-Cola’s activation of their enterprise CDP //

As the company’s intelligence became more centralized, this data overhaul required a reconfiguration in marketing and technology. Coca-Cola now has more products to match customers, with over 250 available. The data was also used to engage customers more effectively.

Keith Bartig, director of precision marketing technologies, Coca-Cola Company, stated that it all began with the company’s goal to be a total beverage company at The MarTech conference. While many people still associate us with sparkling beverages, few realize that we offer beverages for every occasion. We strive to be the beverage choice of our customers on every occasion.

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Two billion people are looking for the best products

Bartig stated that “we need to be very specific and relevant to be cost-effective with our marketing dollars and to engage with our customers with relevant messaging to offer them the products they’re most interest in.”

This is what the Adobe stack (including a CDP) was designed to accomplish — centralizing all customer data and allowing marketing teams and tech teams to manage communications to these customers in more than 200 countries.

Bartig stated that the goal of year one was to deploy the Adobe experience platform across the globe and then build on it. “And so, year two has really paid off. We’re now able to deploy campaigns quickly that we’re [looking to] execute.”

Technology streamlining for digital experiences

The CDP is responsible for personalization of marketing campaigns, experiences, and ecommerce within Adobe’s experience platform. Adobe’s experience manager manages content management. Coca-Cola has retained Microsoft Azure to manage its application portfolio.

Bartig stated that it was a technology-led initiative. It was a technology-led initiative that we said was necessary for our organization’s advancement of marketing practices. Then it was actually working with our partners in marketing [to implement the technology]. Sometimes it’s the reverse depending on where the initiative is marketing-led.

He said, “We needed a platform that would deliver personalization on a very small scale individual scale where there’s these mom-and pop sort of storefronts in smaller markets.” We have the large number of grocery stores and restaurant chains that we have in the United States and everything in-between.

Technology standardization and consensus building

Bartig stated, “We had to show the benefits to our partners in marketing and then focus on education and evangelizing this platform.”

Coca-Cola’s technology department had to present the case for the new CDP/Adobe stack and coordinate its use after it was implemented.

Bartig stated, “We knew that we would have to drive standardization otherwise it would become prohibitively complicated.” It’s important to maintain a balance and be able to adapt to the needs of each region.

The company had a central technology services team that managed user requests and marketing needs in all markets.

Bartig stated that “Everything that we did, was done with global scale in our minds.” “So, if the Latin America region wanted to concentrate on something, or build something, we would do that. We would then add that to our inventory of components and capabilities. Knowing that Asia-Pacific, Europe, and our North America operations might use it in future.”

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Plan your data carefully

Bartig stated that there were many lessons learned along the way. “In hindsight I would have done and would recommend other [enterprises] to take a moment to have a preliminary phase in which you organize your data.”

Coca-Cola wanted to implement an abandoned cart function in its Latin America operations. This would have been a great help when technology was being introduced for the first time.

Bartig said that “we discovered that the tags we use to obtain behavioral data — the data layer by which we would take those tags, then import them into Adobe Experience Platform — all required a lot more work and retrofitting in order to make it organize and work.” Take the time to organize your data and plan your data.

Enterprises need to think about additional data sources and how they plan to model that data. Coca-Cola has placed a strong emphasis on behavioral data to power relevant experiences and ecommerce.

When this fragmentary data is centralized in a CDP, it adds value to customer experiences. This gives you a better understanding of your customer. Coca-Cola has two billion customers.

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The post How Coca-Cola activated its enterprise CDP was first published on MarTech.