Coca-Cola to adapt via three principles

ORLANDO, FLA. — The Coca-Cola Co. has a growth strategy grounded in five pillars — shaping a portfolio of loved brands, transforming its marketing and innovation agenda, optimizing the Coca-Cola ecosystem, building talent and capabilities and enhancing its license to win — but moving forward it is ready to “boldly” adapt with three principles, said Henrique Braun, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola.

In a Feb. 17 presentation at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference taking place in Orlando, Fla., Braun said the principles include becoming even more consumer-centric, remaining constructively discontented and placing digital at the core of every connection.

Braun said the path to becoming more consumer-centric will feature a focus on four “I’s,” — insights, innovation, intimacy and integration.

“We have now the ability to get way more deeper insights for local basis and extrapolate these into scalable platforms moving forward,” he said. “That was done with our modern marketing, our transformation on how to get data and transform that into actions.

“(On) innovation, we believe that we have done a significant work on these, but we can do better.

“Local intimacy, it’s very important as well on the balance of scale and … it’s becoming even more important as we move forward now in terms of driving new opportunities that can come to the $1 billion (brand) ideas that start at the local level and then later can be scaled.

“End-to-end integration, that’s also very important, which is how we integrate the marketing plans with the customers and have a 360° platform that goes from engagement all the way to transactions.”

Expanding on Coca-Cola’s approach to local intimacy, Braun said the company is creating what it calls “must-win missions” for each market. He said Coca-Cola is looking at specific brands in specific markets and determining what must be done in terms of the development stage of that market and how to invest together with its bottlers to accelerate the pace of growth.

“Those ‘must-win missions’ will be also connected to the proper incentives so that we can drive that moving forward,” he said. “So that’s very important, especially because that touches on the concept of being discontent and trying to think on how we want to unlock more growth moving forward.”

Braun also expects digital to be a Coca-Cola “superpower.”

“I deliberately wanted to say a ‘superpower’ because if you follow me on the thinking here that we do have an unrivaled portfolio of $1 billion brands, we have an unmatched system that is very unique and very aligned,” he said. “The next iteration of that could be how we leverage digital to amplify and expand the ceiling of that competitive advantage.”

He stressed, though, that Coca-Cola will need scale to unlock that superpower. He said the company needs alignment on how to leverage data.

“I’ll now say that we are in the beginning of that journey,” he noted. “We need to be humble that that’s the direction that we want to take it.”