Share A Coke: Personalisation made charmingly low-tech in the age of AI

SINGAPORE – Household legacy brands are going all out with marketing gimmicks to stay relevant to consumers. Who can blame them? In a time of content churn, memories are fickle bears. Faster than you can blink, one quirky trend makes way for the next.

In 2025, beverage giant Coca-Cola looked to its history for a marketing gimmick it hoped would last longer in the minds of consumers. It brought back the Share A Coke campaign, which originated in Australia in 2011 and was launched in Singapore in 2015.

The campaign replaced the Coca-Cola logo on its cans with over 170 popular names and titles, such as “Lao Ban” (boss) or “John” or “Lim”. These were sold at supermarkets and convenience stores islandwide.

Customers could also make personalised versions with their own names via a special website or at interactive Personalisation Hub pop-ups across the island. 

A spokesperson for the Coca-Cola Company says the campaign “delivered strong impact” globally, with over 150,000 customised cans created in the first month alone and close to 500,000 visits to Coke.com across the region.

“Singapore was a strong proof-point of this success. Localised nicknames and phrases such as Kiasu King, FOMO (fear of missing out) King and Delulu Gang, combined with on-ground activations across the island, drove strong participation and shareability.”

Overall, Share a Coke 2025 showed that when personalisation, technology and culture come together, the campaign can continue “to create real moments of connection”, added the spokesperson.

Dr Shilpa Madan, assistant professor of marketing at Singapore Management University, says that in 2025, the Share A Coke campaign feels charmingly low-key in an era when everything is “personalised”, from social media feeds to streaming services. 

“For the last few years, we’ve been told that algorithms will know us better than we know ourselves; Share A Coke is the opposite of that. It’s not predictive, it’s not generative, it’s just your name on a can. In a sea of machine-made personalisation, that kind of low-tech embodiment feels unexpectedly fun and warm,” she says.

Moreover, a can with your name on it can stay in your physical space long after a TikTok video or Instagram reel disappears. 

“Possessions act as memory cues. You have the moment of finding your name, the act of sharing it in real life, and the social content that spins out of it. It can stretch a single brand encounter across time and across channels,” she adds. 

The campaign is a textbook case of psychological ownership which, says Dr Madan, is the feeling that something is “yours”, even if you do not legally own it. 

When people have a sense of psychological ownership, they value things more, are willing to pay more, show stronger loyalty and sometimes even display territorial behaviour.

“Finding your name or customising the can with your preferred name reflects research on co-creation and mass customisation, which shows that when consumers help design a product, their willingness to pay jumps because they feel ‘I designed it myself’.”

And it is imperative for a brand like Coca-Cola to evoke these sorts of emotional experiences in their customers; competing in the realm of feeling rather than logic.

After all, as Dr Madan points out, “you don’t buy Coke for health, you don’t buy it for functionality and there are countless near-identical fizzy alternatives on the shelf”.

“Coke has to sell moments, memories and little flashes of joy, rather than just sugar and bubbles. Share A Coke is that strategy in its purest form: it doesn’t try to persuade your head, it goes straight for your heart by turning a generic drink into a tiny, personalised memento,” she adds.