Coca-Cola Foodmarks campaign: borrowing trust from local eateries
Coca-Cola Foodmarks put local eateries first and measured results through online combos. Lessons for brands planning Vietnam's Tet 2027 season.
At seven in the evening, a group of friends asks each other where to eat. Few of them open an app to see which ad is running. Someone names the bun cha place at the end of the alley, a pho shop that opened back when their parents were still in school, or "that place my younger cousin recommended." In Vietnam, trust in food mostly lives in places like these.
The Coca-Cola Foodmarks campaign bets on exactly that. According to Coca-Cola, the Foodmarks campaign, tagline "Quán đỉnh, chuyện hay" (roughly "great eateries, great stories"), launched in March 2024 (SGGP). It is a platform that promotes street food eateries, with Coca-Cola acting as the go-between for the eatery, the diner and young content creators. According to Brands Vietnam, citing figures the brand reported itself, the campaign drew more than 1.1 million visits and lifted online combo sales by 71% (Brands Vietnam). At the MMA Smarties Vietnam 2024 awards, Foodmarks won Best in Show (MMA). Per VCCI News, Coca-Cola Vietnam took home 12 awards in total that season (VCCI News).
126Insights' view: Foodmarks is worth studying because Coca-Cola agreed to step back into a supporting role. The eatery is the lead, the dish is the story, and the bottle comes along in the combo. For Vietnamese brands that plan to hire KOLs (key opinion leaders, i.e. influencers) to borrow credibility, this is a more durable route: borrow credibility from places people already trust.
Trust is earned one meal at a time
Vietnamese elders have a saying: "bán anh em xa, mua láng giềng gần," which means that a close neighbor is worth more than a brother far away. Food makes the point even sharper. A regular spot is a place you have eaten at a dozen times without being let down, where the owner remembers that you like less onion. Trust builds up meal by meal like that, and advertising has a hard time buying it.
The Foodmarks insight, as we read it: when trust already sits with the eatery, a brand does not have to build it from scratch. Standing next to a trusted local spot earns a share of that trust. Think of a wedding banquet. A stranger who introduces himself gets a guarded reception, but a mutual friend who walks you to the table opens the conversation at once. Coca-Cola chose to be the mutual friend and let the host do most of the talking.
How the Coca-Cola Foodmarks campaign works
According to Coca-Cola, the Foodmarks microsite suggests eateries based on the user's location. After eating, users rate the place, and creators make content that tells the eatery's story (VCCI News). Eateries are picked on four criteria: tasty food, a clean space, attentive service, and a story worth telling, such as a family recipe passed down over several decades (SGGP). The program also runs a vote called "Cuộc đua Quán Đỉnh Foodmarks" (the Foodmarks Top Eatery Race), where users with accounts vote for nominated eateries (Foodmarks terms).
Note the order: eatery first, dish first, the owner's story first. Trust in this system comes from the diners, through ratings and votes, so the brand barely has to praise its own product. If you remember the "Share a Coke" campaign that printed names on bottles, Foodmarks goes further in the same direction: it puts someone else's name, this time the eatery's, on the main stage.
The last link is selling. Foodmarks partners with online food ordering platforms for dedicated deals (Thanh Niên). According to a Coca-Cola and Grab announcement published by Brands Vietnam, the two sides extended Foodmarks to GrabAds in several Southeast Asian cities, with combos from eateries (Brands Vietnam). A combo sold on a food delivery app is what turns goodwill into a number you can count.
Each channel has one job, and every job points back to the eatery
According to Brands Vietnam, the campaign ran across a microsite, out-of-home (OOH) ads, KOLs, the Coca-Cola Foodfest festival, a program called "Quán Quen Chính Gốc" on VTV3 (a national TV channel) and a music video featuring Hòa Minzy and Rhyder. Facebook and TikTok added hashtag challenges (Brands Vietnam). WARC describes Coca-Cola building a "Foodmarks hub" on top of Google Maps (WARC).
The channel list is long, but the channels rarely step on each other. The microsite and the map hub help people find a place near them. OOH and KOLs draw attention. The festival lets people taste on the spot, in the spirit of the Vietnamese saying "trăm nghe không bằng một thấy" (seeing once beats hearing a hundred times). The TV program has enough airtime to tell one eatery's whole story, which a short video struggles to do. The delivery app closes the order.
To be fair, Foodmarks still uses KOLs, singers and television. The difference lies in the story being told. Under the mechanism Coca-Cola has described, creators tell the eatery's story while diners rate and vote for themselves. Celebrity credibility is used to lead viewers to the eatery, where trust already exists. That is integrated marketing communications in its most practical sense: many channels telling one story, each carrying one part of it.
Where the 71% comes from, and how to read it
Foodmarks drew visits, but the more notable figure is the 71% rise in online combo sales, per Brands Vietnam, citing figures the brand reported itself. Pay attention to the words online combo: the number measures combo sales through online channels, not Coca-Cola's total sales.
Because the brand reported it, the 71% tells you what the campaign was able to measure, not what you should expect for yourself. Do not use it as a target for your own campaign.
The lesson worth taking is the measurement design. As we read it, the number could be measured because the campaign was tied to a sales channel that counts every order: combos on a food delivery app. Goodwill toward an eatery only becomes revenue when there is somewhere to count it.
Photo by Samvidh Ramanathan on Unsplash
How Vietnamese brands can apply local eatery marketing
Brands that sit alongside a meal have a natural advantage here: beer, fish sauce, seasonings, soft drinks, e-wallets, food delivery apps. Their products are already present at the eatery. The name and format of Foodmarks belong to Coca-Cola; the logic is what to copy. Four steps:
- Map the trusted eateries in the area where you sell. Use the four Foodmarks criteria as a guide: tasty, clean, decent service, a story to tell. Ask your customers and sales team where they eat, and do not look only at which places have the most reviews.
- Design an eatery-plus-product combo, with a separate code for each eatery. Per-eatery codes tell you which eatery pulls orders and which channel works, instead of leaving you with one total view count at the end.
- Give the eatery a real benefit: new customers, video and photos it can use for a long time, a name on the map. When the eatery sees the benefit, the owner introduces the program to regulars without being asked.
- Start small. An SME can begin with 10 to 20 eateries in one district instead of a nationwide campaign. Foodmarks has also worked at street level: according to Kenh14, since January 2025 the program has helped decorate the Tống Duy Tân food street in Hanoi (Kenh14).
Suppose a chili sauce brand in Ho Chi Minh City picks 15 banh mi and bot chien (egg-fried rice flour cake) stalls in one district. Each stall gets its own combo on a delivery app, a local creator films the owner's story, and a small sign goes up at the counter. After six weeks, the marketing team has order counts per stall and enough data to decide whether to expand to the next district.
One caution: a combo sold through a delivery app means the measuring channel sits on someone else's platform. As we wrote in our piece on Meta blocking ads that link to TikTok, a funnel built on rented land can have its rules changed without notice. Keep one channel of your own, such as a code redeemed in the eatery or a customer sign-up list, so your data does not sit entirely inside one app.
Photo by Sebastian Zuchmański on Unsplash
A question to answer before you lock the Tet 2027 plan
If your team is setting the budget for Tet (the Lunar New Year, Vietnam's biggest shopping and dining season) and the year-end eating season, try answering this before you sign another KOL contract: in the area where you sell, which eateries do people trust, and is your product already on their tables?
If you cannot answer yet, the task for this week is simple: eat at the ten busiest eateries around your office, and ask each owner what customers usually order alongside.