CPGmatters: Coca-Cola Rolling Out Global Shopper Segmentation Protocol
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
In an ambitious move notable for its wide scope and marketing implications, The Coca-Cola Company is rolling out a shopper segmentation protocol that can be applied around the world. This sweeping global tool has been launched in multiple countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, with more in planning for 2009.
The reason for the global protocol, said Karen Gryson, director of marketing strategy & insights, is that local markets were each developing their own tools. These different methods not only represented redundant development efforts, but also would make cross-country comparisons difficult for the $29 billion company that markets 2,800 beverages and 450 brands in over 200 countries.
"Development of a standardized global protocol would therefore not only improve productivity, but would also enable a common language for shopper understanding across the company and facilitate cross-country opportunity identification," said Ms. Gryson in a presentation at the Shopper Insights Conference. "The challenge, though, is how do you balance the global needs and the need for commonality and comparability with the need for local actionability?"
Ms. Gryson said the goal was a common global approach for shopper understanding that would enable Coca-Cola to identify not only the local opportunities, but also regionally or globally scaleable opportunities.
"These opportunities might be at a channel level or for a particular retail customer," she explained. "So we needed a standardized, yet flexible, Best Practice protocol that could be implemented in any market around the world without local reinvention."
"When we looked at all the work that had been done locally around the world," she went on to say, "we found that fundamentally people shop for the same reasons regardless of where they live. Relative importance of the various missions may differ from market to market, and the channels may differ, but fundamentally the needs are similar. This gave us reason to believe that a global segmentation would be feasible."
Discussion Questions: What do you think of Coke's move to globally standardize its shopper segmentation protocol? Do you agree that local market segmentation is often a redundant exercise and complicates cross-country comparisons? How do you the balance this global desire for "commonality and comparability" with the need for distinct local approaches?