This article was first published on the Dedao app's "Shao Heng Headlines" and is an interview with me by Shao Heng. The following content has some structural adjustments from the original, but the main content is exactly the same. Here is the full text:
To celebrate the 134th anniversary of the Coca-Cola brand, Coca-Cola officially released its new brand font "Zaihu Ti" on May 8, 2020. This font was inspired by the early trademark fonts used in the Chinese market and is free for personal and non-commercial use.
Creating a brand's own font is not new. Tencent released its own font in 2017, and last year Alibaba and Xiaomi launched Alibaba普惠体 and Xiaomi Milan Ting respectively. Alibaba also announced that its font is completely free for personal and commercial use. Many brands have launched fonts, so why is Coca-Cola's font more noteworthy? Because in Coca-Cola's 130+ year history, this is a common and very effective brand marketing "routine" for Coca-Cola.
Before understanding Coca-Cola's marketing routine, let's first understand a concept: "brand equity." The concept of brand equity was proposed by Kevin Lane Keller in "Strategic Brand Management," which I am leading. Simply put: brand equity is the customer's cognition of the brand that exists in their mind, and these cognitions bring positive benefits to the brand.
For example, the unique design of Coca-Cola's trademark is a specific brand cognition. When customers are very familiar with this trademark, they tend to choose Coca-Cola when buying beverages. This is known in psychology as the mere exposure effect (the more you see something, the more familiar it becomes, and the more you like it).
Another example: Coca-Cola consistently displays feelings like "refreshing" and "happiness" in its communications, which are transmitted to customers' impressions, forming emotional cognition. When customers like these feelings, they also like Coca-Cola more and are more inclined to buy it.
What Coca-Cola has been best at over the years is continuously creating its own long-term brand assets. These assets, easily recognized by customers, are rarely changed. Whether it's today's young people, their parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents, the Coca-Cola they see is almost the same.
Compared to brands that constantly change, Coca-Cola's brand assets seem to have been secretly sealed in the world's safest bank vault by the company, untouched for decades.
When we talk about marketing, we often advocate innovation, but in terms of brand assets, "conservatism" is the best way to maintain assets. Because we maintain brands hoping our brand assets will appreciate. If your assets keep changing, not only will they not appreciate, but past assets will be cleared, making it hard to accumulate brand equity.
So you'll find that Coca-Cola's font design has been like this for over 100 years, and even the Chinese font design evolved from the English font design. Coca-Cola has many such assets that have remained unchanged for decades.
Today, I'll organize for you what long-term brand assets Coca-Cola has accumulated over the years.
1. Coca-Cola Logo
Coca-Cola's logo is its English name. According to Coca-Cola's official website, "Coca-Cola" was proposed by Frank M. Robinson, a partner of founder John S. Pemberton. Robinson, a classical calligrapher, thought "two large C's would look great in advertising," so he tried writing "Coca-Cola" in the then-popular Spencerian script. That's the origin of Coca-Cola's initial logo.
Comparing the earliest Spencerian script logo with the current one, you'll find not much difference. It's like looking at humans from 10,000 years ago—though slightly different, we can still tell it's a human at a glance. Below is the Coca-Cola logo from around 1887.
In 1890, Coca-Cola made a major logo change, but it was short-lived; the new logo was used for only a year before reverting.
In the 1920s, Coca-Cola entered the Chinese market and re-entered in 1979 after the founding of New China. At that time, Coca-Cola kept the English font design, but the Chinese "可口可乐" font used a style similar to today's "Zaihu Ti." Later, to maintain brand asset consistency, Coca-Cola invited renowned Hong Kong designer Alan Chan in 2003 to design the Chinese trademark font used to this day.
It can be said that Coca-Cola's brand assets are globalized. Its English trademark is consistent worldwide, and local language trademark designs try to adopt a style consistent with the English trademark. This brand asset has almost never changed, ensuring a unified and constant cognition in customers' minds.
Moreover, Coca-Cola never makes its logo small for the sake of being "cool." The logo on cans is prominent, ensuring more people see it more often.
