With the avid and loyal fanbase Diet Coke has, we knew that our super fans were in a club of their own. We needed to recognize and reward them beyond just responding to them on social with messages like, “we love you too!” To really make the relationship they have with us official, our goal was to legitimize their superior fandom and reward them for their undivided love and passion for the brand. Because when was the last time a brand just did something for its loyalists without asking for anything in return?
2020 proved that our super fans are in a club all their own, so in 2021 we made it official with the creation of Club Diet Coke. Our intention and execution were simple: identify our top-tier fans and create a community for them to come together and rep their brand enthusiasm. During the summer, we teased the club on Twitter and sent a handful of our most engaged community members branded kits for them to share UGC of, in advance of the launch. All we needed to launch? A single tweet. Engagement spiked and our DMs exploded as everyone expressed desire for Diet Coke VIP status.
We launched with kits and a digital extension to give even more fans VIP status, and we kept the momentum by extending Club Diet Coke to our community on Instagram, too. The summer launch left our loyalists eager for more Club Diet Coke, so we launched a limited holiday edition kit on Cyber Monday, the biggest digital shopping event of the year. The holiday surprise and delight kits came packed with an exclusive welcome card, a members-only holiday sweater and beanie, a mug, and other goodies to get them through the holiday season. Using a phased approach, we teased the seasonal invite across our owned channels to spark interest from Diet Coke fans before following up with an official launch, kits, a digital S+D extension, a call for user-generated content, and a New Years Eve post with all of the Club Diet Coke items.
We sent over 600 besties a physical or digital holiday S&D. We received over 4k inbound messages with sentiment being 95% favorable. Our Club Diet Coke Instagram stories received 2x the view of our always-on story content and we had ~1k engagements on each IG story sticker. By garnering over 474k organic impressions and 15k+ engagements the Club Diet Coke content was among the best performing organic content in 2021.
