Watch out for the event: Coca Cola has just redesigned its image. It hasn’t happened in five years. First change, the brand platform, now called Real Magic and developed as an invitation to celebrate “the real magic of humanity”, according to the brand. It may sound a bit new age, but why not? Note that the brand has chosen to oppose the real world to the magic world and not the virtual world, as is usually the case. Magic to forget the dark side of the virtual. According to Coca, reality would be the product, its distribution and its “iconicity”. Magic, its secret formula and what it provokes as a catalyst of experiences. Wise. 

The second change involves its communication: a new signature (“One Coke Away From Each Other”) and a new global campaign through a spot featuring three famous gamers. We are far from the usual scenes of groups and couples, smiling ecstatically on a sunset background. Or the cute polar bears hugging each other on the ice floe. If the brand has always been a generational symbol (although, in reality, it is usually drunk at home), it now asserts it even stronger by moving in the virtual world and by appearing on Twitch. There, it will offer the possibility to earn a virtual currency to support and encourage streamers or to enjoy benefits. 

“Young people expect something different from Coca-Cola than their elders,” specifies the brand, which sees in the success of e-sports and gaming, the opportunity to seduce the former as much as a new way of understanding the world and considering human relations. A radical choice which risks, however, to exclude anyone who is not familiar with this universe—quite a lot of people. Finally, the logo has also been redesigned to become a “hug logo”; with the curved Coca Cola wrapped around like an invisible hug.

Is this a premonition? That by going too far in the virtual world, brands will end up losing contact with reality like a cosmonaut, the link with their spaceship? Let’s wait to see the next spot before calling Houston.