Javier Meza runs marketing for Coca-Cola’s sparkling brands, roughly 150 brands sold across more than 200 markets, with about a dozen of them managed globally or regionally. His central management idea is that collaboration between global and local teams cannot be asked for as a favor. It has to be built into how the organization allocates money and people.
The tension he is managing is between speed and coherence, and he refuses to trade one for the other. Being coordinated but taking three years to coordinate loses the marketplace, and being agile without coordination is dangerous for a brand the size of Coca-Cola. His phrase for holding both is coordinated agility.
Key findings
- The first lever he names for producing collaboration is uncomfortable and blunt: how money and people are distributed. A big, well-funded team sitting in one market will invent its own brand positioning and believe it is doing the right thing, because it is thinking only about that market.
- Scarcity drives creativity, which is the familiar half of the claim. Meza’s addition is that scarcity also drives collaboration, so removing resources from a team is a way of encouraging it to work with others rather than around them.
- The second lever is decision rights. Connect the network, he says, but keep the decision rights clear, because when a network’s decision rights are vague, aligning a point of view can take forever.
- The third is reward, and he insists it must be material rather than rhetorical. Rewarding the right behavior means money, promotions and public recognition, aimed at the people working in interdependency rather than independence.
The label-less bottle, and what he said about it
Meza’s illustration of coordinated agility arrived in his inbox from Japan, which proposed taking the labels off the bottles. He judged the waste saving small but the symbolism good. His answer was neither yes nor no; it was a scheduling instruction, agree the idea is sound, do not run it alone, and talk about it together next month.
Where the brand’s purpose stops
Asked how a brand should answer a moment of social crisis, Meza narrows the question to the brands he is responsible for and rules Fanta out. The question he starts from is how the company can truly help. Fanta speaking about social justice would not help and would not be authentic, because it is not what the brand stands for, so on that subject the brand has nothing to say.
The flagship brand is a different case, because inclusiveness, equality and optimism are what Coca-Cola already claims. Even there the company said nothing for several days, and internally people asked why it was silent. The answer was that it was thinking about what to do before what to say, and putting actions before words.
The actions run from listening to employees and outside experts, to funding organizations fighting social injustice, to lobbying with partners for hate crime legislation that Georgia did not have. Asked about it personally, Meza answers with biography rather than a position. He grew up in a village in Ecuador of about 50,000 people, and says he is in Atlanta because of opportunities many people still do not get.
Align beliefs before you align programs
Meza’s model of what alignment costs comes from his first profession, chemical engineering. The second law of thermodynamics holds that left alone a system tends to chaos, and removing that chaos takes a lot of energy. Organizations behave the same way, so alignment is a never-ending exercise rather than a meeting in January and a celebration later in the year.
The sequence he insists on has three layers and the first cannot be skipped. Beliefs are aligned before programs, because arguing about actions without an agreed belief means having the same argument again and again. When programs are aligned, what matters is agreeing the objective rather than the program itself, and then agreeing the metrics used to track it.
Four ways to take out sugar, and why the answer differs by country
The objective is fixed centrally and stated as a number rather than an intention: fewer calories per liter of product sold. Reformulation is the first of four routes to it, and Mexico is the case where it was used hardest, with 30 percent of the sugar taken out of Coca-Cola classic. The same route is not the right answer everywhere.
In the United Kingdom 60 percent of Coca-Cola sales are already zero sugar, against three percent in Mexico, which is why the emphasis differs between them. The other three routes are promoting the zero-sugar range, promoting smaller packs, and printing a visible calorie count on every pack. Markets choose which to lean on; the center holds the objective and the metrics.
Pressed on whether he is satisfied, Meza declines the comfortable answer. Obesity is a real problem, and until it is solved he says he is not going to be okay, which means being willing to experiment with new solutions and honest about whether they work. The evidence he offers that the shift is working is commercial: zero-sugar products have grown double digits for three years and now supply more than half the growth of his brands.
