Five score and 25 years ago, John Pemberton devised a sweet, effervescent beverage, an innovative mix of syrup and carbonated water, flavored by coca leaves and kola nuts, which some believe he intended to market as a patent medicine.
The concoction actually was a variation on an earlier libation called Pemberton’s French Wine Cola, but prohibition prompted Pemberton to create a temperate version. Pemberton’s partner, Frank Robinson, came up with a catchy, alliterative name — Coca-Cola — and hand-lettered its logo in a fashionable Spencerian script.
Pemberton’s invention wasn’t exactly an instant sensation. During its first year, Coca-Cola sold only an average of nine glasses a day, at a nickel a glass, at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta. Today, however, using essentially the same logo and formula, Coca-Cola moves some 1.7 billion servings daily, and is widely regarded as the world’s most powerful brand (see page 10).
Few brands — even great brands — could begin to match such a narrative. The lesson, suggests Coca-Cola’s chief marketing and commercial officer Joe Tripodi, is a simple one: consistency.
“The beauty is there hasn’t been a lot of change,” says Joe. “Coke has been about evolution and being a brand that is solidly embedded in certain values while also reflecting the mores of the times.”
And yet, says Joe, contradiction, complexity and the delicate balance between timelessness and relevance relentlessly challenge such simplicity.
The secret formula, then, isn’t just the one jealously guarded in a vault somewhere in Georgia. It’s also Coke’s recipe for holding onto its past while remaining pertinent in the present … and navigating its future. That’s the real thing.
I would talk about two aspects: one would be the physical aspect of the brand and the other would be the emotional aspect. At the physical level, we’ve had Coke in its traditional contour glass bottle since 1916. We’ve also had the logo, the Spenserian script, since the late 1800’s. So, you basically are looking at the value of consistency over a long period of time.
The emotional side is even more important. The brand and the company have stood for positivity, optimism and happiness for 125 years. My sense is that Coke’s consistency on both the emotional and physical aspects is what has sustained Coke and gives it that very unique brand essence and identity.
How has Coke managed to sustain that consistency where others have floundered?
Coke has really identified and tapped into the cultural touch points and passion points of people all around the world, consistently, and has evolved as those passions evolved. It has been part of the Olympics since the 1920s. Coke’s been involved with soccer since the 1950s and FIFA since the ’60s or early ’70s. Coke has been involved with music for decades and decades.
Those passion points are the way that you stay relevant to a new generation. Constantly refreshing yourself — excuse the pun — with a new generation. Always making sure that people recognize that we’re not going to save the world, but that Coke has a small place in larger celebrations. Whether it’s a family meal or a birthday, there’s usually Coke around. Holidays, there’s usually Coke around. Summers, there’s Coke around.
We really stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before us and thought about this business and what it means. They understood the value of ubiquity, the value of the need to be everywhere within an arm’s reach of desire, and also the value of relevance — but not excessively chasing cool and the newest shiny object.
How does Coke’s company culture affect its brand identity?
There’s a positivity in the culture at Coke that it shares with the brand. Fundamentally, it’s about the can-do spirit, the positive spirit that the people in the company have. That pushes all the way down to all of the social responsibility activities that Coke initiates, which really give the company an unbelievable ability to impact communities in a positive way.
While Coca-Cola is a massive global business, it’s all about how we balance that at a local level and how we connect — not only our brand to people who want to drink it, but also how we engage with, and support, local communities.
Your title also balances chief marketing and commercial officer.
Yes, and that means I have to balance between the inspirational side of marketing with the commercial side, which is how we think about shoppers, the route to market, out-of-stocks, and so forth. I have to be the one who sees both sides and thinks about this business all the way from “idea to shelf.” Even with our juice business, we talk about it from grove to glass. It’s a much more holistic view of the business.
So, if someone comes into my office and says, “Joe, here’s a 30-second television commercial that’s going to solve all of our business problems,” I show them the door pretty quickly because I know that it’s a lot of rubbish. I have to balance both sides of the equation — the brand-love side through inspirational marketing, and the brand-value side through all the aspects of the commercial side of the business. We have to live in both, and that’s why Coke created this role for me.
Is advertising as important to Coke’s brand identity as it used to be?
