Coca-Cola: Building a Better Design Machine?

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Cutting Costs

Adgistics, a London-based software firm that's partially owned by Ogilvy's parent, WPP, introduced a similar service in 2001. Adgistics 2.0, as the newest version of the product is called, is behind Ford Motor's (F) Dealer Xpress in Britain, a Web-based system that allows dealers to easily customize advertising templates created by Ford's British marketing department. Dealers can change the language, the cars featured, and the specs and pricing, along with adding their own logo and address. Then they select a publication size, and the file is automatically sent to a newspaper for publication or to a digital printer.

The Design Machine is similar to these forerunners: part digital library of brand assets, part design and production tool. Some 3,000 people across the Coca-Cola universe—many are Coke employees while others, like Vande Loo, work for one of the beverage giant's partners—use the site to create hundreds of millions of pieces of customized retail marketing, ranging from grocery aisle signs to packaging to bottle labels.

Once at the site, a marketer can search by brand, event (the Olympics, say, or the Fourth of July), or content (a label or an in-store sign, for example) to find the most appropriate layout template. Then he or she can start customizing the display, adding the logo of a grocery store where a sign will appear, for instance, or selecting copy appropriate for a movie theater. Users don't need to get their designs approved by anyone at Coca-Cola, because the machine's built-in design parameters ensure that the final materials will conform to global standards already set by the corporate design team in Coke's Atlanta headquarters.

Design VP Butler won't give specifics, but says that thanks to the Design Machine, the company has reduced fees to agencies for localizing point-of-sale pieces by 30%. In addition, Coke no longer has to hire outside printing shops and pay rush fees. "It's made our retail marketing process more efficient and more effective," says Katie Bayne, Coca-Cola's chief marketing officer.

Leveraging Savvy Design

The new online tool has also solved a design conundrum at Coca-Cola. Butler had been looking for ways to produce higher quality materials, but had just 60 designers on staff with no prospect of adding more. "The idea [behind the Design Machine] was how can we make it easy for nondesigners to leverage the power of good design," he says.

For Butler, who previously had been brand-strategy director at marketing and consulting firm Sapient, a Web-based device was the obvious answer, and Coca-Cola hired the Farnham, England-based Elateral to build it. The Design Machine now holds more than 4,000 "templates," and Coke designers are adding material almost daily. "It's helping to educate everyone who uses it about what good design is and how it can be a competitive advantage," says Moira Cullen, Coca-Cola's North America design director.

The tool also suggests that, at least in the realm of marketing, the company is finally finding the right balance between the globalization strategy pushed by former Chief Executive Roberto Goizueta a decade ago—a strategy that Harvard Business School Professor Pankaj Ghemawat termed "globaloney"—and the intensely local strategy implemented by Goizueta's successor, Douglas Daft. It's likely that Coca-Cola's new CEO, Muhtar Kent, who took the reins last July, will see the wisdom of the Design Machine's localization capability. After all, he rose through the ranks of Coca-Cola's international division.

"The fundamental challenge for any brand is to make sure that everybody understands the principles about how your brand can be used, to make the assets accessible, and to adapt what you're doing to blend into the local culture," says Nigel Hollis, chief global analyst at Millward Brown, a market research and brand consultancy. A system like the Design Machine that gives Coca-Cola control over its global brands but allows for efficient customization, says Hollis, "just makes sense."

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Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek.com.