Brand management is three jobs, not one
Meza’s objection to the phrase brand management is that it collapses distinct work, and he splits it in three. Design is consumer insight, deep human values, positioning and brand architecture. Development is platforms, campaigns, the innovation pipeline, communication and promotions. Activation in the marketplace is channels, price, packaging and promotional activity, and each of the three needs its own answer about who does it.
The staffing rule that follows is geographic rather than hierarchical, because the best people for a piece of the work may sit anywhere. Brand positioning is not settled by the four or five people in Atlanta; the field is pulled in through networks with clear decision rights. His summary of what goes wrong is short enough to be useful: either the best people are not on it, or the decision rights are not clear.
The manual is not enough
The interviewer offers the counter-case, a marketer who left Procter and Gamble for a Dutch utility company and was frustrated by the freedom. He had more budget than ever, but the chief executive could walk into a post-production meeting and pull an ad. The thick book of things he could not do had been more motivating, because inside its limits he called the shots.
Meza places Coca-Cola between the two poles and says the position is maintained rather than natural, since a company left alone drifts toward chaos. The manual alone fails because of the bottling system, whose partners tell him plainly what they think of a campaign and cannot be answered by pointing at who holds the decision. Designing the hardware is not enough; the software is credibility and trust.
The night Brazil went out
Asked how a company stops employees from putting their own views out under the brand, Meza tells a story against his own team. He was leading Brazil at the 2014 World Cup, and after the host was knocked out by Germany the national fear was an Argentine win in Rio. When the final ended 1-0 to Germany, his social media people celebrated and told Argentinians to go home.
His reaction named the commercial fact and the brand fact in the same breath: a global brand that stands for universal values, in a company that makes a lot of money in Argentina. The remedy he offers is unglamorous repetition rather than policy, training and more training, resting on alignment on values.
The interviewer’s addition is that the companies with the clearest purpose and values knew best what to do, and what not to do, in situations nobody had written a rule for. Meza’s own test for a hard call is a temporal one. Facing a decision on whether to speak, he asks which of the two choices will let him look back in ten years and say he was on the right side of history.
Ask why the wrong decision looked right
Meza’s correction to the way failure reviews are usually run is that explaining what went wrong is the easy part, and it produces agreement without progress. The harder and more useful question is why the decision was made in the first place. Without that, teams keep repeating failures and explaining them instead of solving the root cause of how the decision was made.
His example is Coke Energy, launched first in Europe on a single taste profile sitting between cola and an energy drink, which the market did not take. A second version with a different profile followed in the United States and drew repeat rates above 70 percent. He then presented the original reasoning back to his colleagues, because it cannot be that the team was stupid then and smart now.
The Tuesday morning forum
The mechanism Meza describes for spreading learning is a standing meeting held every second Tuesday morning, where markets present what they are working on before they run it. Japan might bring a campaign for feedback from the center and from other markets. What keeps it a forum rather than an approval gate is that the market keeps its decision rights unless there is a big problem, and the veto is rarely used.
The digital equivalent is the global experimentation platform, where any market records what it is doing to advance the digital agenda and what it learned, so the center can find the work and scale it. Meza has also been pushing for a failure award inside Coca-Cola, and admits the company has not created one yet.
Marketing equals growth
Coca-Cola went from no chief marketing officer to three, and no longer has a chief growth officer. Meza answers the question about titles by restating what the function is for: marketing is the interface between people and the resources of the organization, reading unmet needs, designing solutions and orchestrating how they reach people. He calls it the value interchange orchestrator.
The growth arithmetic reduces to three variables: more users, more frequency, more money per transaction. The methods for moving them are the part he expects to keep changing, because competitors, channels and the online retail experience keep changing, which is why he wants markets experimenting and the center smart about learning and scaling. His short answer is that marketing equals growth.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation recorded in mid 2020, and the sugar and growth figures are the speaker’s own statements about his own portfolio rather than reported results. He also declines to answer two questions on confidentiality grounds: a viewer’s question about a competitor’s strategy, and the detail of the launch retrospective he describes.
Source
This page summarises HGS #19: Javier Meza (Global CMO Sparkling, Coca-Cola) in conversation about social responsibility, by Frank van den Driest, 2020-10-13.