We helped Coca-Cola launch a direct-to-consumer business in three days — here’s our Design Sprint story

Foreword
That’s not a clickbait title, it’s actually our second very real case study at REBORRN. And while this is a case study published by “us”, the whole outcome is a result of pure co-creation which we’d never be able to accomplish without the amazing hybrid team of Coke & Reborrn People. It’s what you get when you skip the “Client-Consultant” relationship and work as one team.

Background

Let me begin with a bit of context. We are honoured to work with The Coca-Cola Company for the past year or so in several markets in Central, Eastern and Western Europe, supporting a bold vision of Cultural and Business Transformation. Coca-Cola is the kind of visionary organisations we had in mind to work with when launching REBORRN, and we were lucky enough to be one of their key partners in their transformational journey in the region. Among a wide range of projects we‘ve been busy with, there’s one certain initiative we helped launch that is worth sharing.

It all started with a question: How might we role model a culture of rapid experimentation to test new business models and routes to market for Coke across markets?

That might look like a common challenge, but when we say “rapid” we mean like “within-three-days-rapid”. ⏰ 🚀

The answer to such challenge was lying beneath a widespread Design Thinking approach: Design Sprint Methodology (but with a twist, more on that later). If you are not familiar with Design Sprints, you might want to take a look at Google Ventures where it started from in 2016.

It’s a way of working that uses design thinking with the aim of reducing the risk when bringing a new idea, product or service to the market. Long story short, it’s a structured process where you go from nothing to a solution prototype that you can test with consumers within a week.

The Challenge to solve in Austria 🇦🇹

Every Design sprint starts with a solvable challenge in the form of a question. The challenge at hand for this specific Design Sprint in Austria was:

How might we create a Direct to Consumer platform that would make available limited distribution of Coca-Cola products?

To do that we had to bridge the gap between demand and limited distribution for certain products. Such cases include limited editions like Custom Coke Cans with your name on it, SKUs extremely difficult to find on the shelf like Coca-Cola Signature Mixers or apparel from the latest partnership of Coke with Diesel.

To bridge that gap we knew that we needed to use technology and eCommerce platforms specifically.

Instead of spending months building a business case, and then scope a huge eCommerce platform we chose to run an experiment that would give us both an early validation if such a solution would have any market fit, but also get real market data to build a solid business plan.

In the rest of the article, we describe how we cracked the challenge using our own version of Design Sprints which we call the 58 Session. It’s a combination of a Design Sprint and an intense working session really. It’s what you’d get if a “design sprint” and a “hackathon” were having a one-night-stand. 💏

Heavy Preparation

After aligning on the challenge with the leadership team, and running 1to1s with key stakeholders to understand more about the challenge, we set up a team of Reborrn Experts, Coke People with a deep understanding of the market and people from an Austrian Agency that was working with Coke.

We ended up with a list of participants with diverse backgrounds, from Strategists and people from finance to seasoned marketers, product designers and programmatic experts. It’s important to mention that we secured the participation of the market’s C-Level which was crucial for the success of the Sprint.

As part of our prework, we invited entrepreneurs that have been running Direct to Consumer startups to share the challenges of the market, eCommerce Experts from Coca-Cola CEE to showcase best practices around the world, but also consumers from the market to have the team “interrogate” them on the first day of our Sprint. All the POVs were max20’ keynotes or discussions.

At the same time, we worked with Coke’s data analysts to research the market and immerse the Sprint team on the First Day of the Sprint. Being budget & time-conscious we used Pollfish to understand more about limited edition products in Austria, and the respective consumer behaviours.

The research showing what consumers expect from Coke when it comes to limited distribution products.

Finally, as part of the Sprint Preparation, we asked the team participants to complete two missions. The first one was the Empathy mission, interviewing a stranger to get to know more about his consumption habits with a focus on eCommerce and beverages, and the second was the Safari mission, where we asked everyone to buy a limited edition product online, write down their observations and share with the rest of the team.

Stretching the limits of Design Sprint Methodology.

While the Design Sprint Methodology was the answer as a process to move from nothing to a testable prototype, we wanted to stretch the process to its limits. Instead of creating a high fidelity prototype that during a sprint you normally test with 5 end users, as the methodology describes, we decided to actually build an MVP of the product, launch it to the Austrian market and why not have customers before the end of the Sprint! 🤓

At the same time, we felt confident enough to do that in 3 instead of 5 days as the original version of Design Sprints suggest, leaving one more day to monitor the results of the live product, hoping that we might even have a customer.