2. Coca-Cola Contour Bottle
Among Coca-Cola's ubiquitous brand assets, its patented contour bottle is second only to its trademark in recognition. How important is this bottle? Even though glass bottles are now rare, the contour bottle shape still appears on Coca-Cola packaging and ads, like on cans. I've seen comments online about Zaihu Ti, saying it's not great calligraphy. But branding is not calligraphy or art; it's about accumulating unique brand assets. You can say Zaihu Ti's artistic achievement is low, but its brand recognition and uniqueness are very high. This recognition and uniqueness are Coca-Cola's secret to creating brand assets, and the contour bottle design is a perfect example.
In the early 19th century, Coca-Cola's huge success led competitors to imitate it. They made slight variations of the name and logo and put them on bottles, similar to what's happening in China today. Facing many counterfeit products, Coca-Cola worked with bottlers and asked glassmakers to submit new bottle designs: the bottle must be unique, recognizable as Coca-Cola even by touch in the dark, and even identifiable from broken fragments on the ground. In 1915, the now-famous contour bottle was designed and patented by the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana.
This contour bottle was slightly different from today's, but by 1923, a six-pack poster shows a bottle almost identical to today's. Brand equity is customer cognition. A 1949 survey showed over 99% of Americans could identify Coca-Cola by the bottle's shape alone, showing the strength of Coca-Cola's brand equity. In 1950, the unique contour bottle appeared on the cover of Time magazine, becoming the first commercial product on that cover, cementing Coca-Cola's international brand status.
An interesting anecdote: Time originally planned to use then-CEO Robert Woodruff's photo for the cover, but he politely declined, believing the brand was more important and should be prominently introduced. So the bottle was featured. This shows Coca-Cola's emphasis on long-term brand assets, as CEOs may change, but the patented contour bottle will be recognized by customers for a long time.
3. Santa Claus
Every Christmas, the red-and-white Santa Claus appears on streets worldwide, but you might not realize this familiar Santa was created by Coca-Cola.
Early Santa images were inconsistent, stemming from various stories from different countries. Santa varied in height, and his clothes were red, green, or even brown. Later, Coca-Cola, for commercial purposes, unified Santa's image worldwide.
The story goes: due to the Great Depression in 1930, Coca-Cola's sales dropped significantly. They wanted to promote during Christmas and used various Santa images, but with little effect.
In 1931, Coca-Cola hired famous advertising illustrator Haddon Sundblom to redesign Santa. Sundblom, drawing on Clement Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and his Scandinavian heritage, depicted a tall, red-clad, cheerful Santa. For over 30 years, Coca-Cola continued using this image.
However, Coca-Cola did not privatize this Santa image; it opened it to any commercial entity. This led to Santa's image spreading worldwide, but also caused a disconnect between Coca-Cola and Santa. Now, almost no one thinks the red-and-white Santa is Coca-Cola's brand image.
Otherwise, Santa might have become Coca-Cola's most classic brand IP and asset, like Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man for Disney. Still, Coca-Cola used this classic Santa image to create a sales boom for 30 years, longer than most brand assets exist.
4. Coca-Cola Zaihu Ti
We've discussed many classic Coca-Cola brand asset cases. The core keywords are: unique, private, long-term.
Coca-Cola's Zaihu Ti font follows the same principle. This font is based on the font used when Coca-Cola entered China in 1979. Many people remember this font because it was used until 2003.
Why design a font? Because fonts are assets that can last over a century, and no matter who uses this font in the future, it advertises Coca-Cola. If this font becomes a classic, it might become a globally known image like Santa Claus.
Even if Coca-Cola opens the font to everyone, it's still called "Coca-Cola Zaihu Ti," and it won't lose its connection to the brand like Santa did.
I heard from Ding Yi, founder of Type is Beautiful, that China's font library is still very small; even Japan's Chinese font library is 6-7 times larger than China's.
At this time, using a classic font to enrich the Chinese font library is relatively early, making it easier to become a classic. Also, as Chinese culture and fonts become popular worldwide, this Chinese font may spread globally with China's influence.
Of course, we can't predict the future trend of this font, but at least we see Coca-Cola's clear strategy in creating brand assets. Even if this attempt fails, it will try again.
Source: 小马宋 (ID: xiaomasong999) Author: 小马宋