A potential future digital gold mine for Coke?
Read an interesting interview with Carol Kruse, VP Global Interactive Marketing at Coca-Cola a few days ago over at eMarketer.com. The interview highlights the inherent difficulties involved in measuring media ROI for FMCGs selling indirectly via retailers. As a result of being disconnected at the point of sale, FMCGs have traditionally found themselves stuck with indirect brand related KPIs instead such as brand awareness, top of mind, purchase intent, etc. rather than actual sales data that can be easily traced back to a marketing campaign.
In short, Carol summarizes it like this:
“If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online.”
However, what struck me is the fact that Coca-Cola really is in a quite special situation here with their vending machine business in relation to other FMCGs. In the vending machines they have access to a point of sales channel where they indeed can measure the whole funnel if they just connect the digital dots all the way.
With a wireless connection Coke could connect digital vending machines to the digital media campaigns they run. Not only could they measure sales at the digital vending machines in real-time, they obviously also could utilize the GPS position for the individual machines that could be used for local campaigns and geographic A/B testing of creative concepts, etc.
I am pretty sure we will see more aggressive experimentation in this area in the coming years.
(photo by alvy)
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