Coke Weighs The Value of Social Media

Carol Kruse of Coca-Cola explains the company’s forays into social media and digital marketing:

I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. 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. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

In that context, we are asking whether it’s driving brand health or brand love. Is it driving purchase intent? In some cases, like search and online advertising, we have been able to measure ROI driving true incremental volumes and true increases in sales. It’s the same thing from a loyalty and CRM standpoint. We have a lot of online promotions and online loyalty programs like My Coke Rewards, and we’ve certainly measured the amount of true incremental volume those type of programs drive.

Measurement around mobile is difficult right now, and measurement of social media marketing is more difficult. There are a lot of solutions for getting at engagement metrics—how many people participated, how much time was spent, did they tell a friend and are they a repeat visitor? I think there are perfectly adequate engagement metrics in place.

We want to take those to the next level which, for us, is driving brand value. It’s about bringing incremental increases in brand love, purchase intent and actual purchase. But for some brands, like if it’s a new brand—we’re launching Vitamin Water around the world—the brand strategy is building awareness and trial. What are you going to measure there? You’re going to measure awareness and brand recall. There’s not one pat answer of what we’re looking to measure because it depends on the brand and the business objectives.

Brand measurement is important. I think we can do it in the mobile and social realms in a way that is acceptable to consumers. We don’t want to disrupt that consumer’s experience. If we’re going to be there with our brands, we want to be enhancing the experience. You have to be careful how you go about the measurement because you might undo all the goodwill that you have built.

Read the whole thing here, in eMarketer Total Access.