Coca-Cola's Brand Strategy: Zero And Life

Rebranding and re-launching can take many guises from the complete wholesale change of a company or product, inside and out, including name, culture, values, behaviours, tone, visual collateral and all that entails with no connections to the legacy entity, to something less dramatic and of a more evolutionary nature.
In each instance though, the change to whatever degree, affects a change in the minds of the target market in terms of their perceptions of the brand. That change is a process of giving a company, product or service a new image in order to make it more successful.
Brands are key to a company's long-term survival and market leadership.
Brands are constantly evolving to ensure they keep abreast of changing needs in the market place.

The newly-proposed unifying of brand values will enable the Coca-Cola Company to make cost savings through the rationalisation of advertising. But for this to work, the branding and packs must be executed with the same strategy in mind.
Whilst Zero and Life could potentially fit as part of the master brand strategy, Diet Coke remains an elephant in the room here. It has been around much longer and has a distinct personality which it stands to lose under the shift to a true master brand strategy, which requires a fundamental break in the current design code. Under this code, Diet Coke should adopt the Coca-Cola brand name and become Coca-Cola Diet. This is neither good nor bad, but a consequence that needs pointing out and should not be ignored as it will lead to conflicts with Zero which will, if articulated in descriptive terms, be too similar.
Coca-Cola’s shift to creating a master brand is a great idea; the sub-brands will do well to be embraced under the world-famous original. However, what has been revealed so far is only an executional aesthetic change, rather than a strategic brand redesign. It may well create confusion not enhancement, and eventually converge into flavour variants, not separate propositions. In order to be truly successful, this design change must transition into a bigger