Archive for the ‘operational innovation’ tag
How Coca-Cola will double its business by 2020
Everybody tosses around the word “innovation” these days, but it’s hard to nail down what it means, and even harder to bake into the culture of big companies since, generally speaking, big companies like to double down on what they know already works, rather than try something scary and new that isn’t proven.
Then there are different sorts and sizes of innovation: operational innovation, where you do what you already do better; departmental innovation, where one part of the company does something nifty and new — and a lot of marketing innovation happens only within the marketing department and doesn’t touch anybody else; and then there’s cross functional innovation, where stakeholders come from different departments, and where partners like agencies, media companies, and technology companies might have a stake.
At next month’s ad:tech New York, we’ll enjoy a keynote address about brands and innovation given by Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s senior VP, integrated marketing communications and capabilities, who will be joined by Renny Gleeson, Wieden + Kennedy’s global director of interactive strategies and the co-founder of PIE (The Portland Incubator Experiment).
Brad Berens: What is your working definition of innovation? Did I miss something big in the three sorts I laid out? What are your goals for innovation within Coca-Cola, both in the marketing department and on a wider basis?
Wendy Clark: The Coca-Cola Company has a one-page document that represents our ambition for our company and system called our 2020 Vision. Written clearly as a mandate for the marketers of the company, that document is our remit “to develop the world’s most innovative and effective marketing.” That’s easy to say and harder to do. In a system so scaled (we’re in more than 200 countries), innovation can take the form of margin-dilutive complexity if we’re not careful. So we have to be focused.
We start thinking about innovation for our business in terms of our products, our packaging, our equipment, and our consumer engagement. For consumer engagement, we’re really looking at consumer trends, and how we’ll continue to recruit future generations of teens into loving our brands.
What has much of our attention right now is mobile. Mobile is impacting our total business — certainly consumer engagement, but it’s not limited to that. Mobile commerce (m-wallet) and mobile vault will have profoundly positive impacts on our business.