So here’s what needed to be done in order to launch an MVP in 3 days:

Day 1:

• Align the team into the Sprint Challenge.
• Provide the right stimuli for every participant before jumping into solutions with research, external experts & consumer interviews.
• Make a (Journey) map and decide where to focus on the solution design process.

Day 2 (until lunch):

• Use the Group’s collective wisdom to ideate and use a structured process to help them turn their ideas into actual solutions.
• Facilitate a process to make a sticky decision on the winning solution.

💡The team chose to move forward with an idea called “Never Seen Before”. A D2C platform that would be a single product eCommerce platform selling a limited number of items of any product you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else on the Market. For our experiment, we picked “Coca-Cola Signature Mixers” a range of Coca-Cola drinks bundled with certain flavours, ideal for cocktails.

Day 2 (after lunch) & Day 3:

• Build & launch the MVP based on the winning solution in 1.5 days. For our case that meant that in order to launch we needed to have in place the following:

- A Brand (a name and a Logo)
- The proposition (Texts, visuals for the website)
- A working eCommerce Platform (Shopify in our case)
- Accounts on Facebook & Instagram
- Billing system to accept credit cards
- A (temp) Legal entity to invoice the products.
- Stock of products (we had pre-stocked more than one alternatives)
- A way to ship products to customers.
- Legal terms and GDPR Compliant privacy terms
- A phone line for customer inquiries
- Programmatic campaign on Google, Facebook & Instagram.
- Campaign Visuals in various formats
- A survey mechanism for abandoned cards
- A measurement protocol to define success KPIs

That’s all. 😎

Well.. not exactly. We wanted to push more. Since the product was connected to cocktails consumption, the team came up with an idea to create a trade promo campaign on the fly and promote the product at the Hotel’s Lounge bar where we were holding the Design Sprint.

To do that we needed to:

- Design and print a pack of leaflets to promote the Platform on a Trade Promotion on Hote’s lounge bar

- Train the bar’s staff to introduce the mixers to certain customers hanging at the bar, drinking their cocktail.

That’s all we did before pressing the “launch” button (there’s no such thing really by the way) at 7 pm on the 3rd day of the Design Sprint. But while most of the teams were busy building the MVP another team was building this:

• A detailed business plan for the first 12 months of operations to understand the kind of resources we would need in case our experiment was proven successful
• A detailed backlog of next actions for the team in case of a successful experiment,

Day 4:

The next morning we spend most of the day, putting some last final touches to the product, fixing bugs, & fine-tuning the Business Case and recovering from the previous night’s celebrations. 🎉🍾

We did all that while waiting impatiently for our first customer. And guess what: We had more than one. Less than 24h after launching we had some hundreds of visitors, and a handful of customers that actually paid for our products. Before flying back from Austria we were already counting revenue of more than €500 and had our first orders waiting to be delivered to customers.

After the sprint

We left the business running to complete a 3-week experiment to collect enough data to get a data-backed answer to our experiment but also build a solid business case.

The result

The MVP is still live (you can’t buy though) here: https://neverseenbefore.at/

The experiment proved successful, judging by the Customer Acquisition Cost and the Conversion Rate we measured during the 3 week period and the team is now further working on the winning solution.

We created a short documentary trying to visualise part of the story in a 6’ movie:

Epilogue

What we just described is not the result of any secret sauce that we own at REBORRN. It’s what happens when we come together and work as one team with a razor-sharp focus on a singular challenge.

Just take a look at this article on what great teams have done throughout history in days or months, that others couldn’t achieve in years or even decades.

it took 366 days to build the first Disneyland in 1955 (Source)

But living in the midst of an unprecedented crisis we don’t need to look any further to understand what we, humans, can achieve if we come together and focus on a singular challenge.

During this crisis, we’ve seen hospitals built in weeks instead of years, researchers around the world making progress of decades within days, we even see digital transformation of entire governments launching one digital service after the other within a couple of weeks.

It took 2 weeks to build a hospital in Wuhan, China

And while we most often expect this kind of velocity and reflexes from startups, this case study is a living proof that incumbents can be no different.

Compliments

To Demi Kazasi, Coke’s Digital Acceleration Manager for CEE, who came up with the whole initiative, Laszlo Niklos (Country Manager) & Vesna Vlahovic (Marketing Manager) who trusted the whole team and gave us the opportunity to experiment, to Verena Mather for the support and the countless meetings to make this happen. 🙏🏻