ATLANTA -- Amid some 200 analysts, investors and media last week, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent made a confession.
"There was a period when our company did lose its way," he said, according to a report in AdAge magazine. "We were too internally focused and not focused enough on the changes taking place with our consumers and customers. In essence, we were too busy looking at the dashboard and were not sufficiently paying attention to the world outside of our windshield."
The marketer now seems to have its priorities straight, according to the report. At its 2020[image-nocss] Vision meeting last week with analysts and journalists, Coca-Cola laid out goals within the areas of profit, people, portfolio, partners, planet and productivity. Key priorities include doubling system revenue to $200 billion in 2020 from $95 billion last year. And Coke plans to more than double the number of servings of its productswater, soft-drinks, juices and the likeconsumed per day to more than 3 billion.
Coke pulled out all the stops at the meeting, its first such confab since 1998. There was a dinner designed by Linton Hopkins, named one of 2009's best new chefs by Food & Wine, using Coca-Cola as a key ingredient; a sampling of Coca-Cola's foreign beverages; and tastings from its Freestyle fountain, which boasts more than 100 beverage varieties. But underlying the discussion of new products, pricing, targeting, marketing and media approaches was a common theme: putting the consumer front and center.
Kent said the Atlanta-based company will focus on working across many geographies, cultures and channels, targeting the right consumers in a fragmented media environment and innovating.
"People are demanding more and more for their time and attention. People need to be constantly entertained now; [it's an] ADD economy," said Joe Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer, according to the report. "We're changing fundamentally from being TV commercial producers to content developers. ... We're leading a new and unique approach ... from purely mass marketing to one-on-one marketing."
To that end, marketing executives highlighted plans to be relevant locally while scaling globally. Those plans ranged from eliminating agency duplication to creating a single World Cup campaign to introducing new, global packaging for its juice brands.
Efforts to better connect with key consumers, including teens, moms and multicultural consumers, were also detailed. And the marketing team touted its focus on experimenting with new media, such as digital billboards, social media and in-store advertising, while affirming its intent to continue creating high-profile TV campaigns.
Those plans, laid out by the company's top marketers, were well-received by analysts, who recognize that better segmenting media and scaling campaigns globally will eventually boost the bottom line.
"Investors want to see how they're going to [achieve the growth they've projected]," Bill Pecoriello, CEO at ConsumerEdge Research, told the magazine. "Marketing efficiency is one of the contributors to that. Marketing dollars are such a big part of their cost structure that leveraging marketing dollars is key to their profit growth."
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