LANGUAGE AND ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT: THE ANALYSIS OF COCA-COLA

ADVERTISEMENT STRATEGY

Arika Silvia Matovani

121711233053

English Department
Faculty of Humanities
Universitas Airlangga

2020
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Advertisement is a powerful tool to promotes a service or a product to the potential

customers and it has been used since the ancient Greek and Roman until this day. The form of
advertisement has been developed over time from traditional advertisement which appears on
television, newspaper, magazine, radio, and poster to online advertisement. Cao (2008)
suggest that the basic characteristic of advertising is to arouse consumers’ attention and
interest towards a product so that consumers would buy the product. Hence, it becomes
important for the advertiser to pay attention to the structure, verbal, and visual features of
their advertisement to persuade the potential customers to buy their products. In addition,
Medawar (1979) stated that advertisement not only persuade people to buys their products, it
also informs, educates, changes attitudes, and builds images, since what is sold is never a
product, but always an idea (Lazovic, 2014:90). From this statement, it could be inferred that
advertisement is more than a tool to promotes a product, in fact, an advertisement always
contains a particular idea.
Coca-cola is a multinational beverage corporation headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Coca-cola has been operated since 1886 and it operates in more than 200 countries all over
the world. This brand aware of the importance of the advertisement to promotes their product,
and it is proven since they produced advertisement since their first production in 1886. Since
then, Coca-cola has produced thousands of advertisements all over the world.

Image 1. The first advertisement of Coca-cola

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

Before internet was massively used by millions of people from all around the world,
Coca-cola promotes their products using traditional advertisement for more than 100 years,
such as, newspaper, radio, television, and so on. Nevertheless, due to the extensive use of
internet, Coca-cola were aware that they need to adapt their method of traditional
advertisement to online advertisement that allows them to engaged even bigger potential
customers. Thus, they use social media, pop-up windows ads, and web ads to promotes their
products.
There are three aims within this study. The first aim is to analyze the effectivenes of
the structural, verbal, and visual characteristics on one of Coca-cola’s online advertisement to
persuade the customers to buy their product. The second aim is to compare Coca-cola’s
traditional and online advertisement to seek out which platform is more effective to attract the
customer’s attention. The third aim is to reveals how Coca-cola able to carry out their
marketing strategy within the online advertisements that is produced in different languages
and cultures.
 CHAPTER II
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

2.1. The Analysis of The Structural, Visual, and Verbal Characteristics of Online
Advertisement

Image 2. Case 1

Source: https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/

The advertisement above was published in 2019 by Coca-cola in United Kingdom,

and it will be used in analyzing the effectivenes of the structural, verbal, and visual
characteristics on Coca-cola’s online advertisement.

2.1.1. The Analysis of The Structure of Coca-cola’s Online Advertisement

Beside trying to identify the structure of case 1, the researcher also trying to analyze
the AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) model within the structure of the case 1. Delin
(2000) stated that there are four standard components that characterize the structure of an
advertisement: headline, body, copy, signature, and slogan (Lindhom, 2007:15).
According to Bovée et al. (1995), the headline is the first and probably the only part of
the advertisement that customers noticed. The main purpose of headlines is to arouse, attract,
and persuade customers to continue reading the entire advertisement and buy what is being
advertised (Vestergaard and Schroder, 1985:58). Hence, headlines need to be catchy and
interesting to be noticed. Not to mention, it is also relevance with AIDA model whereas an
effective advertisement should first draw coustomers’ attention to itself.
In the case 1, the headline is “We’re taking action on sugar” which is located in the
initial part of the advertisement able to capture the customer’s attention since it was written
using the biggest font. The headline indicates that Coca-cola will make some moves regarding
sugar consumption, and this sentence able to arouse the customers’ curiosity regarding the
action that Coca-cola will take. Consequently, the customers are interested to continue
reading the following part. This implied that the headline of this advertisement covers the first
two stages of the AIDA model which is to attract the customers’ attention and make them
interested in reading the whole advertisement.

Image 3. The body copy of case 1

Within this advertisement, the body copy is located below the picture of two coke
cans. Body copy is the main part of the text in an advertisemet. It does the main informative
and persuasive work of the advert and also helps to define the brand’s personality, and to
reinforce the brand values consistently (Lindhom, 2007: 16). Public Health England reports
that English people consumes almost three times the recommended daily sugar intake.
Therefore, Coca-cola tried to promote healty lifestlye by producing products that contain no
sugar. In this advertisement, Coca-cola informs that they already sold 43% of their products
which contains no sugar and they also informs their vision in which they eager to become the
first country that sells more than 50% of no sugar coke. Thus, this advertisement also helps
building the image that Coca-cola is aware with such issue.
This advertisement is also persuasive since Coca-cola implicitly encourage English
people to become the part of this movement by consuming their products which contain no
sugar. Regarding the AIDA model, the body copy of this advertisement covers the desire and
action aspects. This advertisement able to make their products desirable since it promotes a
healthy lifestyle. Consequently, when customers’ desires to live a healty life are aroused, they
will take an action to buy the products that is being advertised.
 Image 4. The signature line and the slogan of case 1

Leech (1996) stated that a signature line in advertisement consists of a brand name or
a logo, and often accompanied by a slogan. The signature line in this advertisement contains
both the brand logo and the brand name, which is Coca-cola that operates in Great Britain.
According to Myers (1994) Coca-cola wanted the brand’s name, logo, and slogan become the
last thing that people read and remember since they placed the signature line in the lower
right hand corner of the advertisement. The signature line in this advertisement also includes
the company’s slogan which is “Taking action on sugar”. Rein (1982) argue that the purpose
of a slogan is to tie together and summarize the essence of what is being advertised. In this
case, the phrase “taking action on sugar” able to summarize the whole advertisement since
this advertisement focuses on how Coca-cola were eager to lessen the amount of sugar
consumption in UK by producing no sugar coke.

2.1.2. The Analysis of The Verbal Characteristic of Coca-cola’s Online

Advertisement

Language has a significant role in an advertisement. It can determine whether people

will buy or use the advertised product. Thus, the advertiser need to pay attention to the
language that is used in the advertisement. The language of this advertisemens reflects the use
of contextual and poetic functions. Contextual function refers to deictic words such as, you,
we, and there. Throughout the advertisment, the words “we” were mentioned several times
and it can be concluded as deictic word. The word “we” according to Myers (1994) is used
for bringing big, impersonal companies closer to public and “producing a sense of solidarity
with the customer or projecting the image of the company as personal. Within this
advertisement, “we” refers to the advertiser, and this word able to bring Coca-cola closer to
public and produce a sense of solidarity with the society in promoting a healty lifestyle.
 Image 5. The repetition within the advertised product

Myers (1994) stated that poetic functions is used to attract customers’ attention by
producing a foregrounding effects to make an advertisement stand out from another
advertisements. One of the example of poetic function is repetition. Repetition occurs when
the same word or words are repeated within a sentence or phrase (Proctor, 2013:7). In this
case, the repetition can be found in the picture of the advertised product which is “no calories,
no sugar”. The word “no” is repeated twice to create an emphasis of the concept of a healthy
lifestyle since the diet coke did not contains any calories and sugar.
There are three sentences within case 1, and all of them are declaratives since the
subjects “we” precedeed the verb “taking, sell, and aim”. Declaratives sentences are normally
associated with statements discource function because the declaratives sentences are usually
used for stating some informations. In this case, all of the declaratives sentences are helpful in
referring to the information that Coca-cola were taking action on the sugar consumption on
UK in 2019 and will continue to keep doing such thing in 2020.
In order to inform the customers and draw their attention, the advertiser needs to
consider the pragmatic aspect of their advertisement, especially the speech acts. Acoording to
Searle (1992), a speech act in linguistics is an utterance that has performative function in
language and communication. There are three acts within speech acts: locutionary,
illocutionary, and per-locutionary act. Illocutionary act is considered as the core of speech act
since it refers to the action performed by the speaker in producing a given utterance. The type
of illocutionary act that is reflected in the last sentence of the body copy is commissive
illocutionary act. Commisive illocutionary act aim to commit the speaker to carry out some
action or to bring about some state of affairs (Arrosid and Munandar, 2018:52). The sentence
“By 2020, we aim to become the first country in the world where more than 50% of the Coca-
cola we sell contains no sugar” indicates commissive illocutionary act whereas Coca-cola
commit to sells more product that contains no sugar in 2020. With that sentence, Coca-cola
assures the customers that they sells diet and zero sugar coke that will cause no harm for the
customers.

2.1.2. The Analysis of The Visual Characteristic of Coca-cola’s Online

Advertisement

Visual appeal had a prominent place in advertising which is used to command

attention, establish a personality for a product, and anchor the brand identity in the target
audience’s mind (Ungure, 2010:1). Hence, it also important for the advertiser to pay attention
to the visual beside the structural and verbal characteristics. Color is very psychological and
can trigger different emotions for human. In advertisement, Coca-cola is famous with its
white scripted text and vibrant red color as the background. Red in marketing portrays power,
excitement, energy, and passion. It also stimulates appetite, which makes it an excellent
choice when branding beverages. The vibrant red in this advertisement also useful to catches
the customers’ attention to take a glance of the advertisement. The combination of red, white,
black, and grey within this advertisement able to create visual interest and make this
advertisement pleases to read. The advertiser also include the image of their products, which
is zero sugar and diet coke. The size of their product’s picture takes more than half portion of
the advertisement which has a better impact on drawing customers’ attention (Amran and
Razak, 2017:94). Since big pictures are hard to miss, Coca-cola purposely uses them as the
attention-grabbing tools to attract customers’ attention.
The combination of the structures, verbal, and visual characteristic in this
advertisement is quite success since the visual of this advertisment able to draw the
customer’s attention and in the same time, the structure as well as the visual characteristic of
this advertisement able to inform their vision to lessen the sugar consumption in UK and
implicitly persuade the potential customers to buy their product and join the movement.
2.2. The Analysis of Coca-cola’s Traditional and Online Advertisement

Image 6. Case 2

Source: Student newspaper of Elon College (September 30,1944)

Image 7. Case 3

Source:https://www.instagram.com/p/B6OYcJxAKNp/?igshid=1kg5p80z00r9q

Bovée (1995) mentioned that before the introduction of radio, television, and print
advertising, newspaper dominate the field of marketing (Lindholm, 2007:8). Consequently,
for more than 100 years, Coca-cola is using traditional advertisement, especially printed
newspaper. However, with the growing number of internet users in the whole world, Coca-
cola also uses online advertisement, such as Instagram to promotes their products. According
to Jolly, Instagram become one of the most effective social media for advertising since it has
more than one billion active users and 58% higher engagement rates than Facebook. Coca-
cola official account itself gains 2,7 million followers on instagram which make Instagram
become an essential platform to promotes their products. In analyzing the best platform for
advertising, this study will uses the table comparison of online and traditional advertisement
by Gao et al.

Image 8.

From the communication style aspect, Instagram enables the advertiser to interact
with the audience by using comment section in the post or the direct message feature which
support direct real time feedback. In the caption of case 2, the advertiser make some
interaction to their followers by asking who they want to visit within the christmast holiday,
and in the two images below which comes from case 2 comment’s section, interaction
between the advertiser and the followers are occured. This is something that newspaper could
not offer since it only enables one-way communication.

Images 9. Comments on the case 3 post

 According to the availability and schedule aspect, Instagram allows the advertiser to
advertise anytime and anywhere. Meanwhile, in newspaper, there is a spesific schedule with a
very short life-span which is one day since what is published today will be old news
tomorrow. Thus, the advertisement should make a good and quick impression, or it will fail.
Regarding the reachable market aspect, Instagram offers broader range of audience since it
has more than 1 billion active users from all around the world while newspaper could only
reach the audience in a specific region. Based on the advertisement targeting aspect,
Instagram also offers the systematic targeting in which an advertisement can be targeted to
spesific age, gender, and even interest while newspaper could not offer such thing.
The advertiser can embed any link with the feature of “swipe up” in Instagram Story
which enables the audience to be re-directed to the product catalogue on their website. On the
other hand, newspaper unable to allow the direct linkage to the product catalogue. For the
advertising tracking aspect, one of the most interesting feature that Instagram offers is
business feature. This feature allows the advertiser to get access to Instagram analaytics
which allows them to see the statistic of; their audiences’ gender, age, location; reach;
impressions; profile visit; and so on. Meanwhile, newspaper as an offline media could not
offer such thing. The most important aspect to be compared is the advertising cost from
instagram and newspaper. The newspaper advertising cost depends on the publication’s
location and circulation size. According to Bourgeois (2013), the cost of newspaper
advertising in USA are vary around $12 until $163,000. The advertising cost on Instagram is
started from $1 for a day which is much cheaper than the newspaper advertising cost. Thus, it
can be inferred that Instagram is more beneficial and effective for the advertiser than
newspaper in promoting their products. The main reason is because Instagram could reach
broader range of customers and it also has lower advertising cost compared to newspaper.
2.2. The Analysis of Coca-cola’s online advertisement across different language and
cultures

Image 10. Case 4

However, when an advertising campaign

is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.

Source: https://m.facebook.com/TheCocaColaCo/

Image 11. Case 5

Source: https://m.facebook.com/cocacolaindonesia/photos/?ref=page_internal&mt_nav=0

Two advertisement above is the part of the same campaign launched in 2011 namely
“Share A Coke”. In this campaign, the customers’ were encouraged to find bottles with their
name or titles, and Coca-cola also encourage them to use the hastag #Shareacoke on social
media. This campaign is considered as one of the most succesful marketing strategy for Coca-
cola since this campaign resulting a 7% increase in sales. This campaign rolled out in over 80
countries, including Indonesia.
Since consumer’s attitudes, awareness, and behavior are driven by culture, thus, when
an advertising campaign is taken abroad, the advertiser should understand the target
audience’s culture, language, and values to persuade them to buy the advertised product
(Retnowati, 2015:341). According to Hill and Winski (1987), Coca-cola commercials are
standardized, but they allows local agencies to adjust and higlight a particular culture. The
advertisements above are different in the term of culture and the use of language, in the case
4, the advertisement is from USA while in case 5, the advertisement is from Indonesia.
Indonesia is a muslim country and according to the cultural dimensions concept by
Hofstede (2011), Indonesia is classified as a family-oriented country and holds collectivist
culture since in Indonesian society, individuals are integrated into cohesive groups, which
includes extended family. In contradiction, American society is individualist, hence, the
individual is the most important elements in any social settings and connection between
individuals are loose (Soelistyarini, 2014:35).

Values
When advertising abroad, the cultural values
underpinning the society must be analyzed
c a r e f u l l y . Is t h e r e a r e l i g i o n t h a t i s p r a c t i c e d
by the majority of the people? Is the society
collectivist or individualist? Is it family oriented?
Is it hierarchical?
Values
When advertising abroad, the cultural values
underpinning the society must be analyzed
c a r e f u l l y . Is t h e r e a r e l i g i o n t h a t i s p r a c t i c e d
by the majority of the people? Is the society
collectivist or individualist? Is it family oriented?
Is it hierarchical?
The advertisements above are from the same campaign but Coca-cola in Indonesia
completely modify the product and the advertisement. In USA, Coca-cola uses a list
containing more than one thousand generic names in USA and put it in their bottle. In this
case, Coca-cola uses individual strategy which correlate with individualistic cultures. By
using this stretegy, Coca-cola able to connects with their customers on a personal level which
makes this campaign gain a massive success in USA.
However, in Indonesia, Coca-cola uses collectivist strategy which correlate with
collestivistic cultures. Thus, they sells the bottles using kinship names such as “father,
mother, brother, and sister” instead of individual’s name. Beside concerning about local
cultures, the advertiser also uses religion aspect to persuade the customers to buy their
products. It can be seen from the sentence “Sampaikan silaturahmi di bulan Ramadhan”.
Ramadhan is a fasting month in Islamic calender when people usually visit each other to
connect their social ties (silaturahmi). Ramadhan is also consider as the month of mercy and
forgiveness, thus, Coca-cola use Indonesian apologize phrase “maaf ya” in the bottle that they
sell.
Although both cases are the part of the same campaign, but with the cultural
differences between Indonesia and America, it also creates a difference in the use of language
in both advertisement. In case 4 the phrase “it’s coming...” according to Lapsanská (2006)
indicates the use of ellipsis which is used to creates an effect of closeness and conversational
tone to the reader, and it also indicates sense of immediacy in which the products will be
launch in near future. However, in case 5, the sentence “Sampaikan silaturahmi di bulan
Ramadhan” is imperative since it suggest a command without using exclamation mark. The
advertiser implicitly command the customers’ to visit each other in Ramadhan and bring their
relatives a bottle of Coca-cola with their kinship name on it. Thus, it can be concluded that
although the campaign is adjusted to Indonesian culture and language, Coca-cola still manage
to create such an effective advertisement that persuade Indonesian people to buy their
products.
 CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION

Coca-cola is one of the most persistent and well-loved brands in the history. They
always rely on advertising to promote their brand, and it makes them one of the longest
surviving brand ever. The result shown that online advertisement offers more benefits than
traditional advertisement since it enables them to reach global audience and it also offers
lower cost than the traditional media. The result also shown that the combination of the
structure, verbal, and visual characteristic within one of their online advertisement is quite
sucessful in informing and enticing the customers’ attention. In addition, Coca-cola also
sucessful in adjusting the same campaign that is used in USA to Indonesian culture and
language. By creating the culturally acceptable advertisement, Coca-cola able to persuade
Indonesian people to buy their products. Thus, it can be concluded that the key of everlasting
brand relies on how well the company use the advertisement as a tool to influence the public
to buy their products.
 However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.
Humaniora, Vol. 27, No. 3 Oktober 2015
342
these developments are not recent, but have roots
in previous historical processes. Eriksen states that
there is only one really new tendency in this period:
globalization becomes the form of consciousness,
and a global discourse and awareness about the
world as a whole emerge ( Eriksen, 2007: 4-5).
The same idea we can nd in Roland
Robertson’s denition of globalization:
“globalization as a concept refers to the
intensi  cation of consciousness of the world as
a whole” (Robertson, 2009: 13). But also there
are scholars, who favor the idea of contemporary
period as unprecedented “qualitative leap”, and
globalization as something cardinally new and
never before experienced. For example, Manuel
Castells analyzes globalization through the idea
of “the rise of Network Society”, emphasizing
the unparalleled nature of new Information and
Communication Technology and the impact of
integration the world into global communication
networks (Hemer, Tufte 200 However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.
However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.
However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.
However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differences.
However, when an advertising campaign
is taken abroad, different values and perceptions as
to what enhances status or gives convenience exist.
These differences make the original advertising
campaign defunct. Therefore cross cultural
advertising campaign need an understanding of a
particular culture and the creative execution must
still take account of cultural differen

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