Considerably one of the most well-known brands across the globe, Coca-Cola, played a pioneering role in the very development of consumer goods industry. The company stood at the forefront of market-at-large throughout the changing dynamics of the twentieth century, experimenting with numerous ideas that established across different geographies and cultures the core brand of Coca-Cola: Refreshing the world and making a difference. Powering 2.2 billion servings per day (Quincey & Murphy, 2023), underlying activities that work in tandem to align the brand of Coca-Cola ever closer to its customers is an ongoing journey of collaboration with the teams, partners and customer.
Marketing function at Coca-Cola
According to Pandergrast & Crawford, marketing was the core foundation underneath Coke’s success. It defined how the product was manufactured, distributed, and sold, and how consumers perceived it(2021, p.11). More than the product attributes, it was the brand of Coke – synonymized with moments of joy and refreshment – that built a relationship with its consumers. Evolution of this relationship as Coke developed into a multinational company (and the brand – a multicultural one), is a worthy case study.
Brief history of Coke’s marketing: from product promotion to cultural syncretism
Like any new brand, during the nascent days of Coca-Cola dating back to the late 19th century, the priority was to make Coke’s existence known to the people. hence, they utilized modest advertising budget largely to spread awareness of their existence (Pendergrast & Crawford, 2021, p. 12). As the brand steadied its footing in the localities it served, the company scaled its operations: production and promotion, scaling marketing activities with it.
Ubiquity: the sales role that fulfilled marketing goal
Decision makers at the time duly recognized importance of complementing Coke’s marketing with its sales pipeline for availability, round-the-clock and at many locations. It was the sales teams’ role to go to the field and onboard local watering holes like retail stores and restaurants to serve Coke’s products, yet, it seemed to fulfill the key marketing goal.
Such ubiquitous presence at key locations built brand’s rapport with its customers because people not only saw the printed and digital advertisements everywhere, but they could also buy it just as easily from any shop nearby, they did not have to go through the discomfort of waiting, searching and inconveniencing themselves to reach a particular place to acquire what was presented to them as a “refreshing moment of joy”, it was simply available everywhere. Functionally, an extensive sales operation also fulfilled Coke’s marketing goal of building better connection with its consumers (Pendergrast & Crawford, 2021, p. 27).
Brand’s evolution towards cultural branding
Over time, Coke expanded its marketing channels creatively and extensively, targeting the whole spectrum from granularly targeted opportunities to mass coverage. Their activities ranged from placing advertisements on numerous items like stationary, to creating large scale ad campaigns for broadcast media, and everything in between, like sponsoring sports events and placing their brand strategically in movies and television shows (Pendergrast & Crawford, 2021).
As traditional marketing goals eventually fulfilled, Coke’s marketing evolved to connect with consumers on a deeper level, the cultural and social kind by adapting cultural branding. Cultural branding meant catering the brand to the dominant beliefs, values, ideals of Coke’s vast customer base, the brand’s audience. Coca-Cola hence focused on culturally relevant global themes like care for environment and care for personal health, establishing themselves in the cultural and social dialogues, attempting to connect with consumers on a deeper level. Innovation in Coke’s activities was centered around the same, keeping the brand at the heart of many cultural phenomena, aligning the brand with cultural values, beliefs and symbols.
Coke’s marketing in the twenty-first century
With the decline in broadcast model, Coke adopted the Internet, which, as opposed to television commercials, involved a more direct two-way communication. In the digital age, tightly managed brand of Coke was opened to the consumers as they essentially co-created the brand with growing user-generated content, social media engagement and online communities (Pendergrast & Crawford, 2021, p. 30).
Sales function at Coca-Cola
Over its history, sales activities of Coke complemented the marketing team in the ambitious growth efforts. Core function of sales teams at Coca-Cola was to develop robust eco-system of its traditional customers – distributors, retailers, supermarkets, and restaurants, in the geographies worldwide. The team, hierarchically spanning from country manager at the top to account developers and merchandisers at the local level, ensured that said intermediaries stocked, sold, and promoted Coke products (Bartleby Research).
The sales hierarchy
This hierarchy operated as follows. At the frontline, which was the most peripheral level of Coke, and closest to the market, the merchandisers ensured round-the-clock availability of Coke products at point-of-sale locations (Hamlin, 2019). The team would regularly, physically visit the stores to supervise how Coke’s products were displayed. They also talked to the store owners and managers to collected feedback about the products while querying for how much product the store needed for the next cycle. Such communications revealed key insights about the particular stores’ customer base, like whether the consumers were grocery buyers buying the products for household or whether they were impulsive consumers of coke who were taking a break to consume to product, etc.
The Account managers further catered to these vendors (retail shops, grocery stores etc) through an ongoing relationship, thoroughly understanding their needs, providing them training on new products and services, and keeping up with industry trends. They also promoted the products in the locality to the vendors by participating in trade shows. At regional level, sales function oversaw comprehensive availability and distribution of Coke’s products and services along with forecasting and achievement of the sales objectives.