Oh, absolutely, but I would re-frame that and call it content — not just advertising. It’s also not just about television. It’s about compelling content — whether it runs as a 30- or 60-second television commercial, a webisode, or five seconds on a mobile device.
Compelling content that engages the consumer is going to be even more important in building our brand and sustaining its relevance. The big challenge is how to allocate dollars against all these different endpoints — from traditional television, print, radio to digital, social, experiential to cinema and on and on and on.
Coke is often described as being a medium unto itself.
Totally. Obviously, we’ve done a lot with the paid model. We own a tremendous number of media, whether it’s our trucks, the cans, etc. We are also earning media — we have the world’s largest presence on Facebook, not that size is the most important thing.
We also have shared media, because frequently we’re sharing the medium of the retailer and partnering with them. So, there are really four dimensions of media.
We are developing more and more ways to use our own media more effectively to get our message out. I can’t reveal it, but you will see a great, great, example of this come November in the US and a few other selected markets. So, stay tuned for that. It will be quite stunning in terms of its scale.
In the meantime, what is the most important thing you’ve learned about social media?
Well, first of all, I think about it more as a social enterprise than just media. Our approach is very much what we call “fans first.” We let social media build organically as opposed to leading it aggressively. It would be very easy to say that social is the next shiny object, but I fundamentally believe that it’s a seminal, systemic change that gives more and more power and authority over to the consumer.
It is another arrow in the quiver of marketers, but it is a particularly vibrant and large arrow, unlike some of the other fads that came, peaked and diminished. I think social is here to stay and it’s only going to get bigger. That’s why it is so important for companies to look at an enterprise-wide social strategy that doesn’t just focus on the media side.
What does Coke Freestyle (see sidebar) say about Coke’s brand identity?
It says a lot. When I think of innovation, I think about product, package, equipment and consumer engagement innovation. In this particular case, we touch on all of those things. From a product perspective, we often hear how you can get into a co-creation environment with consumers. Well, we have the ultimate, co-creation machine with Freestyle.
It certainly reinvents equipment, but it does a few other things for us. It helps us get volume uplift in outlets and also deliver incremental benefits to retailers or customers.
The current version is fairly simplistic in terms of consumer engagement, at least for beverages. Freestyle is going to become more remotely driven, with mobile capabilities that allow consumers to use it more as a media channel. That will be another owned piece of media for Coke that we can use very strategically in getting messages out to the customer. When we look at Freestyle and its capabilities, we see it as a device that cuts across so many different aspects of innovation for us.
It also goes right back to Coke’s roots as a fountain drink.
It does. It reinvents the fountain machine. It’s also 21st century from a sustainability perspective. The carbon footprint is significantly less because we don’t have to store bags and boxes anymore. The cartridges in the machine are very small and lightweight and can be easily shipped, reducing our carbon footprint all around. The machine is a great example of what you can come up with when you think boldly and really look to reinvention.
What are the most interesting innovation opportunities for Coke at retail today?
With the smaller, mom-and-pop retailers, there is an enormous opportunity for us to help. One of the big challenges with mom-and-pops is the enormous number of choices that are presented. So, one of the challenges for small retailers is how to organize that choice.
We are doing some very interesting things, particularly in Latin America. We are reinventing our presence within mom-and-pops to help them be more profitable and help our brands stand out more. We are also making sure that our sustainability agenda is met, and that beverages are merchandised properly.
With the larger, big-box retailers, we’re looking at doing different things that might be far more focused on mobile wallets, for example. We’re looking at how we might merchandise in a more compelling way. There’s no reason why the beverage aisle needs to be a mish-mash of hundreds of different items. Why couldn’t it be more romanticized and seductive like it is in the cosmetics industry?
We need to work on different types of consumer engagement that allows us to tell our story. At the end of the day, we need to be great storytellers all the way through to the point-of-interaction with the brand. That will play out at a different pace in different markets, but it represents big opportunities for us in the retail space.
What does “shopper marketing” mean to you?
Shopper marketing is simply a detailed understanding, culled through insights of how consumers make choices, and what they respond to. It goes all the way from point-of-sale material to the brand identity to the packaging to the formatting to discreet choice analysis.
