Coca-Cola: thinking outside the bottle

• Author: Tom Benner
• Position: Future Ready Singapore

It’s a tall order. There is more than USD1 billion in retail sales annually across 207 countries (that’s all but two countries in the world). How do you keep the brand experience fresh, every day?

Today we tend to think that innovation is about finding new ideas – discovering ground breaking solutions and launching new products that drive incremental business value.

However, the history of Coca-Cola has shown us how to drive business and innovate with exactly the same product solution across time, generations and markets.

Coca-Cola calls this approach – Constant Reinvention: it’s about refreshing and constantly reinventing the assets you already have.

While the product inside a Coke bottle has not changed since its invention in 1886, marketing the product has been evolving with the times and keeping up with consumers ever since.

Call it thinking outside the bottle

“What we have been doing is innovating around the magic formula,” explains Cristina Bondolowski, Coca-Cola’s head of marketing for Southeast Asia. “As you can imagine, it is a huge challenge for us every day, the pressure that we have in terms of how do we keep it going, how do we ensure that people have that real moment of happiness at least once a day.”

The formula for what’s inside the bottle remains a fiercely guarded secret, but Ms. Bondolowski discusses the four major ingredients for what is outside the bottle.

Ingredient one: understanding people

Understanding consumers and finding insights into their likes and preferences was easy in Coca-Cola’s earliest days, but made harder when distribution grew to worldwide proportions, Ms. Bondolowski says.

While this led to research to capture consumer insights, a direct connection with consumers was still needed.

“There were a lot of intermediates in the middle and obviously it was difficult to capture that point of view,” she notes.

Of course, technology and social media have changed all that and will continue to make it easier for companies, big and small, to interact directly with consumers.

“The biggest revolution we are experiencing today that is making us compete in a democratic way with smaller and bigger players is technology. Technology is impacting innovation, marketing and how we understand consumers,” says Ms. Bondolowski.

Technology is enabling Coca-Cola to close the communication loop with its consumers. She adds: “Suddenly we have direct interaction with our consumers and we know what they are thinking. We can even...