The above video interview is from the Advertising Research Foundation annual conference. Register now for Audience Measurement 6.0 on June 13 – 14 in NYC.
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I know I’ve done a lot of interviews in the past month when I can’t remember whether I interviewed the Coke CMO a few weeks ago. After a bit of digging, I realized that I did indeed sit down with Joseph Tripodi, EVP and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer of The Coca-Cola Company, at the Advertising Research Foundation annual conference for a robust 20 minute conversation.
We covered a lot of topics…hold on, have to watch the interview again to remember what we talked about….including the opportunities and challenges facing brands in a quickly evolving social and digital world. This real-time world throws off massive amounts of data for companies to sift through and make sense of at lighting speed in order to gain a 2 second advantage on the competition. How is Coke changing the way it interacts with consumers in this new world order of consumer engagement and real-time data?
Real-time access to social data allows Coke to develop deeper insight into people’s motives. Instead of looking at the past to predict the future, Coke can look at, and make sense of, real-time information.
Coke spends a lot of time monitoring social networks and how people are reacting to various Coke brands to get real-time feedback on a daily basis. The company is currently building an enterprise-wide social media strategy. It doesn’t hurt that the brand currently has 24,907,446 Facebook fans and 251,152 Twitter followers.
Real-time information isn’t just coming from the Web. Coke is reinventing its fountain machine in the US and has introduced Freestyle, which is a real-time lab that shows Coke management what flavors consumers are mixing. Technology is helping to inform innovation and new product development.
How do you use speed to innovate faster? As Coke gains access to more real-time data and consumer feedback, the company can innovate faster and react to consumer tastes and demands. With emerging technologies and tools, Coke is focused more on precision marketing – displaying the right message, in the right media, to the right consumer segment, in a specific geography, at the right time.
When it comes to brand building, advocacy is the thing Coke values the most, above loyalty. People standing up for and endorsing the brand is enormously powerful. Coke focuses more on expressions than impressions. So while Coke recently produced a viral Youtube video – the Jennifer Aniston sex tape video, which has already passed 9 million views – the brand takes more pride in earned media, whether it be a fan video, or a positive tweet.
Coke has always tried to capitalize on consumer passion points, such as music and sports. One of the new consumer passion points is sustainability. Coke has a program called Live Positively, which has multiple dimensions of sustainability. In each of the categories – water, carbon footprint, recycling, communities – Coke is working at the local level to try to make the world a better place. To do so, the company engages people at the local level to identify problems and solutions on all these fronts. Sustainability is actually where Joe spends most of his time on a day to day basis.
Joe also talks about what skills ad researchers need to do to be viewed as valued strategic contributors within the company. Intellectual curiosity, inspiration, being provocateurs, taking risks and pushing the envelope and making the management team uncomfortable are all attributes that make the list. The research team needs to evolve beyond market research to push and inspire the organization towards change, even if it means telling the management team things they don’t want to hear.
Two other topics we covered include Coke’s use of mobile couponing to drive consumers into retail stores and the brand’s efforts to bring social conversations back to Coke owned Web sites. Coke views itself, through socially enabled micro-sites, as a community facilitator, bringing people with common interests together around areas of passion, such as the World Cup.
