chinese versions are similar, the English reveals a shift in Coca-Cola's appeal: Open Happiness targeted psychological experience and emotion, while Taste the feeling targets sensory experience and taste directly."
author: "空手"
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published: "2019-03-28"
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---

# Salty and Sweet: The Self-Cultivation of a Good Brand

> In early 2016, Coca-Cola announced a major brand upgrade campaign, unveiling the 48th slogan in its history: "Taste the feeling" (Chinese: 这感觉够爽). This replaced "Open Happiness" (Chinese: 畅爽开怀), which had been used since 2009. While the Chinese versions are similar, the English reveals a shift in Coca-Cola's appeal: Open Happiness targeted psychological experience and emotion, while Taste the feeling targets sensory experience and taste directly.

In early 2016, Coca-Cola announced a major brand upgrade campaign, unveiling the 48th slogan in its history: "Taste the feeling" (Chinese: 这感觉够爽).
This slogan replaced "Open Happiness" (Chinese: 畅爽开怀), which had been used since 2009.
Although the Chinese versions of these two slogans are similar, both about "爽" (refreshing), looking at the English reveals a shift in Coca-Cola's appeal: **Open Happiness points to a psychological experience, focusing on emotion. Taste the feeling, on the other hand, is a sensory experience, directly appealing to taste.**
Seeing this slogan, I imagined the inner thoughts of Coca-Cola's client side:
"You guys are always complaining that Coke is high in sugar and unhealthy, but I taste great. Who can resist that feeling? Quick, Taste the feeling!"
Facing the major trend of health, Coca-Cola indeed faces the severe challenge of a declining market share. In the face of people's health concerns, appealing to happiness or joy (Happiness) at this point is indeed like scratching an itch through a boot—weak and ineffective.
So Coke directly said: "Although I'm not healthy, I taste great." This is about choosing between long-term benefits or immediate gratification. People are more easily moved by immediate, tangible benefits than by rational persuasion.
Taste the feeling is more fundamental, hitting people's sensory and physiological needs. This phrase evokes thoughts of addiction to Coke, of being unable to resist.
In my opinion, this is a "salty" slogan.
**A good brand should first be like salt, becoming a necessity of life, having a strong presence in people's lives.**
Open Happiness, on the other hand, is a "sweet" slogan.
It targets people's psychological and emotional needs, creating a sense of sharing and enjoying美好 moments with Coke, representing a wonderful brand image and lifestyle.
**Salty and sweet—this is the self-cultivation of a good brand.**
**A good brand should first be like salt, becoming a necessity in users' lives.** The salty style means more direct consumption stimulation, especially maximizing stimulation at the physiological and sensory levels, making users have strong impulses and urgent purchase needs.
We know salt is essential for life. But you may not know that salt influences the way our tongues taste food; salt greatly stimulates the senses. This can be said to be the biggest secret of the modern food industry.
Salt can enhance the appeal of almost all foods, make sugar taste sweeter, make cookies crispier, delay food spoilage, and mask off-flavors from additives. Even foods that don't need to be salty taste better with salt. Low sodium is unacceptable to food manufacturers. Because without salt, there's no flavor; without flavor, there's no sales.
Cargill, the US food industry giant with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars, specializes in producing salt for food manufacturers. Their latest invention, a tetrahedral pyramid-shaped crystalline salt, dissolves three times faster than regular salt due to its unique shape, maximizing contact with saliva in the mouth. Thus, it delivers saltiness to the brain faster and more intensely.
When marketing this salt to food manufacturers, Cargill calls it a "taste explosion." This is one of the reasons we love junk food.
In fact, not only in food and beverage formulations, but also in their advertisements, they often focus on sensory stimulation and hedonism.
In Pizza Hut ads, the stretchy cheese strings when you pick up a slice. In Coke ads, the slight fizz when the drink is poured over ice. The foam and bubbles in beer ads. All these are part of sensory stimulation.
**For food advertising, the first principle is always to make the food in the ad look tempting, full of appetite appeal, so that consumers want to eat the poster itself after seeing it.**
JDB's ads always open with a hot pot scene, with red oil and chili boiling and churning in the pot, while people sweat from the spiciness and drink JDB to cool down.
This anxiety about getting heaty from the red oil and the relief of drinking herbal tea creates a sensory explosion in consumers' minds, providing excellent consumption stimulation.
Especially for unhealthy food and beverages, the advertising appeals often emphasize instant gratification, directly stimulating your consumption desire and masking any guilt about health.
For example, Harbin Beer's "一起哈啤" (Let's beer together), Carlsberg's "不准不开心" (No being unhappy), Skittles' "玩味无限" (Endless fun), and Quaker's "一定吃到逗" (Definitely funny).
These ads are like salt, trying to stimulate your brain faster and more intensely. Beyond direct sensory temptation, more brands emphasize finding users' "pain points" and creating "rigid demand."
