BY SKIP WOLLENBERG
The Associated Press

        NEW YORK — Coca-Cola has a word that it hopes will get people thirsting for its top-selling flagship soft drink: Enjoy.

        That simple declaration is the core of the new “Coca Cola. Enjoy” advertising theme, which the huge beverage concern has created to help reignite growth of one of the best-known brands in the world.

SENSORY APPEAL

Charles Frenette, Coca-Cola's chief marketing officer, said the changes are designed to point up the sensory experience of drinking a Coke.   In one TV ad, a man steps up to a bar and a parrot perched nearby mimics the sound of a bottle being opened, poured and gulped. The man grows thirstier but before he can order, the waitress shows up with a bottle of Coca-Cola. “Enjoy,” the parrot cackles.   In another ad, three boys in a village in Morocco wait for a delivery of Coca-Cola and wonder how it will taste.   “My father says it's just like kissing a girl,” one boy says. After a truck arrives, the oldest boy takes a bottle out of a cooler and drinks.   “Is it like kissing a girl?” the boys ask their 12- or 13-year-old friend. The boy replies, “I hope so.”

      “It is an invitation to people to view life through the optimistic lens that this product can provide,” Ian Rowden, director of advertising for Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, said earlier this week in discussing the new ads. The company was showing off the campaign to its bottlers Wednesday evening.

        Television and radio commercials in the new campaign begin appearing Monday in the United States and are already running in some overseas mar kets. Coca-Cola declines to say how much it is spending to run the ads.

        The new theme replaces the “Always Coca-Cola” campaign, which has been appearing since 1993. Coke executives said that campaign has worked well but that it was time for a change.

        Sales of the flagship Coca-Cola brand were up an average 6.7 percent a year worldwide in the first six years of the “Always” campaign, but sales growth slowed last year, Coke spokesman Bob Bertini said.

        He said the magnitude of the slowdown has not yet been disclosed but attributed it to the impact of economic conditions overseas, the recall of Coca-Cola products in France and Belgium due to a health scare and to price competition in the United States.

        The theme change is part of a broader marketing overhaul that has included a make-over of the imagery used in the Coca-Cola logo and packaging that now shows the cap popping off and the drink splashing out.