Kids marketing: Whatever happened to the Coke yoyo?
Posted on 23. May, 2011 by Jonathan Cherry in Branding
Super cool
When we were in junior school [that would have been the the 80's] the hottest and most widely supported craze involved doing tricks with Coke / Fanta / Sprite branded yoyos.
Non-branded versions didn’t cut it – you had to have the smooth spinning radness of either a Coke, Fanta or Sprite branded piece. You could buy them or save up the inner liners of bottle caps to exchange for one.
Coke even sent around professional yoyo teams to demonstrate tricks to school kids during assembly. The success of promotion spread like wildfire via word-of-mouth through the school social networks and has to have been one of the most powerful promotional projects ever undertaken in South Africa. You’d be buying Coke just to score yet another yoyo to add to your collection, because the 15 you already had just wasn’t enough.
Fast forward 30 years and we wonder if the same idea would work today? Are simple things like yoyos too lame to cut it in 2011 on the playground?
6 Responses to “Kids marketing: Whatever happened to the Coke yoyo?”
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Jonathan Peel
23. May, 2011
I was wondering what happened to them the other day.
I remember them from school as well (90s).
I thought about it when I was in Sausage Saloon last week (a hotdog shop, not whatever you might be thinking [http://www.sausagesaloon.co.za/]). They were giving away Coca-Cola branded yo-yos with children’s meals. They did not look the same though.
IsaBeauPeep
23. May, 2011
they were the best – the Coke ones that is. And you had to get your string nice and ‘used in’ to get max results:) good times – bought lots of coke at the corner cafe.
The Skim
23. May, 2011
We used to use woolen string to make the spin longer. Those were the days
Gevaar
24. May, 2011
Visited Perth around 2 years ago, where I saw they had the yo-yo deals with some size coke bottles. Was very impressed and bought myself some yo-yo-age immediately. Campaign was very small and having lived in Sydney for 2 years, haven\’t seen or heard the campaign again.
Shows you that there is actually still some of these yo-yo\’s left, and think SA is the perfect place for another campaign of the sort.
Richard
24. May, 2011
I remember lusting so bad after a mythical Black Coke “Pro” yoyo.
Antony
31. May, 2011
I got the fabled Black Coke yo-yo. I collected every bottle cap seal in the country and shoved them into an envelope to Coke. I seem to remember it not working as well as the red one. Oh well..