Member Spotlight (September-October 2022)

Dana Barba
Senior Vice President, Marketing, North America Operating Unit
The Coca-Cola Co.

Main job responsibilities: I lead the frontline marketing team, which amplifies brand and shopper strategies with our bottling system, integrates shopper marketing with our top retail customers, and leads the marketing of our Freestyle beverage experience for North America. Collectively, the team serves as the face of our brands to the customers, asset partners and bottling system. My team focuses on the last mile to the consumer.

As part of our evolution in 2021, we launched a new high-touch, brand edge field marketing capability. It combines strategic consumer recruitment and partnership marketing with retail engagement. Unique and authentic sampling experiences are amplified by local influencer, social media and partnership drops, and then leveraged for new business and sales.

How you win with shoppers during uncertain economic times: We are focused on building end-to-end ex-periences tailored to our customers, which has helped us react quickly and adapt to challenges as they arise. We used agile design principles to introduce (in just six weeks) “The Coca-Cola Value Collection,” which features new and existing package assortments of our popular sparkling beverages across various price points, sizes and flavors. The value packs will be featured in large store, convenience and value channels.

New marketing tactic in your toolbox: We’re very excited about the way we have approached our Coca-Cola Creations innovation platform. Coca-Cola Starlight harnessed Gen Z influencer culture with a digital experience that articulated the full magic of the Starlight experience, including bespoke influencer “unboxing” of product and an AR music performance unlocked by the label. Next, inspired by Gen Z’s connection to drop and gaming culture, Coca-Cola Byte became the first Coca-Cola product to launch in the metaverse and debut on the livestreaming platform Twitch. We continued to build on this successful platform with our most recent launch of Coca-Cola Dreamworld in August.

Memorable aha moment in your career: Learning about and applying insights from our new consumer segmentation model. It’s defined by higher order needs and motivations versus simple demographics. It can be applied to customer planning and shopper marketing. The aha came when in diving into the work, they described a consumer based just on demographics. We look at six additional layers of influences and differentiators beyond demographics to really understand who the consumer is, what is important to them and how to connect with them.