Being in direct touch with customer needs, sales teams also collaborated with finance, marketing, and operations departments to fulfill said needs, relaying back the first-hand information from the market (Climb, 2022).
The e-commerce era evolution: Digital sales team
With the rising use of the social media and e-commerce, Coca-Cola explored its own direct-to-consumer platforms, essentially adopting omni-channel approach to reach the end consumer online. The company created a dedicated digital sales team to cater to digitization of its sales channels. The digital sales team aligned brand with realities of new-coming platforms.
Their function included creation of packaging more suitable for online sales and shipping directly to consumers. They improved digital imagery of products enhancing their product’s visual quality online. Among offline channels, they maintained brand consistency between on-screen presentation at retailers and digital menus in restaurants with physical presentation of coke products (The Coca-Cola Company, 2020). Digital sales team oversaw the entire digital strategy at offline locations and integrated online channels in company’s sales and marketing (Eddu saver, 2019).
Intertwined nature of marketing and sales teams
Put distinctly, the marketing function at Coca-Cola operated centrally, engaging in aims broader in scope: from generating awareness to generating demand, while establishing and maintaining Coke brand in the process. On the other end, sales function was more specific, regularly collaborating with retailers, wholesalers and distributors, developing relationships with key customers and executing daily to fulfill short term objectives. Despite the distinct functions with clearly defined roles, objectives of both teams complemented each other. The concept of integrating sales and marketing was inherent to Coke’s management, since, as noted earlier, the company duly recognized importance of complementing marketing with execution on the ground.
How sales and marketing complemented each other
As early as in 1899, when independent bottlers undertook distribution and sale of Coke products in their respective territories, they relied entirely on Coca-Cola for advertising materials, signifying importance of Coke’s marketing on local sales function (Pendergrast & Crawford, 2021, p. 15). Coke naturally attained the brand consistency across different geographies through this partnership.
Shared reporting
Company’s shared reporting was another foundation through which sales and marketing came together. The marketing team traditionally communicated with consumers via brand marketing, while sales happened through bottler-operated pipeline. Consequently, the marketing team was removed from the sales data and end consumers. Sales information is how the marketing team could see the feedback of their marketing and promotion activities in particular region, hence, the information that was typically sitting with Coke’s sales partners: bottlers, distributors and retailers was critical for Coca-Cola’s marketing team.
Coca-Cola developed a shared reporting system that was accessed by all the sales partners of Coke to feed sales information back to the company, which allowed the company to create central business intelligence, collecting, processing, and sharing back substantial amount of data from hundreds of independently operating bottlers around the world. Sales reporting and forecasting thus developed, provided marketing teams with much needed insight into sales as an outcome of their activities.
Sales teams also benefitted from this system. The sales personnel that were on the field, collecting stocking orders from retailers in their locality now had a clear visualized information on their device, which was usually a tablet screen, about the particular locality’s marketing activities. They could use this information in real-time to inform about Coke’s marketing activities to their retailers, feeding them with the insights about Coke’s central activities which were not easy to do before. Such visualized dashboards available at the click of a button allowed sales teams to make critical decisions without having to communicate back and forth with marketing teams. (Brouwer & Chacko, 2015).
Collaborative campaigns
In trailblazing marketing campaigns like “Happiness Machine” where ordinary-looking vending machines surprised customers with ‘array of goodies including flowers, pizzas, sunglasses’ (The Coca-Cola Company, 2010), “Share a Coke” campaign in which popular names, nicknames, kinship terms were printed on Coke bottles suggesting to share the product with them (Moye, 2016), “Coca-cola Freestyle” that let customers make custom beverages using Coke’s 100 flavors through self-serve fountains (WILSON, 2009), the operationally complex “how” was executed by local sales teams. They educated and onboarded retailers for such campaigns, guided marketing teams on best locations for machine placement, managed the product logistics, machine placements and supply chain.
Sales team actively participated in the planning the marketing campaigns providing key insights into customer behavior, market trends and sales opportunities, enabling marketing teams with a holistic understanding of the campaign’s target market. In terms of implementing the campaign, sales teams collaborated with Coke’s local customers (retailers) to secure their support, participation and to equip them with necessary resources. They also provided marketing team the real-time feedback of campaign through frequent monitoring of sales performance, guiding the team to refine strategies.
Consistent brand, diverse teams
The relationship between sales and marketing at Coca-Cola may safely be considered integrated, as both teams and the management, recognize their complementary role, which has been evident in the information sharing and comprehensive alignment of company’s branding strategies. Coordinating closely with the sales and marketing teams is how Coca-Cola represented itself as a single entity to end consumers despite the involvement of multiple teams. The complexity on the company’s end seldom left the company’s boundary.