The presentation by Joseph V. Tripodi, Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer of The Coca-Cola Company, was much awaited at AdAsia. As brand steward for the world's most valuable brand, delegates were keen to know what insights he would offer on the new rules of consumer engagement. “Consumer engagement and the way you advertise to them is rapidly changing,” says Tripodi. “In the '80s you ‘sprayed and prayed', in the '90s you had more segmentation, and in the 2000s it was one-on-one, and in this decade you find there are even more dots to connect.”

Tripodi focused his presentation on the concept of ‘liquid and linked'. “Those days when a 30-sec TV spot solved your problem are all gone,” he emphasised. Instead, Tripodi says, Coke's concept of liquid content is compelling creative work, which is so culturally relevant that it can flow through any medium and become all-pervasive. When ‘liquid' is ‘linked' to Coke's brand strategy, it meets with the soft drink major's overall business strategies. He referred to Coke's remixed version of Somali-Canadian K'Naan's Waving Flag song during the FIFA World Cup in 2010, which was the largest activation in Coke's history. The song went viral through social media, TV commercials and was linked by the common thread of celebration. While Coke's branding was not overt, the interest the song generated rubbed off on the Coke brand.

In this interview to BrandLine as well as in a media interaction, Tripodi spoke on brand Coke and how India is vital to the company's strategy of doubling sales by 2020. Excerpts from the interactions:

Coke has 35 million Facebook fans. How do you leverage this base of fans for brand Coke?

Very carefully, I would say! We leverage them by tapping into them and asking them about our campaigns, show them sneak previews of a Super Bowl ad, or what they think of a design, and so on. We try to figure out with such a huge base of people, how do you harness them, to be advocates for your brand. I talked about impressions, expressions, conversations and transactions … at the end of the day, in a perfect world, it can give you more transactions for your brand, but given the social currency around, there could also be a downside; people spreading the bad word. It's your ability to harness that and activate those people to tell positive stories that's a really important thing for us. But you cannot be too forced, too heavy-handed or too scripted. Nor can you be seen as trying to direct them, because then they will reject it. You have to carefully see them as part of your family and figure out ways to speak to them.

So, it's a double-edged sword, isn't it?

That's why transparency is key. Fifty years ago brands were all about quality, and then it became about image, and now it's all about trust and that evolution is something that has large implications for companies. You have to get very comfortable and be able to stand up and have a candid dialogue if you make a mistake. We are in a world where we tell people you have a quality issue, you have to put your hands up, you cannot bury and hide it because it's worse than the problem itself. So, you have to be very transparent about these things.

What do you say about new-age technology brands being right up there among the most valuable brands alongside Coke?

It's going to happen because the value of those brands is growing so quickly. Apple is itself up 27 per cent in a year, but once you get to our number of over $70 billion (brand value), it's hard to grow (at that rate); maybe by $5 billion or $10 billion. Having said that, we don't obsess over it. I just want to be the best in our business and as you know, the biggest companies are not necessarily the most profitable. We are extremely profitable as a company. If your primary competitor (read Pepsi) was catching up, I would wonder.

Many managers who have grown up in the '80s find this animal of social media very new. What is Coke doing to get its people up to speed?

One of the big changes we did is to put it all on the iPad and get everyone to communicate, have more virtual meetings. We are in 206 countries, so we operate 24/7; something is always happening in the Coke world. We understand that we need an enterprise strategy and not just a marketing strategy to deal with this social world and part of that means you have consumers writing in all the time.

But, if you are responding only 9-5 during business hours, and something could blow up at 5.30 p.m. and if you're not going to respond till the next day…? We are putting in place infrastructure to have a dialogue with consumers 24/7; putting in place call centres, we want to be able to get our call centre people to handle a lot of the responses; 90 per cent of the questions can probably be handled by them. That's the way we are getting comfortable with it (social media) as a company.

How important is India for you to achieve your 2020 vision of doubling sales?

India is one of our most important markets in the 6 Ps — across all our dimensions of profit, portfolio, planet, people, partnerships and productivity. India is a strategic market for the Coca-Cola Company and where we have a significant presence. We invest a lot of money in India. And if we don't compete effectively in India, we don't achieve our 20-20 target … that is the reality. I think, frequently in these markets, you can get crazy on a quarterly basis. Analysts do. But you have got to look at how you perform over a time period and watch your performance. And I think for us, certainly, we have had 21 quarters of double-digit growth in India, which is exactly where we need to be.

I look at three parts of my job. One is where the growth is active for the company, what are the categories growing and what are the geographies that we need to place our bets on. That is number one. Then I talk about culture. Do you know if you have the right culture? Because culture is so important for a successful company. And you want to dial up those parts of the culture that are positive, and dial down those parts of the culture that are not as good.

And the third aspect for me is the capabilities. Do we have the right capabilities over this period of change to make sure that the company will sustain itself for a long time? So I am very focused on growth, culture and capabilities in my job and obviously everyone at a local level is doing that too.

So, what is Coke's strategy to make further inroads in the Indian market?

I think almost 700 million Indians live in the lower-income area; we don't want to neglect them.

We think they represent a huge opportunity, so we need to make sure that the product is available, make sure that it is affordable, and we need to make sure that the packages are right-sized. So, the right packaging, right price points, right availability are all important components of how we get our manufacturing closer to the people. We look constantly at innovations against those things.

One of the biggest opportunities is when people from the rural environment (move to cities) ... when I lived in Hong Kong for a number of years in the early 1980s, at that time, only 20 per cent of China lived in the cities and now 47 per cent of the Chinese are in the cities and so 300 million people moved from basically rural areas into the cities. So their life changed. They had money, their life became faster and the middle-class was growing.

We project almost a million people entering the middle-class over the course of the next decade. When people do that, they seek packaged beverages (among other things), and that is why we were very bullish on India and we continue to see urbanisation and more mobility and that is why we fundamentally think that India is a strategic market for us along with China and Brazil.

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