Few would disagree that the Evangelization of Coke is one of the greatest Marketing since Jesus recruited 12 disciples to spread Christianity.
As Coke now looks to establish conversations around its brand using social media we take a look at this article from Marketing Week Check it out.
“A brand is a promise. A good brand is a promise kept.” The Coca-Cola Company chairman and chief executive Muhtar Kent is musing on how to keep his company on the growth trail, without succumbing to the “arrogance” of the past.
On the eve of the iconic drinks brand’s 125th anniversary, the Coca-Cola Company invited a selection of the world’s leading business press to its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, to spend four days with those responsible for growing Coca-Cola’s brands including Coke, Fanta, Sprite and Powerade. Marketing Week was the only UK business magazine in attendance.
We arrived with the expectation that Coke’s top executives would want only to celebrate past successes – but in fact they were keen to explain how Coca-Cola continues to pioneer marketing and eager to show they had learnt from the lessons of their past.
Behind closed doors at the world’s most famous brand
26 May 2011 | By Mark Choueke
“A brand is a promise. A good brand is a promise kept.” The Coca-Cola Company chairman and chief executive Muhtar Kent is musing on how to keep his company on the growth trail, without succumbing to the “arrogance” of the past.
On the eve of the iconic drinks brand’s 125th anniversary, the Coca-Cola Company invited a selection of the world’s leading business press to its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, to spend four days with those responsible for growing Coca-Cola’s brands including Coke, Fanta, Sprite and Powerade. Marketing Week was the only UK business magazine in attendance.
We arrived with the expectation that Coke’s top executives would want only to celebrate past successes – but in fact they were keen to explain how Coca-Cola continues to pioneer marketing and eager to show they had learnt from the lessons of their past.
While instilling in his troops the confidence and optimism necessary to double Coca-Cola’s revenue to $200bn (£123.4bn) in the next decade – part of the company’s 2020 corporate vision which launched last year – Kent says the company must keep at bay the failings which he says nearly brought Coca-Cola to its knees in the Nineties.
Kent’s caution against repeating certain mistakes of old – and more recent – is shared by every member of Coca-Cola’s senior management team.
A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it and the bum on the corner knows it
Andy Warhol, artist
Kent said: “We have to stay close to our partners, our retail customers and our consumers. We must earn their trust every single day. We cannot afford, in any sense, to take a victory lap or to become arrogant again.”
It seems strange to think that the narrative surrounding Coca-Cola could be about anything but success. Last year, the company sold 25.5 billion unit cases of drinks across its 500 brands. In doing so it added 1.1 billion unit cases to its volume, representing impressive growth of 5% in a tough climate. Coca-Cola currently sells 1.7 billion drinks every day and the Coca-Cola brand itself is available in all but three countries – Cuba, North Korea and Burma.
But sure enough, in the short time that Marketing Week spent in Atlanta, several leading figures at Coke referred back to a darker time when complacency threatened to wreck any chance the business stood of reaching such milestones.
Many of the company’s senior management team have served it for a decade or more and most have been there far longer. For them, the current success looks like something of a turnaround. Clyde Tuggle, senior vice-president of global public affairs and communications, joined in 1989. He has seen the good times and the very bad. “Believing your own hype is like breathing in your own exhaust fumes,” he says.
He points to a number of times when the company hit trouble, including the insolvency that nearly saw Coca-Cola shut its doors due to a massive spike in sugar prices in 1923, a government rationing of sugar in 1940 and a ten-year period between 1970 and 1980 when compound growth was only 1%.
By way of contrast, the Eighties and early Nineties, under legendary chairman and CEO Roberto Goizueta, was a period of growth and success thanks to some outstanding marketing. A dangerous complacency though crept in at the end of the 1990s and lasted early into the new millennium, says Tuggle.
Perhaps inevitably, such arrogance led to a string of PR disasters. There was a crisis in Belgium when dozens of schoolchildren became sick after drinking Coca-Cola products. There was a famous diversity lawsuit when Coca-Cola employees felt discriminated against on the basis of race. There were accusations over the killing of labour organisers in Columbia. And a verbal slip to a journalist left the world in no doubt about how the company viewed consumers when then CEO Douglas Ivester said he was considering creating a drinks vending machine that charged more money as the weather got warmer.
Coca-Cola is more than just a drink. It is an idea, it’s a vision, a feeling. It is about great connections and shared experiences. It is one of the truly common threads that bonds the world together.
Muhtar Kent, Chairman & chief executive, The Coca-Cola Company
Then Neville Isdell took the helm in 2004 and stabilised the company, before Muhtar Kent took over in 2008. Tuggle says Kent’s presence has been hugely significant. “What Muhtar has done is to bring everyone together, all our bottlers and partners, to focus on the brand, and show us what success can look like in the future.”
The challenge for Coca-Cola now is to achieve its planned growth and double its size in a very different world to the one the company grew up in. Chief marketing and commercial officer Joe Tripodi tells Marketing Week: “What has got us to 125 years is not going to sustain us through the next 125.”
That much Kent knew from day one of his appointment as CEO, gathering together company leaders at a special summit to talk about how things would change. He recognised that the pace of global socio-economic change would impact heavily on the business and that Coca-Cola needed to start operating differently if it was to thrive. “We knew what was occurring would fundamentally reshape our industry and the world,” says Kent. “Such changes were going to make the previous decade seem tranquil.”
Indeed, the company’s 2020 vision, which emerged from that meeting, is built around six global trends identified by Kent and his colleagues, which are now being realized, and faster than predicted in some cases.
The trends include an emerging middle class that Coca-Cola believes will deliver between 800 million and 1 billion more customers in the next 10 years, with 60% of that new wealth coming from emerging markets.
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