Arnab Roy, VP-Marketing, Coca-Cola India and Southwest Asia, who has been associated with the brand for more than 23 years, engaged in a fun conversation with Dr. Annurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, BW Businessworld & exchange4media at the Pitch CMO Summit 2024. 

Roy started with explaining the purpose-based growth of Coke. He said, “At an overall level, the purpose of any brand or any company, especially if it is a publicly listed company, is to ensure that we make money for our shareholders. At the end of the day, that's the most important one.” 

As we are trying to build the brand, we make it more relevant to the culture and it is important to understand what the overarching values are supposed to be.

The brand Coke essentially stands for two to three important values around the world, as per him. It has been trying to be consistent for the last 130-odd years plus now. It ensures that it can bring happiness to the world, refreshment to the world, and stand for an inclusive world. 

“Throughout the overall decades, we have been trying to communicate ourselves and at the core of Coke's existence, is customer centricity,” he added.

Further explaining the job of a marketeer, he said it simply is to be a growth leader. Firstly a marketer has to know how to bring more consumers? For that, obviously, understanding who these people are, where are their motivations, what are the particular locations that you can actually bring them in? A lot goes into understanding that. 

“The second task of marketeers could also be, if they can't grow the existing consumer base, can they increase their frequency of consumption because that could be the other way of growth. The third important piece of growth is to increase their profitability per transaction,” he added.

According to Roy, all the three, either get new consumers or more depth of consumption or improve profitability per transaction. If a marketeer is not taking these three honestly, they don’t really have a marketing plan. 

Next, explaining how the summer season has fared for the brand, Roy shared, “ The business has been very good but could have been far, far better. The last three years, we've had a very good run and even outside this category, it has been the fastest growing FMCG category.”

But it's a highly underpenetrated segment. And then on the external side, the infrastructure in the rural parts of India has been a boon to Coke’s growth. With higher electrification, they have been able to get more coolers and probability of consumption is much higher. But Roy believes they could have grown a lot more, and that was constrained with how much supply and manufacturing capacities they have. 

The hurdle is that the consumer of today is moving away from sugary drinks and towards non-sugary alternatives. 

Roy explains that brands are at a point of inflection for the beverage category to explode in India. “Now, we all have to be careful on how we brand healthy products because we don't claim ourselves as we are a healthy product. We are a product that you can enjoy.”

“The problem is that there are a lot of products out there, beverages especially, who claim to be healthy. When you have a look at the ingredients, most of them actually have twice the amount of sugar than what a Coke or a Sprite would have had,” he added.

Eventually, Roy believes that there is going to be an option for a lot of different kinds of beverages. "Are sparkling beverages going to replace regular? Absolutely not," he averred.

The opportunity to grow is massive. One doesn’t want to have karela juice every day, all the time. There are moments in the day when one is having a biryani, and they will want to have a Thums Up with it. 

Music, sports, cricket, entertainment, for Coke’s portfolio brands have been big drivers of salience, showcasing and consumption. This season, which starts in July and goes till October, a very clear-cut role on each brand playing a particular approach to a passion point will be taken.

Roy added, “Brand Coke has taken a little bit of a backseat on cricket, simple reason being, cricket is expensive in India, and if I have to justify my ROI on cricket investments, it has to be done with Thums Up.”

Towards the end, speaking of the future of marketing and how Coke will leverage it, he shared, “AI is going to be the single biggest impact in marketing in the last 3-4 decades and is here to stay. Everything that I have seen, not only in India but abroad, and all the experiments we are seeing, all the people we are speaking to, AI is gonna change marketing. Data mining, data analysis, production, creation of content, product innovation and much more is set to revolutinise via AI.”

For more updates, be socially connected with us on
Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube & Google News