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Some marketing experts are convinced that playing off this generation's angst is the wrong way in. "There's so much negativity around them, there are so many things to be bummed out about that they don't necessarily want to be reminded of that stuff," says one ad executive who spent the past 18 years studying adolescents. "Whether it's on the conscious or unconscious level, people are pushed away from it."
Coke argues that its understanding of teens is based on years of study, including the two-year Global Teenager program that employed graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The OK campaign is only the company's latest effort to extend its dominance over the world teen market: earlier this year, Coke launched its highly successful "Obey Your Thirst" campaign for Sprite, which also pointedly refuses to overpromise by suggesting that the drink will not produce beautiful women or athletic victories but only relieve a dry throat.
Even though Coca-Cola's soft drinks outsell those of its main rival, Pepsi, by more than 2 to 1 around the globe and Coke is the most popular single drink with teenagers, the company still wants to beef up its presence in carbonated drinks aimed specifically at teens. Pepsi's Mountain Dew, the most popular such beverage, owns 3.5% of the U.S. soft-drink market, compared with just 0.3% for Coke's citrus counterpart, Mello Yello. "Coke is trying to take it all," says Larry Jabbonsky, editor of the trade journal Beverage World. "Traditionally, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have allowed smaller players to be the product innovators. Now Coke is becoming an innovator too."
The OK campaign was fine-tuned during a year of field study that confirmed Coke's impression that the current crop of teens suffer, along with their twentysomething elders, from an acute sense of diminished expectations. Like many other researchers, Coke saw that teens were concerned about violence, aids and getting jobs, all of which heightened their typical adolescent anxieties. "Economic prosperity is less available than it was for their parents. Even traditional rites of passage, such as sex, are fraught with life-or-death consequences," says Lanahan.
Armed with its findings, Coke set out to address the very real problems that teens face without seeming, on the surface at least, to exploit them. The OK trademark struck company marketers as the ideal solution. "It underpromises," says Lanahan. "It doesn't say, 'This is the next great thing.' It's the flip side of overclaiming, which is what teens perceive a lot of brands do." At the same time, the OK theme attempts to play into the sense of optimism that this generation retains. ("OK-ness," says a campaign slogan, "is the belief that, no matter what, things are going to be OK.") Nor does it hurt that, according to Coke, O.K. is the most widely known phrase around the world -- followed by Coca-Cola.
All the rest of the campaign flows naturally from this studiedly unstudied, I'm-O.K.-you're-O.K. conceit. The same low-key approach animates the print and TV ads that Coke is rolling out in test markets this week. The major innovations in this battle for the teens: