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• 1 media/All Over the World Coca Cola Brings Refreshment Larger cropped.jpg media/water for life cropped Screen Shot 2017-11-22 at 1.02.59 AM copy.jpg 2017-11-28T22:42:22-08:00 Life as It Should Be 3 image_header 2017-11-28T22:46:23-08:00             At the beginning of the millennium, Coca-Cola’s new advertising campaigns attempted to “glocalize” the global brand image to the local Indian context, as advertising executives liked to call this process.  This was a departure from the Company’s standardized global advertising with its iconic but distant appeal to assumed universals, declaring it was “Always Coca-Cola” everywhere in the world.[1]   Instead, The slick “Life Ho To Aisi” campaign, meaning “Life As It Should Be” in evocative Hinglish,  attempted a localization while still communicating the universal neoliberal promise of freedom and individual self-betterment by placing Coca-Cola in the hands of Aishwarya Rai in India’s modernized global cities and the lives of its aspiring consumer world citizens. The ads engaged the urban middle class with a celebration of both Coca-Cola and their consumptive opportunity to buy into the global “good life”  -- life as it should be -- in the new free marketplace of global brands within India.[2]
   
              But to grow profits more dramatically, the company sought to connect deeply with “Indianness” and a broader swath of the Indian population by “speak[ing] the…language” of the “rural masses as well as the lower socio economic classes,”[3] who comprised the majority of the nation, but with little disposable income were still infrequent consumers of the company’s products, but represented a kind of authentic Indianness to the consumer classes.  Because, in India, as advertising creatives explained, “refreshment was real, earthy and unaffected by global trends,” and Coca-Cola wanted to be seen as a central part of it.[4]  
   

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  [1] For more on changes to the advertising strategies of multinationals and efforts to localize products through locally-produced advertising campaigns, see William O'Barr, Marcio Moreira, and Shelly Lazarus, "Global Advertising," Advertising & Society Review 9 (2008) and William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke:  Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC, 2003).

  [2] Boby Kurian, “Coca-Cola May Dump Life ho to aisi Campaign,” The Hindu Business Line, December 19, 2002, http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2002/12/19/stories/2002121902380600.htm, Jennifer Kaye, "Coca-Cola India," (Hanover, N.H., 2004), 6.

  [3] “Thanda Matlab Solitary EFFIE Gold: EFFIE Awards 2003,” Indiantelevision.com, August 22 2003, http://www.indiantelevision.com/mam/special/y2k3/effie.htm

  [4] Ibid.