Over the last two years, Vietnam has been one of the world's fastest-growing markets for brand Coca-Cola across. Coke’s brand love scores are also growing fast in Vietnam.

The country’s first "Share a Coke" campaign in 2014 helped drive a lot of that success. This year, there was a new challenge: Maintain strong momentum for the brand, especially with teens, where the market competition is intense.

To take "Share a Coke" to the next level, the Vietnam team looked to the now-universal language of emoticons. In Vietnam – as in much of the world – young people use emoticons to share how they feel. Coca-Cola Vietnam introduced 41 emoticons.

“Emoticons have become a perfect sharing platform, a sharing of human feelings,” said Pratik Thakar, integrated marketing communications director for Coca-Cola’s ASEAN business unit, which includes Vietnam. “It transcends language barriers and has pretty much become a part of popular culture across most ASEAN markets.”

Vietnam kicked off the first phase of the campaign to build awareness. Beyond traditional media, a “social invasion” entailed bloggers and local celebrities introducing Coke’s new emoticons. Special partnerships with Facebook and the country's largest local messaging platform, Zalo, helped spread the word.

In the second phase, the team is focused on inspiring teens to share their own stories. Consumers will be able to personalize cans at retail outlets and customize stickers on Zalo. Within four days of the phase two launch, consumers had downloaded 1.3 million stickers.

"Share a Coke emoticons are, once again, proving our way of doing marketing with the consumer at heart,” said Uyen Pham Na, marketing director, Coca-Cola Vietnam. “I believe Coke emoticons will be a new way for Vietnamese teens to communicate their feelings. This campaign not only brings Coca-Cola closer to our consumer but also benefits our business with promising volume increase."

Basil Sidky, general manager for Coca-Cola in Indochina, added, “I am very excited about the Coke emoticon campaign. It’s smart to leverage the youth’s social currency to boost the brand’s relevance in this mobile and digital era, giving us a much richer ground to engage with our consumers.”

The campaign is scheduled to roll out across Thailand later this year and in the Philippines in the summer of 2016.