The Coke and Mentos Meme

I expect that you're familiar with the dramatic outcomes from mixing Coke and Mentos mints. Tens of millions of people have watched thousands of different videos (almost 1,400 on Google Video alone) of people dropping Mentos into Coke bottles on all the major video sharing sites.



If you take a look at the search volumes for Coke Google Trends (below, in blue) there's a noticeable impact of the phenomenon. The global volume of searches is higher for Coke than at any other point in its history. The significance of this is hard to isolate, particularly as Trends doesn't offer a scale. For example, why would anyone search on Coke if they weren't looking for something like this? Coke, too, isn't the kind of brand that needs to benefit from increased awareness. It does, however, benefit from consideration and preference. Do these videos deliver this? If you consider Coke's efforts in digital music downloads and compare the quantity and quality of interaction with the brand I suspect that this meme is an extremely useful one for them.







Coke, however, is just half the equation. When you overlay the volume of searches for Mentos (below in red) on the graph from above you can see a brand benefitting by a whole new order of magnitude. Mentos does not have the awareness of Coke and these videos won't change that. I wonder though, if Mentos marketers are in the habit of taking regular ACP studies - if so I bet this phenomenon would be sufficiently significant to be measured.




I chatted with a guy who works on Mentos in Europe and it sounds as though they're ecstatic about the situation, having had nothing to do with creating it. The impact on sales has been significant as well.