Technology is great, but Coca-Cola wants more human connections

Interview with Bradford Ross, Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola’s director of global football marketing Bradford Ross explains how the company has adapted its branding strategies to include more powerful consumer experiences that celebrate human connection, inclusivity and the passion that fans have for the game.

Are there one or two industry or societal trends having a big impact on Coca-Cola marketing right now?

Given the shift in how people are consuming, integrating, and interacting with media, we look at marketing from a more media neutral lens than ever before. That’s one of the fundamental trends we’re focused on now. The second big thing is how technology has evolved over the last couple of years to create a deeper communication with consumers.

It essentially gives you this power to bring people who are further from you closer. On the flipside, however, it also has this ability to take people that are closer to you further away. It’s your classic blessing and curse scenario.

What does that mean for marketers?

Now everyone has the ability to spread their message and connect with people on the other side of the world. Unfortunately, if you go too far down that road you end up becoming a little disconnected from your audience. Because of that, I believe there’s a shift in how consumers want to interact with brands. It may seem counterproductive, but we want to go to a more analog space to create experiences that people can actually be part of. Because now more than ever, that’s what people are craving. So I think it’s important for brands to create and give that to consumers.

“We want to create experiences that people can actually be part of.”

That takes us directly into the heart of the matter. How has Coca-Cola changed its experiential marketing for this new reality?

Experience in marketing has actually been part of our brand and our brand values from very early on. What I think has happened is experiential marketing has probably gotten a little more sophisticated. What we see now is how experiential should be a big component of the integrated marketing mix, as opposed to a standalone component of it.

Would it be fair to say though that, in that past, those efforts were simpler, more about sponsorship and sampling?

I agree it was probably simpler in that we hadn’t yet built it out into what we are trying to do from the integrated approach. It was a little bit more single-minded in its focus. Whether it was a sponsorship where the objective was brand awareness, or it was just a pure sampling activity to build trial, they are both two pretty simple standalone objectives.

Now we have to determine how experiential marketing moves from being a standalone objective to part of a more integrated approach.

So now it can actually become part of the brand strategy’s big picture?

Absolutely, 100%. A great example is in 2014 we had our biggest global marketing campaign ever, which was built around the FIFA World Cup. The creative idea was the World’s Cup. The narrative was around people feeling a little bit excluded from the FIFA World Cup because they couldn’t be part it. So for us it was about making it more inclusive.

We created an experiential activity called the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour by Coca-Cola. We took the FIFA World Cup trophy to 90 countries over nine months. It was three and a half times around the circumference of the earth. We engaged closely with over a million consumers who came and got their photograph taken with the trophy.

Now that was experiential in its purest form, but linked back to a much bigger campaign and core creative idea for the FIFA World Cup. It became our proof point for the World’s Cup narrative and the World’s Cup campaign.

Beyond those in-person interactions how did the Tour do?

It did exceedingly well because it provided us with a platform where we could actually tell and build authentic credible stories that don’t come to life if you go the TVC route. So while we had a manifesto and a TVC — which were the underpinnings of the campaign — we worked with our local markets using the trophy tour to tell a beautiful story around a community that wanted us to bring the trophy to them.

Not only did that give us amazing on-the-ground experiential credibility, but it enabled us to build extremely powerful content from that experience because it was real, authentic and credible.

“It’s all about taking the intrinsic qualities of the brand and bringing them to life through an experiential activity.”

One of the terms that comes up a lot in discussions about modern experiential marketing is multisensorial. Is that something that Coca-Cola thinks about?

We do, absolutely. For example, last year it was the 100 year anniversary of the contour bottle. So we asked ourselves ‘What’s the experiential element of this?’

To answer that, we created what we called the Bottle Art Tour- an event in which we travelled to 21 or 22 markets around the world with a bottle art exhibit. Of course it was more than just an art show that featured the bottle, the tour was really about how the bottle influenced culture, both musically and artistically.

The best part of it was how we built the multisensorial effect into the exhibit. For example, the minute you entered the doors you were hit with the smell of Coke and caramel. Then you walked through a mist tunnel into this very cool, refreshing room, so it almost felt like you were stepping into a fridge.

Ultimately, we wanted to play with the senses. So from a visual point of view, we had an exhibit called the Bubble-izer in which people could see their images on a screen and through this amazing technology it would appear like they had bubbles coming out of their heads and arms. It actually looked like they were in a Coke bottle.

From a feel and touch perspective, we had lined up a series of Coke bottles that you could roll your hand across to actually feel the texture of the bottle itself.

And then for the audio component of the experience, we recreated the sound you get when you open a Coke. The entire exhibit was all about taking the intrinsic qualities of the brand and bringing them to life through an experiential activity.

And it did well?

It was super-successful. When we we asked consumers what they liked, a lot of them ranked the sensorial room very, very highly because it engaged with all their senses. As marketers, what more could we ask for?

For a look at how Stella Artois is using experiential marketing today, click here. And for a deeper dive into experiential marketing that answers key questions about how and why brands can build better experiences for their consumers, click here.