Coke wants the protest kids to drink Coke

[Doug Henwood]

Financial Times - August 1, 2000

Douglas Daft: Global chief thinks locally
By Richard Tomkins

The anti-globalisation movement has gathered a fair rag-bag of 
supporters in the past year or two. Now meet the latest recruit: 
Douglas Daft, the new chairman and chief executive of Coca-Cola.

"Think local, act local" has become the catchphrase of the man tasked 
with turning the company around after one of the worst years in its 
history.

Mr Daft is the first to acknowledge the paradox. "There's no one more 
global in terms of ubiquity than we are," he said in an interview.

But if Mr Daft has a dream, it is this. When demonstrators gather to 
protest against global capitalism, they should be drinking bottles of 
Coca-Cola, not smashing them.

"There will always be those who attack or criticise Coke in order to 
get publicity," he says. "But when it happens, we want our brand 
value to be such that people say: 'No, Coke's not like that. I just 
don't believe it'."

So far, Coca-Cola has managed to escape much of the opprobrium heaped 
by the anti-globalisation movement on multinational companies such as 
McDonald's, Nike and Royal Dutch/Shell.

One reason is that it has failed to give protesters much of a hook to 
hang their hostility on - unlike McDonald's with the McLibel trial, 
Nike with its overseas labour practices and Royal/Dutch Shell with 
its role in Nigeria.

Last year, however, Coca-Cola came dangerously close to providing a 
target when it bungled its response to a contamination scare in 
Europe, leading to accusations of corporate arrogance.

That affair was followed by clashes with regulators in Europe and 
elsewhere, who accused the company of throwing its weight around by 
agreeing to buy Cadbury Schweppes' soft drinks business without 
getting antitrust clearance.

Two weeks ago, a league table of global brands published in the 
Financial Times showed that the value of Coca-Cola's brand had 
slumped 13 per cent to $72.5bn in the last year. Interbrand, the 
consultancy that compiled the figures, said the events in Europe had 
a lot to do with the decline.

However improbably, Mr Daft claims to have welcomed the result, 
saying it helped him ram home the point he has been trying to make 
inside Coca-Cola: that when a company and its brand are synonymous, 
the way the company conducts itself is as important to the brand as 
conventional advertising and marketing.

"Whatever the brand stands for, the company must also stand for, and 
whatever the company stands for, the brand must.

"That is the biggest issue that got away from us in the last year or 
so," he says.

"If someone says you're acting in an arrogant fashion, and we say 
they're confusing hard negotiation with arrogance ... it doesn't 
matter whether we think they're right or not: if that spills over to 
the brand, you really get into trouble."

Arrogance seems almost to obsess Mr Daft - understandably, since it 
typically tops the list of vices that anti-globalisation campaigners 
detest in their targets.

The anti-McDonald's website www.mcspotlight.org, for example, says it 
has singled out the burger chain because it is "a particularly 
arrogant, shiny and self-important example of a system which values 
profits at the expense of anything else".

Significantly, there does not yet appear to be an anti-Coca-Cola 
website, and it will be a measure of Mr Daft's success in moulding 
Coca-Cola's brand image if there never is one.

He has the advantage that he could scarcely be more different from 
his buttoned-up and sometimes overbearing predecessor, Douglas 
Ivester. He leads by example: relaxed, unassuming, trustworthy and 
good-humoured, he embodies many of the qualities he wants Coca-Cola 
to project.

Where Coca-Cola went wrong, he says, was in moving towards greater 
centralisation just at a time when the backlash against globalisation 
was gathering pace. Decisions on local marketing, communications, and 
even which charity to support were taken at company headquarters in 
Atlanta.

"Where I think we missed the heartbeat over the last two or three 
years was that ... we ended up with a definition of a global 
consumer. We were looking at similarities, not differences, and we 
didn't stand for anything in particular for the individual."

Now Mr Daft is trying to rebuild the brand's relevance to different 
communities around the world. He has cut thousands of headquarters 
jobs, decentralising power and local advertising is replacing the 
global "Enjoy" campaign launched only six months ago.

In Europe, almost all the senior US executives have been replaced 
with local managers, and Mr Daft has spent a great deal of time 
mending fences with governments and regulators. Next time a problem 
arises, he hopes officials will call him and find out what is going 
on "before going into the public domain and talking about this 
arrogant company doing such-and-such".

Meanwhile, Mr Daft says he opposes extending the Coca-Cola brand to 
other products, even though the company recently licensed the 
European roll-out of a casual clothing range called Coca-Cola Ware. 
He inherited that decision, he says, indicating that he did so 
unenthusiastically.

Coca-Cola does not need to extend its brand, he says, because it 
already stands for far more than a brown, fizzy drink. "If we thought 
we were just selling a liquid, we would have been gone long ago. 
We're not. We're selling entertainment, a concept.

"Yes, it's refreshing on a hot day, but we're not selling just that: 
we're selling an idea through the imagery, the 100 years of 
advertising, the communication and the local community attitude. 
We've made it much more than a product."

So will Coca-Cola be around for ever? Or, as one of the first 
generation of consumer brands created more than a century ago, is it 
now approaching maturity?

"It's what you do to keep your brand, imagery and relevance," he 
replies. "The concept of a brand, provided you continue to renew it, 
will last forever, so if the concept lasts forever, a brand that 
continues to renew itself will last forever.

"If you don't continue to renew yourself. ..then the brand will 
disappear. It's up to the brand owners to make sure that doesn't 
happen."