He is considered one of the gurus of social media marketing. The Atlanta-based The Coca-Cola Company’s chief marketing and commercial officer, Joseph Tripodi, in Delhi for the Ad Asia summit, speaks to Surajeet Das Gupta and Viveat Susan Pinto about the new marketing world and its relevance to India. Excerpts:
Using the social media is the hottest new tool in marketing. You are one of its key proponents and have been doing it in a big way. What is your view?
When we speak about social media, we are talking of consumers moving from impressions to expressions and then finally making a transaction.
It is about how you get consumers to express an opinion to generate a conversation and then transact. So, it is about impressions to expressions to conversations and transactions. That's how I view the social media have to be addressed. I understand the social media have come with such force in the last few years. People are still wading through it. Companies should feel free to experiment. No problem if you fail. That's our philosophy.
But what are the budgets you have set aside for social media marketing? After all, everyone is talking but not too much money is being put in.
We have got a model called 70:20:10. Seventy per cent of our dollars are spent on those we know will work. Twenty per cent goes to innovate on this 70 per cent and 10 per cent on experimentation. That includes social media marketing, where we allow people to experiment and fail. Failure is essential for you to grow and come up with the right solution.
Are there ways by which you can gauge transactions are happening due to social media interactions?
We are doing that in the US and a number of other markets, where we have loyalty programmes. In the US, we run the My Coke Rewards programme. People who buy a Coke enter a code. So, we know that people are definitively shopping. So, we are able to close that loop and link and say definitively that My Coke Rewards generated an extra amount of value and volume. These are hardcore heavy users of our products. We have been able to close the loop. But, you need to have the data source. I am not sure that it is available here because so much of the business goes through mom and pop stores. At this point, we are building the databases here, then we will take the next step of monitoring transactions.
You can surely use this database to leverage your marketing. You can do a lot with this data about each consumer.
You are right. The big play that is coming in consumer packaged goods, which wasn't there before, is the concept of lifetime customer value. This is common in financial services. It struck me when I joined Coke four years ago and went to Japan. We have a mammoth business there under Georgia Coffee. Imagine there are five million Japanese men that control a huge part of the total profitability of the company.
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But, we know nothing about them. We didn't have enough data on them and we should have. If were doing a lifetime customer value analysis of them over a period of them, we would have known how to target them.
When you overlay social media marketing with loyalty programmes, it will close the loop. It will give you the value of the customer and help you target them better. It's not about being corporate and selling all the time. Give me something of value. That value could be a sneak peak of the new Coke Studio, not always will you get a free T-shirt. In short, there are number of ways to engage the consumer once you know him better.
What are the challenges in selling a product like Coke?
There are multiple challenges. We want to teach people how to drink Coca-Cola and we want to teach them to fall in love with Coca-Cola. That's why it is so important to balance both the intrinsics and the extrinsics.
If we are only about the product, and not the brand, it wouldn't be interesting. People have to relate to us, which is why it becomes important to identify their passion points and market aggressively using such points. In the Indian context, you have Bollywood, cricket and music.
Is their a commonality across the globe in the universe you target, for instance the youth?
We did a session with teenagers in India and I realised their insecurities and aspirations were the same as my children's in the US. There is some common angst and insecurities the youth have across the world.
However, their personal struggles are different. It varies among the urban and rural youth, for instance, in India. So, there has to be a segmentation of the messaging, though the overall theme might be the same. This is called precision marketing. It is no more about spraying and praying.
In India, for instance, Thums Up has a macho image among the urban youth. But in rural areas, we do cultural gatherings, which you call jalsas. Based on your target group, you have to tweak the messaging.
So is it easier to be a marketing man now, with universal behavourial patterns of consumers across the globe in each segment?
There is a global culture across various segments. And, yes, the world is shrinking. But, the big challenge for marketers today is how to aggregate content and how to use this over digital, analog and other media. Even we haven't cracked the code on this. That is because it is very sophisticated.