Myanmar has been under sanctions for really long time. Long enough that the people who live there don’t really get what an ATM is, haven’t been subjected to television singing competitions, and don’t know anything about Coke.
But once sanctions were lifted, Coke naturally started working on making sure the Myanmarmots needed to start exercising and going to the dentist more often. The only problem is that after trading almost solely on brand for the past century, they had to figure out how to sell Coke to people who hadn’t heard of it before.
Moin says he started to go back in the Coca-Cola archives. He was looking at how the company marketed its product before the internet, before TV, even before radio. Eventually he found his perfect model for Myanmar, place where nobody knew anything about Coke — Atlanta, 1886.
Back then the hot advertising trend was wall posters. Moin noticed that in the beginning, Coke didn’t use the posters to talk about friends or happiness or style. It talked about what the product tasted like. It simply described it. Moin pulled out two words in particular that would form the core of his Myanmar campaign — “delicious, refreshing.”