Building personalized 1-to-1 customer relationships and creating value are two brand loyalty drivers for executives at The Coca-Cola Company.
During his presentation at the Nov. 19 Morgan Stanley Global Consumer Conference, Sandy Douglas, SVP, Global Chief Customer Officer and President, Coca-Cola North America, described Coca-Cola’s North America strategic business focuses on driving economic profit and value creation for the company.
Douglas offered three main levers: Accelerating topline growth, margin expansion, and capital efficiency.
“And that is our role in North America and we’re going to do that,” Douglas said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “The action agenda is driving brand growth to improving quantity and quality of all types of marketing but led by great advertising. Next is, continuing our significant momentum that we’ve achieved over the last four or five years in the still categories through acquisition and organic brand development, we've become a powerful participant in the non-carbonated beverage business.”
Creating value and engagement for customers is the core lever for Coca-Cola, Douglas said.
“Now the focus is on the intrinsic, delicious, amazing taste of an ice cold Coke,” he explained. “The basic marketing is a key element because Coke has a mysterious taste and the ability to romance it, to celebrate it, to attract it, to sell it, to invite with it, is what makes Coke grow. It has been always that way and in a contemporary modern digital way today, it is no less significant and I’ll show you the results we’re starting to achieve.”
What’s more, Coca-Cola has focused on packaging architecture.
“In this case, we’ve actually sharpened our focus and we had some key insights that are trend-based, that are based on the health and wellness trends, that suggests consumer’s strong desire for smaller packages, for premium packages, that don’t give them too much liquid, they give them the ability to refresh and enjoy but not necessarily to over-consume,” Douglas explained. “And then finally we are building a one-to-one relationship. You’ll hear that from a lot of marketers now is their capability of data and the ability of loyalty programs gives you the ability to communicate and understand almost on a one-on-one basis what consumers want, where they want it, and how you can incentivize purchase and build your relationship with them.”
Douglas said the marketing is beginning to work.
“We ran a promotion that many of you know in the third quarter called Share a Coke that was very effective, but what you can see is an October well after Share a Coke was over, the results accelerated further,” he said. “You see the relationship of the brand to the industry and even to the total Coca-Cola Company. The 3% sales growth for our Sparkling beverages since the middle part of the year-end sustaining and accelerating slightly is an algorithm that works for us.”