If brands want to be loved, they need to give consumers some space, especially in emerging media. Carol Kruse, Coca-Cola's interactive marketing leader, discusses the strategy for winning affections online.
When a company has more than a century of marketing experience under its belt, people expect it to know a thing or two about communicating with consumers. That expectation is why the Coca-Cola Company can't -- and doesn't -- hesitate to experiment when it comes to new marketing channels and techniques, says Carol Kruse, vice president of global interactive marketing.
Throughout its more than 120-year history, Coca-Cola has always tapped into the latest technologies to build relationships with consumers, Kruse notes. "For instance, we were one of the first companies to use coupons to provide savings to our consumers," she says. "We were an early adopter of TV, out-of-home and print... We want to keep the brand relevant and current, and so in that case, the web is just the latest medium to do that."
Although Kruse isn't at liberty to disclose specific advertising budget allocations, she does note that the company's interactive marketing investment has certainly grown in recent years -- and she foresees a continued upward trend, despite the current economic slump being felt around the globe.
Of course, as is to be expected of a company that operates in more than 200 countries, the breakdown of Coca-Cola's interactive efforts varies greatly by geographic region. While North America has led the world in embracing the internet as a communications channel, Asia clearly dominates the mobile space and, thus, Coca-Cola's mobile spending. "Then, when you get to some of the more developing countries like in Africa, where internet penetration is just 5 percent and mobile penetration is 95 percent, in many of those markets, we just skip the internet overall and jump straight to mobile marketing."
But of course, some marketing efforts, by their very nature, do bridge national divides. Such was the case with many brands' campaigns for the Beijing Olympics, and Coca-Cola was no exception. As part of its sponsorship of the Olympic Games, the company launched its "Design the World a Coke" campaign, which enabled consumers to go online and create their own artwork for the company's iconic bottle. (The site has since been redesigned for the holidays. See original Olympics visuals here.)
"We encouraged people to reach across to people around the world and co-design bottles, in kind of an East-meets-West way," Kruse says. "We saw people from Korea co-designing a bottle with a person from France, for instance. Then they could take those bottles that they had designed and put them on their Facebook pages or send them to a friend, and you could view the bottles in the gallery and comment on people's bottles, etc."
To date, according to the Coca-Cola website, more than 100,000 bottles have been designed worldwide, with more than 35,000 collaborative "mashup" bottles.