Published in Marketing Week, December 2024.
Coca-Cola and its Christmas trucks prove the value of consistency – and why it doesn’t always have to be in competition with novelty.
Yep, it’s time. Holidays are coming! Nothing heralds the arrival of the festive season quite like the Coca-Cola Christmas trucks.
This year most of the marketing commentary has focussed on the use of AI. But in all the hullabaloo perhaps the most important element of the ads has been ignored: its remarkable consistency.
The trucks have been part of our Christmases since 1995, when ad agency W.B. Doner created a TV commercial featuring a magnificent ‘Christmas caravan’ with 30,000 festive lights gleaming as a convoy snaked through the snow.
They’ve been a presence for almost 30 years now, barring a short break in the early 2000s, and are now firmly built into our popular culture, with a real version of the truck touring the UK every December. #holidaysarecoming is tweeted 57 million times a year, and according to Coca-Cola, 44% of Brits say they eagerly anticipate it as the official start of the season.
More evidence for its success comes from an analysis carried out by the research agency System1. In 2023, they tested the impact of the ad and it scored 5.9, which is the maximum possible on their Test Your Ad tool.
So, it’s a campaign that’s got something right. Clearly it has captured our imaginations. But how can insights from behavioural science explain its impact?
Mere exposure
Year after year, the trucks hit our screens (and roads). And this is key to their success. Because we have a tendency to develop a liking for things simply because we are familiar with them.
It’s one of the classic findings from psychology, dating back to a study in 1968 by University of Michigan psychologist Robert Zajonc. He set out to explore how our attitudes to stimuli change with repeated exposure.
To do this, he showed participants a book filled with images. Sometimes the book consisted of nonsense words, other times Chinese letters or unfamiliar faces.
Participants had to flick through the pages and then rate how pleasant the images were.
The twist in the experiment was that some images were shown just once; others multiple times (anywhere between twice and 25 times).
The findings of the study were clear: the more times people had seen the images, the more they liked them.
Zajonc called this the mere exposure effect to capture the idea that repetition creates positivity, even when no additional information is communicated.
There’s an evolutionary explanation for preferring things we know well, and it comes down to trust. Imagine you’re a hunter-gatherer in the past and you have a choice of two fruits to eat: one is well-known, the other, novel. Which would you go for?
Obviously, the safest option is the one we know. In this way, we’ve evolved to feel automatically at ease and more positive about things we’ve seen before that haven’t harmed us. We can relax in familiar company, confident there’s no threat.
That’s why we draw comfort from long-established routines, places and things. This extends to ads and brands, which become “old favourites”.
What about novelty?
You might be sceptical about applying Zajonc’s findings directly to your work. After all, people were required to look at symbols and pictures. In the real world, a marketer’s first task is to grab attention. Novelty is a great way to do this.
But novelty and frequent exposure cannot co-exist — they are in conflict. We can see this in data from Kantar, who looked at the idea of ‘wear out’ — measuring when people become fed up with an ad. There was no correlation between frequency scores and ‘fed-up’ scores. Plotted on a graph, the line was basically horizontal.
Now, if novelty was the only important factor, you’d expect that chart to slope distinctly upwards as people became bored of the ad over time.
And if Zajonc’s findings were 100% true in advertising, you would expect this chart to slope downwards — as people appreciated the ad more (and became less ‘fed up’) over time.
But actually, neither happens. The effects cancel one another out.
Novelty or exposure – what matters?
Given this apparent contradiction, why are we discussing this? Does this mean the psychology research is unhelpful? I don’t think so.
Because we marketers are fully aware of the need for novelty. But we don’t always consider how to balance this with enough exposure to develop those warm fuzzy feelings of familiarity. In fact, evidence from System1 shows that the average ad runs for roughly 80 days in the UK. In the US, it’s twice as long.
Most marketers believe that the longer a campaign airs, the weaker it becomes. So after a fairly short burst, it’s back to the drawing board. That’s a problem, because every new creative campaign demands significant investment.
But the mere exposure effect presents an alternative approach — save on creative costs by developing new campaigns less often. Your audiences won’t tire of the ads.
The excessive belief in “wear out” has another impact — the best ads don’t run for any longer than the weakest ones. Evidence from System1 shows that in the UK the average time an ad is on air doesn’t increase with star rating.
However, if marketers can accept that ‘wear out’ is exaggerated, this liberates them to re-run their best performers again and again. By running the best creative multiple times and the weakest just once, the average creative impact of a brand’s ads increases.
This way, you could save some money and have happy audiences — and keep ideas like Coca-Cola’s blazing red truck rolling for years to come. Because great creative should run and run.
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