Coca-Cola doesn’t want Coke Zero Sugar to become the new Coke but it’s banking on it to boost sales

It’s a big bet, but one that Coca-Cola desperately needs. Coca-Cola's sales fell for the fourth straight quarter in April as demand for its products fell in Europe.

Speaking to The Drum Bobby Brittain, Coca-Cola GB marketing director, told The Drum that Coke Zero Sugar provides “the most exciting” growth opportunity to help it realise its ambitions of raising the percentage of sales of its no sugar products to 50 per cent by 2020.

“In order to realise our ambition in having half of the cola that we sell being no sugar the way that we do that is by giving a real adrenaline shot to Coke Zero Sugar, that’s the growth opportunity.

“The main product for me will always be Coke and I don’t just say that because I drink it every day, I say it because if you look at Coke Zero Sugar we are paying Coke the ultimate compliment, because what we are saying is that Coke Zero Sugar looks more like Coke and tastes more like Coke. We are always using Coke as the benchmark, both in terms of the brand and the product, and that is what we aspire for all of the brands under the Coke trademark to be like.”

Currently Coke Zero Sugar is roughly a fifth of the size of Diet Coke and a seventh of Coke in terms of sales, with Brittain estimating that a year out from now sales of the product, and its awareness, will have increased “significantly” thanks to the current adrenaline shot.

Elsewhere, Coca-Cola is changing the way it creates content for platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat and is increasingly bringing them in to the development of campaign ideas rather than “instructing Mediacom to say, ‘right that is our spend, that’s the content, now go and make it happen’”.

For example, over Christmas last year Coca-Cola worked with Snapchat on a campaign and worked with the app right from the beginning of the idea, something Brittain said is important in the digital space where “real research and knowledge” is scarce.

“Snapchat a really good example of a business that said let’s work on this together, let’s set some clear KPIs and we were delighted with the process and the results. So there is no question, we are working increasingly with businesses that do not assume they know everything, particularly in a digital space where transparency and real research and knowledge is pretty scarce. The more that we can collaborate on learning together the better.”