To give labourers in the UAE a few extra minutes of happiness, Coca-Cola created the Hello Happiness Phone Booth — a special phone booth that accepts Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins for a free 3-minute international phone call, helping them connect with their families back home more often.
Coca-Cola Hello Happiness
Interactive Machine | Product Design | Custom Electronic Development
Experiential Innovation
Case Study
In 2014, we set out to increase brand love amongst one of the UAE’s largest consumer segments – South Asians. In a segment usually targeted with basic freebies and generic prizes, we needed an insight that our target could truly relate to. We found that majority of the segment was made up of blue collar workers who leave their families back home and come to the country to work for a better future – often on extremely low wages.
So we created the Hello Happiness Phone Booths – booths powered by Coca-Cola bottle caps to help connect these workers to their families more often. The booths were installed in labour camps across the country and logged over 140,000 minutes, while an online video took the activation further with more than 14,000 tweets, 45,000 shares and 67,000 likes on social media.
Results
With over 820 million media impressions and an estimated PR value of more than 1.5 million dollars, Coca-Cola saw a 13.55% increase in brand love, as well as 6.7% more weekly drinkers amongst South Asians in the UAE. Though the booths were placed in labour camps to speak specifically to our target, the online video helped contribute to the overall brand image of Coca-Cola, reaching consumers from multiple tiers and around the world. The brand promise of ‘open happiness’ was ignited in a unique and insightful way, and organically extended across a wide range of platforms.