When we shared a coke for the first time with Kenya in 2015.

When my then-boss Mona Wanjiru called me to her office to brief me over what seemed like this monstrous but also exciting campaign for Kenya #ShareACokeKE I remember feeling all sorts of mixed emotions - anxiety mixed with joy is a bizarre but sweet feeling. In a nutshell, the essence of this grand campaign was to allow Kenyan consumers to express themselves through a bottle of Coke, see their names on a pack - their unique Kenyan nicknames on not just a pack but all Coca-Cola packs (big and small) and what we at KO (this is Coca-Cola company’s stock symbol) called crowns but Kenyans call 'bottle tops'. We allowed consumers to swap the iconic brand Coca-Cola name with theirs - genuinely expressing themselves and their unique Kenyanese heritage on a Coke bottle and sharing it with their friends. I had never seen any other brand pull this off - at least not in 2014, so this was truly iconic. We were still determining what levels of iconic this campaign would unlock for us then.

Share a Coke was just that - sharing a Coke with Kenyans. A campaign borrowed with pride from the Australian, New Zealand, Asia, and U.S. markets that had had whirling levels of performance across most KPIs, especially amongst teens. And here was me, a starry-eyed Junior Brand Manager who had only just joined KO Central East and West Africa a few months before and had only worked on Minute Maid. Mona had just assigned me what I initially thought was not the sexy part of the campaign - packaging and experiential. Why not the ATL elements? (I said to myself). Why not the cool stuff of TV, Radio, and lavish outdoor billboards? Why not help and learn to scale this campaign digitally under Waithera? But trust that I did not swim in that worry for long. Mona gave me a look and added 'Trust me, you'll understand... ' And from there, I dived into the mounds of work.

Oi, understand I did. Everyone else got excellent creative elements - those where you work with significant brand teams and the creative & media teams at Ogilvy Africa. I had my work cut out with a tinge of envy.?Little did I know how blessed I was going to be.

The first was to get our 150 Kenyan names approved. When I first received them from the superable research team led by Rose Nyambura Mambo . I sighed, happy, they truly were Kenyan names - but later after keenly going through them I cringed. It just wasn't enough. It was vast, but it wasn't deep. See, what we had at the time was from a government agency that answered KO's request - to give us the top 150 names of the teens (all born between 1994 and 2005). It locked out many Kenyans whose names didn't make the top 150 cut because of their overall numbers, and in comparison to the other more popular names, they just were not seen or heard. It did not sit right with me. I wanted a complete representation of Kenya. With that, I asked Mona for an additional four days - to give this campaign more Kenyanese names. I wasn't about to leave behind the Maasai, Mijikenda, Indian, Somali, Arab, and more. I made tonnes of calls with my then KU alumni network and friends of friends to get these names and validate their nicknames. So aside from the usual Mary, Hannah, Marto, Jaymo, Johnnie, Mwas, Oti, and Kamau names, we now had Shah & Chadni, Kadzo and Kazungu, Salim & Hadija, Said & Halima, Aarti & Chebii - you get it. That brought us to a total of 233 names - to this day, I still have no idea how this passed - but I did say - our campaign was going to be across the country - and our many tribe names had to be represented in a uniquely Kenyan way.

Next was what I now reflect on as the most challenging part. I was organizing packaging. It made me question what exactly I studied for in uni. A subset of a unit was on the packaging but nothing like this. I had done packaging at BAT before and on a large scale with my then-line manager Kenneth Gitonga (hi, team Sportsman). But not to this level. I had to sit with the design teams to localize and develop brand design templates for all 350ml, 500ml, 1.25L, and 2L, but our empty label 200ml can and 300ml, 500ml, and 1L glass bottles but for 233 names on each label. And for 5 bottlers - Nairobi Bottlers, Equator Bottlers, Almasi bottlers (Rift Valley, Kisii & Mt.Kenya), and Coastal bottlers in 5 large regions. It was the first time I had seen so many designs of Mark's and Jessica's on e-samples and physical samples in one go. I had to keep getting breaks to let my eyes rest before we mistakenly approved Otieno as Odhieno. Lord! I only had to do Kenya, but my good friend and former colleague Micah Wanyama and his team had to do the same for more markets even as he drove Kenya - Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Reunion Islands. Bless his patient and keen soul.

