On June 29th, Skopje hosted its first ever Pride Parade. This would probably be a very common information elsewhere, but when speaking of North Macedonia, a pretty much conservative country towards differences in general, but at the same time with people who openly defy taboos and conformism, Skopje’s Pride Parade was one of the most popular topics in the hot month of June.
The Coca-Cola Company on the other hand, is a company leader in its efforts for inclusiveness, bringing people together and proud of its history of supporting and including the LGBTQI community in the workplace, in its advertising and in communities throughout the world, so wanted to give support to the first ever Pride in Skopje in an unique and memorable way.
The main insight of the idea lied exactly in the roots of the North Macedonian society. As most Macedonian population has negative attitude towards the LGBTQI community, they also often use slang and jargon words with negative tone to label activists and LGBTQI people. One of the most commonly used word describing this population is “opposite” or “reverse”, referring to them as different, as “not normal”, or the very least, as “odd”.
Having this in mind, we used this negative tone of voice and transformed it into a positive message, once again demonstrating Coca-Cola’s commitment to supporting diversity around the world, including North Macedonia.
Exclusively for the Pride Parade in Skopje, Coca-Cola brought a Pride dedicated limited edition bottle with a special label where Coca-Cola logo was reversed or “the other way around” and it carried “reverse” message instead of its classic “ORIGINAL TASTE” claim, proudly saying: LOVE IS ALWAYS THE RIGHT WAY (ЉУБОВТА Е СЕКОГАШ ИСПРАВНА).
The message had a “mirror effect”, meaning in order to read the words normally, you would simply have to look the label of the Coca-Cola bottle in the mirror. In addition, the word “LOVE” („ЉУБОВ“) was written in rainbow colors and the bar-code was rainbow too!
The idea for the communication, in fact, was inspired from the everyday life, where, besides other homophobic expressions, the statement “reversed” or “the other way around” is used in order to discriminate a person belonging to the LGBTI community.
RESULTS: 40 influencers with over 600.000 followers (more than 30% of North Macedonia population) joined our campaign for free. Facebook and Instagram posts were organic with 200% higher reach with engagement rate of 6% vs. 1% average and 1.8K reactions, 136 comments and 839 shares in only two days. In addition, the Facebook video has almost 10K views within a day.
