Coca-Cola Distributes 'Shelf-Savvy' Handbooks

Atlanta — The Coca-Cola Co. published eight handbooks titled "The Shelf-Savvy Tools Series" as a resource for its employees. The series outlines the company's focus on shopper marketing, and the books go to all brand managers, customer managers, salespeople and commercial managers within Coca-Cola, as well as all bottlers across the markets it serves."At the end of the day, all of us are engaged in the need to do shopper marketing," says Darren Marshall, vice president of global shopper development. "It's a new science, and we need to build our capabilities so we can all more effectively capture value at retail." Coca-Cola employees who specialize in specific areas collaborated on the first four handbooks in the introductory series, which consist of Shelf-Savvy Marketing, Shopper Insights, OBPPC (occasion, brand, pack, price, channel) Architecture and Shopper Strategy. Marshall says the second four in the series, also introductory handbooks, are hitting desks now, and focus on merchandising, packaging, customer marketing and P-O-P. More may be published, he adds.Marshall says the idea for the books began by organizing the brand's plans of what marketing today should be all about to bring a more shopper-centric focus to what Coca-Cola does. "We want to create value for our constituents by connecting our brands to consumers (by creating brands people love), to shoppers (by converting them into buyers) and to customers (by collaborating with them to create value)."Marshall says communicating the right skills to focus on was essential. "We started doing research on the capabilities and the best practices we needed to develop, and we have an ongoing stable of intellectual property that is being developed," he says. But the question is building the capabilities across the 206 markets the company manages around the world."We wanted to get the fundamentals out in simple little notebooks, and get on every desk of every key constituent around the world who needs to know about these fundamentals," says Marshall.The books outline a multi-part model for organizing and executing shopper marketing plans, starting with an understanding of shoppers and prioritizing. "Not all shoppers are the same, so how do we build the simple skills to be able to separate the high-value shoppers from the less valuable shoppers?" says Marshall. Building the right portfolio provides the base for OBPPC. "It's all about making sure we have the right brands in the right place at the right package size and the right price point to make sure that those right consumers are finding the things they want," he says."The sciences that help us shape what we do at the shelf," he says, include packaging and merchandising. "It's determining how we set up a shelf or a cooler so we know in a fact-based way that we can sell more by doing x vs. y. You bring all of those pieces together and you have our picture of success for any given retail space. The books are a double-click on each of those steps to be able to give people all the tangible skills they need."We've developed over the last year and a half this whole concept of 'shelf-savvy marketing'," Marshall says. "In that short time, we've basically been able to get nearly universal awareness of what shelf-savvy marketing is within our community. One of the key drivers to that has been these books."

Coca-Cola Distributes 'Shelf-Savvy' Handbooks

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

Related Topics

Related Images

Company

Market Segment