Coca-Cola is, arguably, the most iconic brand in the world. But, company officials want to build a stronger brand and enhance customer relationships, while elevating brand loyalty.
During Tuesday’s fiscal fourth-quarter conference call, The Coca-Cola Company CEO Ahmet Muhtar Kent discussed strategic goals.
“As the most valuable beverage brand in the world, people continue to love our brand, but we recognize consumers want to enjoy Coca-Cola in different ways,” he said, according to Seeking Alpha. “Regardless of which one they want, they want a Coca-Cola brand with great taste and uplifting refreshment. Our One Brand strategy transitions us to a single iconic brand campaign that celebrates both the product as well as the brand.
Importantly, this campaign gets back to our roots, featuring the product at the heart of the creative, and celebrating the experience and simple pleasures of drinking a Coca-Cola, any Coca-Cola.”
Kent added that the campaign is an example of how the company is transforming the way it works to be faster with reduced costs.
“This campaign was built end-to-end from the start, from consumer through to shopper, digital, and music, and was developed to support the entire globe,” he explained. “This helped us reduce the number of agencies and better leverages production costs as well. This discipline, combined with the inspiration of our talented marketing teams, is what will continue to fuel our growth.”
In late 2014, Coca-Cola we announced a five-point plan to reinvigorate its growth and increase profitability.
“We committed to transform the company to one that is focused on our core value creation model of building strong brands, enhancing customer relationships, and leading our franchise system with a goal of becoming a leaner, higher margin, higher return, and more focused company,” Kent said. “And I’m pleased to say that we made significant progress against our initiatives, including the very important announcement this morning about accelerating our refranchising. Importantly, our progress against these initiatives is leading to improving performance, even in a very challenging macro environment.”
On Tuesday, Coca-Cola announced that it’s committed to refranchising 100% of its bottling territories, including Coke cold-fill production by the end of 2017.
“This is a critical step for our entire system in North America,” Kent explained. “It will not be easy and will require the hard work and dedicated efforts of our entire team and close collaboration with our bottling partners. So we have a clear plan in place, and are confident that this is essential for our future success. When we complete these refranchising efforts by the end of 2017, we will look very different than we do today, as we return to a company that is focused on our core strength of building strong, sustainable, and valuable brands, creating value for our customers and partners and continuing to drive system capabilities. As a result, we will become less capital intensive, with significantly higher margins and returns, which will enable our core strengths even further.”