Coke continues to baffle me. I was recently pointed to their redesign, which, while fancy and pretty and impressive, has absolutely zero to do with any of their branding efforts thus far. And listening to their SVP for core global brands spout bullshit about the branding doesn’t help.

The style looks like they just tried really hard to build a Web 2.0 looking site (hell, look at the logo at left, I didn’t crop it, they’re cutting off part of the classic script now). Count the number of splats, bright colors, gradients, 45s, subtle drop shadows, buttons, etc. How the hell does this have anything to do with any other marketing Coke is doing? Hi Coke, this is my friend branding. I figured it might be time you two meet.

Now, in Coke’s defense it appears to me that they’ve found a home for their ill-fated bottle films. It looks like they now have not only a home, but a purpose. Although… why aren’t they being called bottle films right up front? You have to dig into “Inspiration” to find them. Odd.

I don’t know if it is my lack of fondness for Coke, my lack of fondness for trendy redesigns,my lack of fondness for huge corporations sucking at basic branding, or my lack of fondness for huge bandwidth sucking pointless all flash sites, but I’m just not quite thrilled with this. I really had thought we were past pointless flash sites, but alas… check out the site map to see that there are actually only 5 pages of actual content INCLUDING the terms of use and privacy policy. Sigh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Marketing, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.