The Coca-Cola Company is one of the most renowned marketing businesses in the world, but even it cannot stand still when it comes to the effectiveness agenda.

Speaking at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing today (2 October), Coca-Cola senior director Nisa Genc explained the business has been “reimagining” its approach to effectiveness across its entire system.

One thing that remains constant is seeing growth as the “effectiveness output” for the business. What is shifting is how Coke drives that effectiveness. The media and consumer landscape is changing, meaning the business has to change its approach accordingly.

“We’re now talking about an experiences universe rather than one-way mass exposure,” Genc said.

While mass reach is still absolutely vital for Coca-Cola as one of the biggest consumer goods businesses in the world, it is no longer aiming to do this simply with one big advert. Instead, scaled personalisation and experiences is what is going to truly engage consumers, Genc noted.

How do we in today’s world make a simple and strong idea more effective without majorly needing to change the idea?

Nisa Genc, Coca-Cola

Creating the growth she referenced requires driving behaviour change, something that must be done by engagement with consumers rather than projecting messages at them.

“[Coca-Cola must make consumers] part of the experience, rather than being exposed to what we’re telling them,” said Genc.

Those experiences can take different forms, for example through the products themselves, the retail environment or, notably, through digital.

“One thing that I want to leave you with in this model is that these are not being siloed, isolated experiences,” she noted, explaining the idea is to form a coherent “universe”.

One example of how the business has been driving a coherent experience “universe” is through its famous Share a Coke campaign, which it brought back earlier this year. First launched over a decade ago, Genc said one of the main challenges with bringing the initiative back was that the “majority of the target group” had never experienced Share a Coke as a consumer, meaning the brand had to take a slightly different approach.

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That different approach centred around pushing Share a Coke on social channels and working with creators. This year’s activation has also involved AI experiences enabling consumers to engage with the campaign.

This year’s Share a Coke activation is a good example of how the business can take an existing idea and translate it for a new era of effectiveness.

“How do we in today’s world make a simple and strong idea more effective without majorly needing to change the idea?” said Genc.

She also gave the example of how the company brought its festive campaign to life, integrating generative AI and personalisation. The key to Coca-Cola’s approach is personalised experiences scaled. According to Genc, today’s data capabilities make that much easier than it ever was before.

“Data is our new best friend,” she said, enabling marketers to go from “audience planning to the actual person”.