Global Drinks Industry

Context

A global drinks company with a very successful track record of developing marketing capability needed to find new ways to improve international marketing operations. It knew that traditional approaches were unlikely to provide the kind of 'step change' required and wanted some new, more creative thinking on how to improve marketing performance.

Insight

There are often risks, problems and inefficiencies in translating strategy into action, especially in large scale and complex organisations. But emerging social technologies, collaboration, co-creation and ideation tools can help. While these are not the only answer they can offer productivity and capacity benefits that release trapped value and enable more economic collaboration across diverse groups of people.

Solution

Working closely with an alliance partner and one of our expert associates, former insight director with SAB Miller and Coca Cola we identified significant savings and performance improvement using social technologies and collaboration programmes.

We demonstrated how strategic plans could be 'activated in market' more effectively by embedding key processes within social technology, ideation and collaboration tools. And we showed how capacity benefits could be realise when these technologies and processes became part of 'the day job' for marketers in group and regional organisations.

WE developed a series of programmes to share ideas between group strategists and marketing staff 'in market', showed how specific ideation and collaboration technologies could store ideas, build corporate memory, reduce operational costs, increase productivity and encourage more meaningful and ongoing strategic dialogue.

In short we showed how important strategies would not become 'lost in translation' and how more effective marketing execution could be achieved.

Benefits

We identified several million dollars of annual operational savings and over 15% improvement in available marketing capacity throughout the global marketing community.