The appointment of Joseph V. Tripodi as Coca-Cola's new CMO represents the biggest change in the company's branding strategy since it took cocaine out of its recipe.
Over the decades, Coke has become a poster child for insane branding largesse, keeping a veritable ecosystem of gurus and media outlets alive with its US$ 2 billion+ annual ad spend. You can't go to a movie, read a magazine, or attend a sports event these days without witnessing something irrelevant, courtesy of the Coke branding braintrust.
An ever-tougher business environment has forced the company to experiment far afield from its comfort zone; it has achieved mixed results with waters and teas, weird variations on its carbonated beverages, and other efforts to make its product offering relevant to consumers’ fickle habits.
Thank goodness Coke's branding has won advertising awards at Cannes. Only now it's time for the branding to come home. And Tripodi may just be the guy to do it.
He's supposedly going to focus a lot more on stores, and Coke will support it by uniting its marketing and customer groups under him. This makes complete sense for two basic reasons:
First, consumer decision-making happens at retail, at least in the beverage business. It happens even more specifically when consumers are thirsty. Zillions of these microscopic moments drive the macros of case shipments and company revenue.
Putting Cokes in front of people when they want to buy or drink – i.e. distribution – is probably the most important brand vehicle, and creating reasons to motivate people to buy or drink it is the right creative challenge for the company's branding.
Tripodi comes from the transaction-based worlds of insurance and financial services, in which brands live or die based not on what people think about them, but how/where/why/how often they use them.
So perhaps we'll start seeing more aggressive and inventive Coke activities in retail (media coverage mentioned better programs with Wal-Mart), fast food, airplanes, movie theaters, schools (ugh!), or any other real-world place they can get into.
Second, it's time to admit that attaching and sustaining branding atmospherics to a can of soda pop is a losing proposition.
The branding ecosystem has celebrated Coke's brand for many years now, encouraging everything from deals with creative artist managers to make ads (remember those cuddly polar bears that drank more Coke than any human beings did?), and catchy songs (yeah, that one), to plastering logos on every flat surface of last season's American Idol.
Coke has spent billions each year trying to get us to associate subtleties of emotions with one slogan or another, all in the belief that someday, sometime, somehow, and for some reason or another, we'll make purchase decisions based on our perceptions of its brand.
Only we don't. The beverage business gets decided mostly at the point of purchase, whether today, or 100 years ago. No company has successfully branded itself out of this competitive reality.
If you find execs outside the self-support group of marketers, and ask them what matters about brand, they'll tell you that actions are far more valuable than thoughts and words. Coke can't deliver profits based on consumers contemplating its logo, or associating world peace or eternal salvation with a catchy slogan.
It never did.
People always needed to buy it, drink it, and then repeat. And folks who worry about delivering that reality are the folks who have enabled the business to succeed, and will do so again.
Maybe Tripodi is one of those guys. It's quite possible that his appointment signals that Coke will finally give up the (branding) ghost, so to speak, and address the truisms of today's marketplace.
The fact that he was responsible for the feel-good “Priceless” campaign at MasterCard could mean that he has the bona fides to facilitate this transition at Coke, or that he, in the end, is capable of being distracted by creative commercials and schwag tickets to sports events as much as most other CMOs.
He'll keep his job longer if he keeps his focus on distribution as a branding strategy, not an operational tool.
Coca-Cola might sell more Cokes, too.
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