**What does that mean? It means your brand must directly face users' problems. Either tell users what problems your brand can solve, or remind users that if you don't buy, you'll face problems in life.**
This problem-awareness is another form of salty advertising. Look at Snickers' series of ads, which use exaggerated methods to remind you that when you're hungry, you'll do anything. "Hungry? Grab a Snickers."
If a brand doesn't directly address problems and its product benefits are irrelevant, users will feel it's optional, no different from existing products.
Today, many companies build brands without focusing on the product. They make an ordinary product and pin their hopes on price and channels, especially on packaging and marketing, hoping that advertising will drive purchases. This is very difficult.
**Building a brand, first and foremost, is about providing timely help (雪中送炭), creating urgent needs, and maximizing sensory satisfaction. Then comes icing on the cake (锦上添花). A brand that can only add icing but not provide timely help is destined to be short-lived.**
Solving pain points is like providing timely help; it directly hits users' senses, directly addresses their problems, and provides the most direct consumption stimulation. This is the salty style.
But too much salt becomes monotonous and boring, so we need some sweetness.
For years, Oreo has held the top spot in global sales by educating consumers on the "Twist, Lick, Dunk" ritual and strongly pairing with milk.
But in recent years, Oreo has started to decline. The twist-lick-dunk no longer resonates with consumers; the ad scenes are repetitive, always showing warm, bright middle-class dining tables, happy families, Oreo cookies, and glasses of milk...
So Oreo changed its brand proposition to "Play Together" and started to let loose.
Oreo began launching various weird flavors, like popping candy and marshmallow, and encouraged fans to brainstorm new flavors.
The more famous marketing campaign was the Oreo music box, where the cookie acts as a record; placing it on the box plays music, and taking a bite changes the song.
This revitalized Oreo. Oreo is no longer a monotonous cookie but a fun, interesting, and distinctive brand that can play together with consumers.
No brand can capture consumers through year-after-year brainwashing ads. Brainwashing ads can only make consumers remember you, nothing else. Constant stimulation will make users bored, especially today, when fickle consumers always get aesthetic fatigue with brands.
**A successful brand must not only be a necessity for users but also make them feel the brand's beauty, and evoke richer associations and experiences when they think of the brand. Only then can it firmly grasp users.**
So the most successful brands are always associated with social status, psychological superiority, ideal self-image, beautiful emotional experiences, and upper-class lifestyles. Beyond physical functions, they paint a big picture for users, satisfying their virtual desires. This is the sweet style.
The world isn't limited to Starbucks for quality coffee. What truly sets Starbucks apart? It's the brand philosophy Starbucks has upheld for 40 years: to inspire the human spirit.
Starbucks' design philosophy is that when you taste a cup of coffee, the music you hear, the sofa you sit on, the furniture in the store, the paintings on the walls, and the small talk with the barista—all are meant to create a comfortable coffee experience, allowing you to better connect with others and think. This is what distinguishes Starbucks from other coffee brands, making it the "third place" beyond home and work.
Similarly, Heytea's current slogan is also "一杯喜茶激发一份灵感" (A cup of Heytea inspires inspiration), whereas before they printed on cups "喜茶是芝士奶盖茶的首创者" (Heytea is the pioneer of cheese milk cap tea).
Do you need to queue 2 hours for a cup of milk tea? You don't need to, but you want to. In a sense, the advertising industry is the dream-making industry. It sells a promise to consumers: after owning my product, you will become more beautiful, smarter, stronger, more interesting, more charming, more tasteful...
In a word, after owning my product, your life will be better, your life will be more complete. This is a sweet temptation.
**Salt is instant stimulation; sweet is long-term satisfaction.**
**Salt creates need; sweet creates want.**
**Salt is direct and rough; sweet is a sugar-coated bullet.**
Often, a brand's communication swings between these two dimensions, appealing to the salty style for two years, then the sweet style for two years, thus continuously capturing consumers.
Looking at the 48 slogans in Coke's history, we can see that **Coke is actually alternating between sensory stimulation and emotional selling.**
> Salty style—
>
> Delicious and Refreshing (1904), Thirst Knows No Season (1922), Enjoy Thirst (1923), The Pause that Refreshes (1929), Ice Cold Sunshine (1932)
> Sweet style—
>
> Where There's Coke There's Hospitality (1948), Sign of Good Taste (1957), Things Go Better With Coke (1963), It's the Real Thing (1969), Have a Coke and a Smile (1979), You Can't Beat the Real Thing (1990), Make It Real (2005)
Coke talks to you about Delicious, Refresh, Thirst, Ice Cold... directly hitting your senses, directly addressing your problems, making you more dependent and sticky on Coke, making it a necessity of life.
On the other hand, Coke also creates a wonderful atmosphere and experience through ads, emphasizing Coke's Hospitality, Smile, Real, and Happiness, evoking beautiful associations and emotional connections with Coke.
This is being salty and sweet.
Source: 空手 (ID: firesteal13)
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