Bachir Zeroual, Global Director of Marketing for The Coca Cola Company, participated in a compelling Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss a recent venture Powerade embarked on with fitness sports community Endomondo, Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of The Olympics and FIFA World Cup, content, loyalty, and challenges.
Endomondo launched a Brand Pages service for its very popular fitness social network. Powerade, manufactured and marketed by The Coca-Cola Company, was one of the first companies to take advantage of this platform. Powerade was the Official Sports Drink at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
What factors prompted Powerade to get involved with Endomondo?
Powerade is continuously looking for relevant ways to connect with its core target, which we identify as "born sportsmen and women.” Endomondo brings together the right, leading technology with social networking capabilities to motivate users from around the world to be more active, have more fun and compete with each other while they are becoming better all-round athletes.
What do you hope this partnership will bring Powerade customers from an engagement perspective?
This partnership is certainly a cornerstone of our activation of the FIFA World Cup event in Brazil this year. By offering our core target a set of communications and experiences that resonate with the way they consume their passion for sport, we are convinced it will drive more engagement from our consumers and will also help us recruit new ones to the Powerade brand. Endomondo enables us to do all of this: bridge the online and offline worlds, convey our brand messages through the new Page tool and also engage one on one with our target.
How will the gaming aspect of this impact your customers?
The gamification of sports and fitness in general is a real trend in today’s world and, as a brand, we must leverage it. The main value of this gamification trend is that it makes sport, fitness, or an overall active lifestyle more accessible for more people.
How important is content to Powerade and its customers?
Content is key. Content is what enables Powerade to tell the right story and speak to our consumers’ hearts and minds. But more important than content is the relevance of the content; the authenticity of the content and the context in which the content is delivered. Endomondo, in that regard is a fantastic vehicle for our content as it enables Powerade to reach the right audience, with the right content in the context of their exercise.
With the Olympics and World Cup as part of your portfolio, how will this partnership work toward furthering customer engagement/customer experience from those two massive worldwide events?
Customer engagement should obviously be an ongoing process for any brand and it cannot be limited to specific events. But by combining the power of events such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics (in terms of consumer passion and interest) with what the Endomondo platform can offer as a content vehicle, Powerade is certain we will engage more consumers in a more relevant way.
If loyalty is based on a behavior, as we believe, how do you think that behavior has changed in recent years?
Well, two very important things have happened in the recent years. One is, thanks to greater access to information, consumers are more and more savvy and aware of what choices they need to make and why. The second is that technology has enabled consumers to access what they want, do what they want and not to rely on any brand. The time of "brought to you courtesy of brand X" is long gone. So to build loyalty, as a brand you need to ensure that you are creating shared value - that each time a consumer interacts with your brand he/she can clearly see the value he/she is getting.
As a global marketer, what things or challenges keep you up at night?
What keeps me up at night is the question of how we can ensure that, at any given time, any of our initiatives is connecting with our targets in an authentic way with a relevant message. Authenticity and relevance will ultimately drive brand love.