Coca-Cola Leadership Details Digital Roadmap: Moving from Data Silos to a Connected Network
While the Coca-Cola Co. has been following a multi-year roadmap to digitize the enterprise, the journey is far from over. One thing that's been at the core is data — insights that can marry the global footprint rather than standing alone and operating in silos, according to president and CFO John Murphy.
Through statements shared during recent conferences — including Citi's Global Consumer & Retail event and CAGNY — Coca-Cola leadership made clear that a key priority moving forward is to operate more as a network rather than a functional hierarchical organization.
This means investing in "the ability to dial up at the local level with the capabilities that we're building around the world," said Murphy at the Citi's conference.
"When it comes to the world of data, it's so much more effective to be able to leverage datasets that connect and talk to each other. At the root of insights is a fundamental set of capabilities that allows you to leverage multiple datasets, and that's an area we see a lot of opportunity ahead for us as we continue to bring the whole digital era into our system."
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The notion of "data intimacy," as EVP and COO Henrique Braun (who transitions to CEO on March 31) called it, is more about precision at scale rather than fragmentation. But the scalability has to have value.
"Scaling generic content is not going to give you the greatest bang for your buck," said Murphy. "The point is to be able to bring core content tailored appropriately but with efficiency to be more precise with our communication at the point of sale, whether it's in Haiti or in Germany."
Setting Priorities
Moving from a large legacy infrastructure, this has meant establishing an agenda with very distinctive areas of focus. In the last three to four years, the goals have focused on several questions:
- How does Coca-Cola become better at engaging with its consumer base?
- How does the company work with its bottling partners to be a better partner to the millions of customers that it has around the world?
- How does Coca-Cola run its own shop better?
From this, it has led to three recent principles, according to Braun's statements from the CAGNY conference: become even more consumer-centric; work on a balanced growth algorithm with partners; and place digital in every connection across the Coca-Cola system.
Though Coca-Cola has made significant strides toward modernizing the company in recent years, Braun said it is still at the beginning of unlocking data alignment to have the scale needed to advance its digital priorities.
"The way we're going to engage this time around will show how these platforms can focus on consumers at a global level and scale the opportunities, without losing the opportunity to have more hyper-personalized engagement with the consumers at the local level in a way that we haven't done before," he added.
More on Coca-Cola's Digital Transformation
At the helm of these efforts is Sedef Salingan Sahin, who took on the new role of chief digital officer at the beginning of the year.
At the time of Sahin's hiring, Braun said she would assess how to "organize the teams responsible for digital across the enterprise to help strengthen execution, simplify how we work and enable us to deliver for consumers with greater precision and speed.”
AI has been a key part of the company's digital transformation strategy. Quincey has previously shared that AI allows for greater segmentation, targeting and adaptation of Coca-Cola's core marketing and sales areas, but there's still work to do in connecting the two.
More on these efforts:
The company has been investing internally, but also participates as a member of MIT's Generative AI Impact Consortium, which brings together interdisciplinary MIT researchers and cross-sector industry leaders to connect cutting-edge AI research with real-world expertise.
