He loves chicken curry; counts Kolkata as his favourite Indian city for its vibe “from one block to the next”; and hailing from football-mad Spain, says watching a big cricket match live is on his bucket list. Manolo Arroyo is CocaCola’s global marketing chief, but has India firmly in his sights. As the marketing head for a $260-billion behemoth, Arroyo knows he needs to be nimble with strategies in order to keep pace with younger consumers and newer rivals. Edited excerpts from an interview:
Coca-Cola has said it will market to consumers in radically different ways. Can you elaborate?
One way is a shift of the metrics — moving more into actual growth. There’s a big difference between what consumers say and what they do. The challenge is to bridge that gap. Our key metric is our consumer base and making sure we grow every year. The second change is how we connect with consumers. For decades, most of our media investments were on TV. That’s changed radically; the whole family no longer sits around a TV set, watching a commercial break together. Consumption is anywhere, anytime, through mobile devices. The other component is experience based marketing — retail experiences, points of consumption, life experiences, street marketing, etc. Through this, we have to drive growth and engage differently with consumers.
So, what happens to the big-bang campaigns, if your young consumers don’t have the time to watch them?
Gen Z, for sure, is not consuming traditional TV. But we recently ran an experiment with thousands of Gen Z consumers and learnt that the speed at which they scroll content is around 20% faster than my 50-plus generation. However, when they find content that they really like, they can go very deep. They can even stay two to three hours.
You lead marketing in 200-plus countries. What’s distinct about the Indian consumer?
Is there an Indian consumer? This is a gigantic, enormous country, more of a continent. The level of development of Coca-Cola or Maaza or Thums Up is all very different. That shows in population dynamics, economic development, habits that have been in place for decades.
How much do you think about competition? Earlier it was just Coke versus Pepsi, but now you have new categories and new rivals.
Competition is a great thing. Ultimately it benefits the consumer. And it’s not only because the liquid is the same colour. Our competition doesn’t even have to be soft drinks; it’s all commercial beverages, and the switching between options that all of us do on a daily basis.
Coca-Cola now has coffee, tea, alcohol, etc — these are adult categories.Was it a strategic decision to broad base consumers?
Beyond soft drinks, there’s a dynamic that is very interesting, which is an age of entering categories and retaining consumption within that. Within soft drinks, for instance, consumers tend to enter in their late teens and continue until they’re in their 50s. But that’s different for coffee. Or dairy, juice, energy, etc. And it depends on who’s drinking, who’s making the decision to drink, the decision to buy.
What are your plans of scaling up alcohol based drinks to other markets?
Alcohol is a very big category and we have on purpose decided to experiment here. We began with Lemon-Dou in Japan. We’ve just announced our partnership with Pernod Ricard for Absolut Vodka and Sprite. There’s also Jack Daniel’s and Coke. We do have expansion plans, but the plans are segmented according to markets where the consumer is ready. There’s going to be a sequence in place.
There’s so much talk and activism over sugar. Influencers have now joined the game. Will some of your advertising talk about health now?
The beverage motivation needs of humans are very different, not only across geographies, but even within the same consumer. What you need in the morning is very different from what you drink with your meal, or at the end of the day to unwind. Our por tfolio tries to address that diversification. When it comes to health, the definition is also very relative and individual.
Rapid climate change is bringing about rainier summers, warmer winters, etc.
How is a summer - focused category like yours coping?There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world today, a lot. Every year, we think that we’re going to have a certain kind of challenge, and suddenly, we find a different set of challenges. When we refer to an all weather strategy, it’s what we have learned and trained our muscle — to quickly adapt to changing external conditions.
What role is AI playing for you?Coca-Cola is one of the first companies pushing and experimenting with AI. What’s happening with AI is fascinating.
I got to say upfront — there’s much more that we don’t know compared to what we do know. This area is developing at the speed of light. We were the first company combining GPT-4 and DALL-E. We see AI impacting production, media, research, marketing, metrics — you name it. The sooner we embrace this, the better.
There’s been so much talk about Coca Cola's agency transformation to WPP. How’s that working out?
It was a very bold move that no one in the industry had dared. Just going with one single network globally, at the scale of Coca-Cola, it’s unprecedented. But in the age in which content, creativity and media enabled by data and technology are one, [we believe] you can’t separate them. Then you’re bringing in complexity that you don’t really need. There’s a tremendous amount of interest, you cannot imagine, almost on a weekly basis. Either our agency or just myself and my team get multiple questions from multiple industries, who are hearing what we’re starting to do.
A Jefferies report says Pepsi Co could overtake Coca-Cola as the biggest US beverage company by value, riding on snacking. Will Coca-Cola get into snacking?
Not that I’m aware of. We’re a beverage company and the potential for growth [within this sector] is just tremendous. India is in the global spotlight. What have you told your team here? There’s nothing that can beat curiosity and willingness to learn. So, it’s a lot about walking the streets, understanding the rich, poor, medium; going north, south, inside the country, on the coast, etc. In marketing, you need to be out in the streets, visiting stores, entering homes to see how different people live their day in, day out. There’s a whole lot of the population that lives a very different reality. You need to continuously recalibrate what you’re seeing.
By Ratna Bhushan
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2024/jan/17/brand-equity/india-is-more-of-a-continent-than-country/articleshow/106910413.cms
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