Coco Veranda – A Sri Lankan Example of a Brand Well Peopleized

If you read my last blog post describing the concept of “peopleizing” a brand, you might come up with the intuitive question “is this possible?”. You might ask, are there brands who have managed to do this already?

As it’s the case with any new concepts, you won’t find dozens of practical examples at the initial stages as the concept itself requires lots more improvements and modifications based on practical insights. However, I can give you a one good practical example from a Sri Lankan café located in Colombo 07000; Coco Veranda.

My first interaction with Coco Veranda and its co-founder was, when I did them a PPC campaign on Google for their sister company The Bloom Room. By that time, Coco Veranda was doing relatively well on social media, and I realized how potential is this brand to flourish as a perfect example for a social media success. Later, I got deeply involved in the TweetupSL event, in which Coco Veranda played a huge role to make the event a major success.

Today, we can cite Coco Veranda as a perfect example of a brand which is ‘well Peopleized’ among their target community. Unlike most other brands who jump into social media bandwagon; Coco never went after number of followers and ‘likes’ obsessively. They never try to use social media as another channel of ‘advertising’ to force their marketing messages down the throats of potential customers. Instead, they got involved with the community with a genuine desire for social media, and created genuine relationships with real people. This ‘authenticity’ factor in Coco Veranda’s social media efforts, helped them establish the ‘trust’ element so strongly within the community. Today, Coco Veranda is not just a mere ‘faceless brand’ for social media users in Sri Lanka. Instead, “Coco” is a real person with a distinct personality. That ‘person’ interacts with other people in the community with more of a ‘human to human’ interaction.

The point is, Coco never entered the social media scene with a pure sales intention. That is the very reason why Coco had been successful in improving the ‘likeability’ among the community members it interacts with regularly.

Here is a small video case study I did about Coco Veranda. The video includes an interview with the co-founder and joint Managing Director; Mr. Sarath Chandra Sathiamoorthy who is the main man behind Coco’s social media presence.

Originally posted on www.amisampath.com Like this blog? Get email updates when I post next time, or subscribe to the feed on a reader. Follow me on Twitter @Amisampath