constantly working on not just, What do I want my brand to stand for? but also, How do I want to position it versus every other brand in the market?”
Kellogg and General Mills and other food manufacturers might think they are pretty good at this positioning stuff, but their efforts pale in comparison to those of Coca-Cola, which isn’t so much a company as a $35 billion institutional force. Coke didn’t just set up a war room, like Kellogg did with its special team dedicated to identifying and targeting the fears and desires of consumers. At Coca-Cola, the whole organization was a war room. The desks and tables in Coke’s headquarters complex in Atlanta were papered with charts that mapped out the company’s strategy, and every employee was expected to devote long hours to the cause. Coke prided itself on being progressive, but at one company meeting in the 1990s, a female executive asked whether Coke might consider creating aday-care facility to ease the scramble at 6 P . M ., when children needed picking up long before the day at Coke was done. The company president, Douglas Ivester, who had no kids and often worked seven days a week, stared at her for a moment and then said,“There will never be a day care on this campus.”
The man who instilled this ethos, Robert Woodruff, was a classic corporate warrior. He was working for an automobile maker, the White Motor Company, in 1923 when his father asked him to move to Atlanta. He needed help running his newly acquired company, Coke, which was foundering. The elder Woodruff, Ernest, had led a group of bankers in buying Coca-Cola for $25 million four years earlier when Coke’s profits had gone flat, but the company’s prospects had only grown worse. Sales were falling, despite Coke’s attempts to boost consumption through the introduction of a cardboard carton that could hold six bottles. Coke was also distracted by fights with its bottlers—the franchises, numbering 1,200 at the time, who had the plants where the Coke concentrate was combined with sugar, water, and carbonization.
Robert Woodruff—who would oversee Coca-Cola for six decades—is widely credited, among many other things, with two brilliant innovations. In 1927, he created a division called the Foreign Department, which introduced Coke to the rest of the world. Then, at the onset of World War II, he publicly declared that every soldier in uniform would get Coke for five cents a bottle, no matter where they were stationed or what it cost the company to put those bottles into their hands. As a result, a generation of men and women came home hooked on Coke.
Woodruff, however, had another insight—this one not as frequently discussed in the business school case studies—that would help take the company from solid to spectacular. He figured out how to tap into people’s emotions better than anyone else in the industry of consumer goods, whether food or beer or cigarettes. His method didn’t require slogans or celebrity endorsements or the kind of money the company would spend every year on advertising, though all those things helped. It went deeper than that. It focused on getting Coke into the hands of people, especiallykids, when they were most vulnerable to persuasion—those moments when they were happy. That is how Coke came to be partners with America’s favorite pastime.“The story they always tell at Coke,” Dunn said, “is Mr. Woodruff saying, ‘When I was a kid, my father took me to my first baseball game, and there was nothing more sacred to me than that moment with my father. And what did I have to drink? I had an ice-cold Coke, which became part of that sacred moment.’
“The idea was to be in all those places where these special moments of your life took place,” Dunn continued. “Coke wanted to be part of those moments. That was, if not the most brilliant marketing strategy of all time, probably one of the best two or three. You not only had the imagery, it’s like somebody
Kellogg and General Mills and other food manufacturers might think they are pretty good at this positioning stuff, but their efforts pale in comparison to those of Coca-Cola, which isn’t so much a company as a $35 billion institutional force. Coke didn’t just set up a war room, like Kellogg did with its special team dedicated to identifying and targeting the fears and desires of consumers. At Coca-Cola, the whole organization was a war room. The desks and tables in Coke’s headquarters complex in Atlanta were papered with charts that mapped out the company’s strategy, and every employee was expected to devote long hours to the cause. Coke prided itself on being progressive, but at one company meeting in the 1990s, a female executive asked whether Coke might consider creating aday-care facility to ease the scramble at 6 P . M ., when children needed picking up long before the day at Coke was done. The company president, Douglas Ivester, who had no kids and often worked seven days a week, stared at her for a moment and then said,“There will never be a day care on this campus.”
The man who instilled this ethos, Robert Woodruff, was a classic corporate warrior. He was working for an automobile maker, the White Motor Company, in 1923 when his father asked him to move to Atlanta. He needed help running his newly acquired company, Coke, which was foundering. The elder Woodruff, Ernest, had led a group of bankers in buying Coca-Cola for $25 million four years earlier when Coke’s profits had gone flat, but the company’s prospects had only grown worse. Sales were falling, despite Coke’s attempts to boost consumption through the introduction of a cardboard carton that could hold six bottles. Coke was also distracted by fights with its bottlers—the franchises, numbering 1,200 at the time, who had the plants where the Coke concentrate was combined with sugar, water, and carbonization.
Robert Woodruff—who would oversee Coca-Cola for six decades—is widely credited, among many other things, with two brilliant innovations. In 1927, he created a division called the Foreign Department, which introduced Coke to the rest of the world. Then, at the onset of World War II, he publicly declared that every soldier in uniform would get Coke for five cents a bottle, no matter where they were stationed or what it cost the company to put those bottles into their hands. As a result, a generation of men and women came home hooked on Coke.
Woodruff, however, had another insight—this one not as frequently discussed in the business school case studies—that would help take the company from solid to spectacular. He figured out how to tap into people’s emotions better than anyone else in the industry of consumer goods, whether food or beer or cigarettes. His method didn’t require slogans or celebrity endorsements or the kind of money the company would spend every year on advertising, though all those things helped. It went deeper than that. It focused on getting Coke into the hands of people, especiallykids, when they were most vulnerable to persuasion—those moments when they were happy. That is how Coke came to be partners with America’s favorite pastime.“The story they always tell at Coke,” Dunn said, “is Mr. Woodruff saying, ‘When I was a kid, my father took me to my first baseball game, and there was nothing more sacred to me than that moment with my father. And what did I have to drink? I had an ice-cold Coke, which became part of that sacred moment.’
“The idea was to be in all those places where these special moments of your life took place,” Dunn continued. “Coke wanted to be part of those moments. That was, if not the most brilliant marketing strategy of all time, probably one of the best two or three. You not only had the imagery, it’s like somebody
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