Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, recently penned a great article for the HBR on how the brand’s marketing is shifting from impressions to expressions. I wanted to focus on one point that Joe made:
Build a process that shares successes and failures quickly throughout your company.Increasing consumer expressions requires many experiments, and some will fail. Build a pipeline so you can quickly replicate your successes in other markets and share the lessons from any failures. For example, our “Happiness Machine” video was a hit on YouTube so we turned it into a TV commercial, and we’ve replicated that low-cost, viral concept in other markets.
This is vitally important, especially when you are dealing with emerging marketing areas such as social media and mobile, and within big brands. I recently wrote about the need to facilitate feedback internally AND externally (and among both groups), and I think this is an area that brands that have more mature social media marketing efforts will definitely capitalize on. One of the big ‘knocks’ against social media especially is that it’s said to take a lot of time to implement and execute properly. To Joe’s point, if a feedback system/cycle is put in place internally, the outcomes discovered by one area of the company, can be shared throughout, so that there’s no need to constantly re-invent the wheel.
Check out Joe’s article, and here’s the tv commercial that resulted from the success of their YouTube spots.
Everything evolves around us so fast it’s mandatory to be quick and agile in understanding what works and what doesn’t, and why. Experimenting is vital in the success of a business, but it’s even more vital to be able to turn a success into something more organic.