It’s kind of an umbrella term for a large number of activities. Ultimately, it’s about the insight that’s going to tell me how to align my occasion, my price, my pack, my brand and my channel to extract the most value and revenue for us and for our customers.
Is there more opportunity today for innovation in product marketing or marketing communications?
That’s a great question. My sense is that there is more opportunity for innovation in consumer engagement. Consumers are, in some instances, drowning in choice. I am not a big fan for what I call mindless flavor extensions — flavoritis, if you will. If we create pomegranate-flavored Coke, that’s going to get us a very short-term blip in sales and then it will even out.
How about dragon-fruit Coke?
We certainly have dragon fruit in our vitamin-water line. But I promise you, it will not be coming to your nearest Coca-Cola line!
When I think about innovation, I think about a broader definition, because the fundamental thing about Coca-Cola is that we really can’t innovate on what’s in the bottle. We can’t change the secret formula, so we have to innovate around the product.
That’s why you see Freestyle, which is an innovation around the delivery system. You see our PlantBottle packaging innovation, where 30 percent of the bottle is made from sugar-cane waste. One of our biggest innovations in the US is the Coke Digital Network, our proprietary, national, digital-signage network — not just out-of-home, but elsewhere, too.
It’s very easy to be seduced by bringing out a new flavor or line extension, but it’s fundamentally more important to execute better what you have. Better execution of your core attributes is the better path to growth, not endlessly chasing the next new thing. That’s what Coke has been about for the last 125 years.
What are Coke’s most exciting experiential opportunities?
We probably did the largest-ever experiential branding activity that any company has ever done with the FIFA World Cup Trophy tour last year, where we took the World Cup Trophy to 90 countries around the world, including every country in Africa.
We’ve got our World of Coca-Cola experience pavilion here in Atlanta. We get a million people a year through there. With our Open Happiness campaign, you’ve probably seen the YouTube video with the happiness machine, where all kinds of surprises are delivered out of a vending machine.
I’m a big believer in experiential spontaneity, where you insert your brand in a situation and get a spontaneous reaction in a unique and fun way. It brings a little moment of joy and happiness to people. That’s a big space for us, and it’s exciting.
How is Coke celebrating its 125th year?
We’re celebrating by thanking our partners, our bottlers, and our customers. We’re celebrating with people all around the world who love and buy our products. It’s a thank-you to not only the people of Atlanta and people around the world, but also a big thank-you to our customers. We have about 20 million customers worldwide that we call on, on a weekly basis.
We’ve made some serious grant donations this year to build a better future for people. We are re-upping our commitment in a number of corporate sustainability areas.
When we talk about turning 125, we talk about how the business has gone from one country to 206, how we’ve gone from one brand to 500 brands, how we’ve gone from serving one Coke at a time — roughly nine servings a day at Jacob’s Pharmacy — to 1.7 billion servings a day. It all comes down to the people who have supported the company. That’s what this celebration is all about. It is less about us and more about them.
How do you like to enjoy Coke?
Well, this gets to another innovation. We haven’t scaled this yet, but we’ve put Coke in an aluminum contour bottle. The feel of the aluminum in your hand is just magnificent. But the other thing is it stays cold for like three hours! That’s an amazing phenomenon. I’d love to scale that dramatically. That bottle, for me at this moment, is how I really enjoy Coke.
How does Coke resonate with you, personally?
The one thing that has stunned me when I came here — and I’ve been here three-and-a-half years now — is how deeply embedded the company is in localities all around the world, and the impact that Coke has on these communities.
People don’t realize that Coke is the largest employer in Haiti, for example. Coke has spent tens of millions of dollars on HIV education in Africa. Coke has built massive recycling plants around the world to stimulate recycling. Coke has 250-plus water projects to bring water or restore water tables around the world.
The schools that the company has built, the education programs … the economic opportunity that Coke brings through its micro-distribution centers, giving people — especially women — an opportunity to start a business. That’s what makes me feel really good.
What is it about Coke that creates happiness?
Number one, it’s the bubbles. Number two, it’s a wonderfully uplifting drink. It goes down easy. When it’s ice cold, it’s spectacularly refreshing. When you combine that with optimism, Coca-Cola creates happiness. Coke is 125 years young, and the best is yet to come. 
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SIDEBAR: The Freestylin’ Coca-Cola
