Coca-Cola is marketing with a ‘brand experience’ mindset in its South East Asian markets, according to a senior marketing executive at the company.

Within Coca-Cola, consumers are now increasingly viewed as users – rather than buyers – of products in the “extremely crowded” category that the beverage titan operates in.

From reaching minds to embedding itself in its consumers’ lives, this focus has seen the company step up its attempts to intersect consumer and user experience with meaningful design and disruptive technology.

“We know that the world has changed. Everything is digital, so integrated marketing communications also needs to change to lead and operate in the experience age,” said Prathik Thakur, Coca-Cola Company’s head of integrated marketing communication and director for South East Asia, at the recent All That Matters conference in Singapore.

Changing its mindset in line with how consumers’ lives have been changing was necessary to bring relevance to the company’s marketing efforts, he explained. “We need to connect with our consumers and target how we fit into their lives and their minds.” (For more on Coca-Cola’s approach, read WARC’s report: Coca-Colas’s ‘brand experience’ mindset in South East Asia.)

There are four areas in which Coca-Cola looks at experience: on-screen, on-shelf, on-occasion and on-pack. Experience on-pack, for example, looks at how product packaging can be deployed as an asset in terms of “our own media” to maximise marketing mileage.

Meanwhile, the potential of what constitutes experience on-screen goes beyond the usual interpretation of screens to include e-commerce or grocery shopping apps.

“We used to talk about top-of-mind, and how to get that mindshare in terms of how much we are creating noise and stay on top of their minds,” Thakur said. “This (new) thinking helps us create our strategies.”

Sourced from WARC