Coca-Cola on cultural insight: Turning social tensions into a global marketing program

Geoffrey Precourt Event Reports ARF Re:Think, April 2012

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Coca-Cola on cultural insight: Turning social tensions into a global marketing program Geoffrey Precourt Event Reports ARF Re:Think, April 2012

Coca-Cola on cultural insight: turning social tensions into a global marketing program
Geoffrey Precourt Warc It's not easy being a cultural icon. For one, culture changes market by market, decade by decade. That's the issue facing Pablo Kennedy, Coca-Cola Global Knowledge and Innovation Director, who leads the company's Human Motivation Framework program. At the 2012 Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) annual Re:Think assembly of thought leadership, Kennedy gave some insight into how the brand stays culturally relevant over time. Coca-Cola has embraced a "better-world" perspective for the last 100 years, Kennedy explained, "adopting to the problems and tensions of the time." The brand regularly has sought to refresh itself as "a synonym of happiness and optimism." When those values start to ebb, Coca-Cola steps in, "understanding consumers as humans with tensions and desires." In the 1970s, for instance, social unrest was a cultural tension that Coke identified. The values that offered points of connection between consumers and the brand, he explained, were, "hope, freedom, and the possibility of connecting with others". The result? An iconic piece of television advertising that told the world, "Peace is possible."

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By sharing a point of view with time-sensitive social tensions, Kennedy explained, "People will see you as a relevant brand when society is in conflict." And when culture starts to drift, the brand reacts, embracing a formula of "human tensions plus values plus brand point of view equals what we call, 'brand love'." Kennedy began his work in market research with 10 years at Unilever. He moved to Coca-Cola in 2008. With Coke's Human Motivation Framework, "We need to tap into social tensions," Kennedy told the ARF. "What are societies struggling with? What are the common themes? Who is the enemy we are going to fight? What are the values we want to support? And what are the areas of the brand we can talk about?" To tap into the current mindset, Coca-Cola spent nine months researching the roots of various points of global tensions. More than 340 interviews with social scientists, thought leaders, economists, and communications specialists started the process of developing an "intellectual point of view" that could help the company "grasp different market expressions" of unrest. The topline finding: "To understand the world, you have to understand that people never know what's going to happen. Economies are changing overnight. And there's increasing paranoia all over the world." An example: there is a fear that "Everyone is my enemy and I can't predict the action of others." Kennedy explained: "You see someone and the first think you think is, 'I'm scared.'" Respondents recognized that the fears were largely unfounded, but the irrationality didn't matter. "They still cared." Drilling down on the data, Coca-Cola found 10 'microforces' tensions that are global in most societies. And, although they came to light in different degrees in different parts of the world, the forces were universal enough for Coca-Cola to begin work "to make our brand work better". To give the theory some meaning, in-depth sessions followed in China, Argentina, and the US. "We wanted to articulate this global insight with insights from consumers," Kennedy told the ARF session. "We used vox populi to discover what they really were talking about when they were not talking in [a formal research context]. And we found that consumers had a profound need to talk about it. We'd try to end an interview after 10 minutes and they'd say, 'No, no, nolet me talk you some more. Can we please continue?' It was a real kind of catharsis." To countermand the feeling that, "bad people outnumber good people", Kennedy told the ARF audience, "We needed to develop a culturally relevant message." One insight that drove the execution of advertising: good people and good news do not make the news. "We had a point of view that we wanted to show that people had good reasons to believe in this world." The result was the 'Reason to believe' spot.

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In Cokespeak, the program was "very liquid," Kennedy said, in that it could be used for special occasions like Mothers Day and Fathers Day. It could be aired in Egypt even as people took to the streets in the Arab spring and after the tsunami in Japan. But it didn't need an occasion: it was a global message that resonated in Turkey, the US, and in India in Hindi:

Viewer responses put the work in "the top five percent" of commercial rankings in Mexico, Thailand, and China, according to Kennedy. "If you want to be a cultural-leadership brand, you have to lead." And 'Reason to believe' was not a one-time research that began and ended with one global program, said Kennedy. "We'll use [the findings] for future products and on other campaigns. When you go so deeply into society, you can use the work for almost anything you do inside your own company."

About the author Geoffrey Precourt is the US Editor of Warc You can read all his papers and reports from recent marketing events at www.warc.com/precourt.

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