Consumer engagement: How Coca-Cola fosters human connections

By Alby Anand Kurian on Mar 12, 2013 (1 day 23 hours ago)
filed under Marketing, Asia-Pacific

The soft drinks giant is building its marketing strategy around strong links between the brand and everyday people.

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The Coca-Cola charts sport a smile—global sales volume and net income rose by four per cent in the third quarter of 2012. The brand seems to have received some help from missteps by PepsiCo. By diversifying into health foods, Pepsi has taken its eye off its area of core competence and the underlying message that Pepsi appears to be sending out is an almost apologetic one.
Coca-Cola, on the other hand, has moved on aggressively. So how does the company manage to keep turning in such good numbers?
“By researching the human condition,” says Stan Sthanunathan, vice-president of marketing strategy and insights at Coca-Cola.
Ask him to elaborate (for the connection between ‘the human condition’ and a product that Steve Jobs called ‘sugar water’ is difficult to make), and the answer comes straight off the bat. “By that, I mean that we should understand people as people, as opposed to people as consumers,” says Sthanunathan.
Marketers often fall into this trap because that’s where they see commercial opportunity, he says. “If you like Coke while you consume it, that is all to the good, but then we ask the next question, ‘How do we connect Coke, in such an emotionally enriching way, that you always feel good about it, not just when you drink it?’”
People are consumers for a particular product category, say beverages, for only half an hour in a day. The other 23.5 hours, as human beings, they have needs, wants, preoccupations and tensions. This, says Sthanunathan, is where the Coca-Cola strategy comes in—using those feelings to create a strong connection between the brand and the human being. It may not translate immediately into consumption, but it translates into connections.
Perhaps the consumption will follow later? “When the consumption happens, it will be consumption with a bond,” he says. “Consumption for its own sake leads to commoditisation of the brand. Once it’s a commodity, the consumer will go for the cheapest option on the day.”
But how exactly does a cola company make that connection? (It’s easier for a brand such as Apple, which makes what is seen as an important part of one’s life.) And the human condition is a vast area; where does one begin?
Coca-Cola has a market research study, Sthanunathan explains, called the Consumer Beverage Landscape, conducted every three years across 55 countries. Earlier, the company would segment the market into nine different need states (a need state is the primary purpose for purchase—the driver—such as hunger and health). But all of this had been constructed around the ‘understanding consumers as consumers’ mindset. Coca-Cola set out to change that; instead, it said: “Let’s understand human motivations.” This resulted in segmenting people into 10 core human motivations.



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