Now the more exciting part. Supporting bottler production teams to identify their current stock levels in-house - both pre and post-production and for the trade teams checking in on quantities at distributors and critical retail outlets in the country. A detailed plan steered by Nairobi bottlers, Almasi bottlers, Equatorial bottlers, and Coast bottlers, all drying down products by the most robust pipeline management I have yet to see matched to date. We had locked a date, that by the first week of January, Share a Coke would flow into the trade. And there would be no write-offs for products or labels. Coca-Cola genuinely is the king of the trade. I recall watching trade teams working in unison with bottler production teams to rotate slower-moving products to faster-moving outlets - while being keen to ensure product freshness and adherence to quality standards. We never ran out and didn't have excess generic labels in the market, and all was set for launch. I say a giant thank you and bear hug to Brian Okoth , who led this for close to 40% of the Kenya volume and value. You are a rock star, B! And to the marketing & trade teams that did not sleep to get the whole country reading red with names. Norma Asimba. June Karanja Ampher Apidi amongst many more.

I worked on experiential. Ensuring influencers were meticulously selected and chosen. Across sports, media, comedy, and the arts....we chose the best to launch our packs with customized cans and unique personalized messages, from sharing a Coke with my friend, the late Bob Collymore for his birthday, to moving what felt like heaven and earth to have Mona Share a Coke with then, President Uhuru Kenyatta, to tracking down Caroline Mutoko to moving across more than 20 towns in Kenya making customized Cokes for friends, lovers, enemies, parents, kids. Name it; we probably printed it. One of the anchors for the campaign was also to deliver Share Coke cans to employees in what we called ‘peer companies’ to KO. I worked with the agency reaching out to HR teams to plan for deliveries of cans to their teams. At first, there was of course slight hesitation - possibly because it's just hard to trust a fellow Kenyan, and fraud was real. And for some, it didn't matter that I had a KO email address, to be honest. But thank you to my other former employer Safaricom PLC , CBA (now NCBA Group ), 英美烟草 Kenya, and 荷商葛蘭素史克藥廠 Kenya HR teams who took a leap of faith with me and the agency teams.

This would not be a complete story without sharing the incredible things that The Digital Diva delivered for us. I remember marveling almost daily at Waithera Kabiru and her agency team at Ogilvy Africa, creating a virtual platform for Kenyans to customize their digital virtual cans. @Rehema Chege and the content teams churning out tonnes of Share a Coke content and chap calendars for all platforms. And it was then rolling out a heavily UGC-led campaign that delivered a reach of over 1Bn in Kenya and close to 10x that all over Africa. One day, Waithera called me and said that we received a request from a young Kenyan man who wanted to use the Share Coke cans to propose to his girlfriend, and we needed to make it happen. We did, and he proposed at a beautiful candlelight dinner with our customized cans asking his fiance - Will you Marry me? I genuinely hope they are still together. (But that's not the point)

And to the mighty Kenya Agency Council of brilliant minds Amy Wahome Rehema Chege Carole Muthaura @Achieng' Omwanda Halima Mwania, Team EXP led by Tessa Calleb & Marcus Olang' , who raked in creative, media and digital planning hours churning out what felt like 150+ slides with 50+ versions and the mounds of shopper artwork, digital content, TV cutdowns, vernacular and Swanglish radio spot ads, driving media partners for the best media buys at the lowest price (beating media inflation), overnight Magnate outdoor deliveries, locking up KICC with the text to see your name in lights, launch & media events, experiential blasts across Kenya, trade artworks for bottlers - name it. I say an enormous thank you. (Please tag anyone i have left out - 8 years is a long time abi, I apologize in advance). You all delivered a beautiful, collaborative orchestra that was the Share A Coke 1.0 Kenya campaign. World-class delivery that increased the frequency of purchase by over 12% grew brand Coca-Cola volumes across all SKUs (including those pesky cans we struggled with) to an average of 27%+ month-on-month growth for over six months.

Last but certainly not least, a huge thank you to Rodney Nzioka who led the overall Kenya strategy and walked through the bottler engagements with zeal and rallying all the agency team troops. To Mona W. Karingi , my then-boss but now forever friend, thank you for giving me the packaging & experiential elements of this campaign; it stretched me and broke me in good ways but formed a great foundation that created Klaire the Brand Titan.