The brief arrived as one sentence: Coca-Cola is not seen as an Indian brand, so how do we make it an Indian brand? The obvious response is to hunt for evidence that it already is one. I thought that was the wrong move, and the deck said so on its second page.
Coca-Cola has stood for Americana since the Second World War. You cannot wish that away, and a brand with a limited footprint in a country cannot argue itself into being native to it. So the proposition was narrower and, I still think, more honest: make it a piece of Americana that Indians adopt as their own. That is a different job from pretending the American part is not there.
I led this pitch as Asia head, and we won it. I led the team on the account that followed, and was close to the planning throughout; the execution was done by people I had hired. What follows is the argument we made and the system we built to carry it, which is the part that transfers.
What the brand was actually up against
The pressure was not only about affection. Coca-Cola was being challenged on cool by Apple and Starbucks rather than by other drinks. It was losing graduates to Facebook and Google. It had been grouped with alcohol and tobacco in the 2014–15 finance bill. It was treated as a drain on water in a country where water is political, and it carried the global argument about sugar and public health.
The tension that mattered sat between two of those. Affection for the brand was low, but Indians largely did not yet regard it as a marker of an unhealthy life. Consumption was among the lowest in the world. So the risk was not the current position but the trajectory: rising sales driving up the health objection before affection had been built. A brand in that position cannot lead with volume. It has to earn the right to grow.
Working out what happiness means somewhere specific
Coca-Cola's global idea is happiness. The question I put in the middle of the deck was what happiness actually means in India, and what we would need to know to connect the brand to it there.
The answer came from where India sits on two axes. It is a collectivist culture rather than an individualistic one, and a high-context culture rather than a low one. Happiness in a place like that is not a private state that a person achieves. It is a shared experience, and it is produced at the intersection of three things: culture, community and milestones. Exams, festivals, weddings, sport, food.
That is the whole argument in one line. An American brand selling individual refreshment was talking past a country where the emotion it had chosen to own is something people have together. The narrative that followed — a story in a bottle — was built from culture, community and milestones rather than from the product.
The three re-workings
The framework restructured three things rather than producing a campaign.
Re-thinking the brand narrative meant giving each brand its own territory in the same grammar: happiness for Coca-Cola, strength for Thums Up, and for the corporate brand, a destination built on happiness and sustainability.
Re-shaping the communication ecosystem meant treating the brand's own website as a publishing platform rather than a brochure, and putting owned, earned and paid channels — media outreach, regional and local press, native advertising and content partnerships, online influencers, radio, activations — around it, in one plan rather than in separate agency silos.
Re-inventing the methodology meant naming four modes of communication and attaching an outcome to each: engage, for the corporate narrative; talk, for brand affection; advocate, for stakeholder engagement; and amplify, for attitude change. Every proposed initiative was then filed under the outcome it was supposed to move.
How the programme was held together
The initiatives themselves are the client's, and they stay off this page. The discipline around them is what I would argue for again anywhere.
Nothing entered the programme without an outcome attached. Every initiative was filed under one of the four modes, which meant each one had to declare what it was for before it was costed — corporate narrative, brand affection, stakeholder engagement or attitude change. An idea that could not name its outcome did not survive the sort, and a good idea filed under the wrong outcome was measured against the wrong number, which is the more common failure.
Each then carried its own measurement line, and paid, owned and earned were measured separately rather than summed, because they answer different questions. Reach tells you who could have seen it. Participation tells you who did something. Message delivery tells you whether the thing they saw was the thing you meant. A programme that adds those together produces a large number and no information.
What I would do differently
I would have built the standing instrument first and pitched second. In any programme of this shape there is one component that compounds — it produces a number nobody else has, and it gives the company a reason to talk to government and media that is not a request. Everything else can hang off it. The rest are activations, and an activation is judged on the week it runs while an instrument is judged on the years it runs. We sold the whole programme at once, which meant the compounding part had to wait its turn behind things that were easier to picture.
The argument and the system are on this page because they are mine to describe. The initiatives, and what they produced, belong to the client. The method is describable. The specifics are not mine to publish.