Coca-Cola and its unfeasibly large ‘monad*’

What on earth is Coke CEO Muhtar Kent on about, asks a bemused Dominic Mills – and whatever it is, can it breathe some new romance into the brand?

*No, that’s not a typo (and apologies Viz and dear old Buster Gonad).

Earlier this year, Coke CEO Muhtar Kent made this somewhat gnomic statement: “In many markets around the world Coca-Cola is monadical [sic], but we need to work harder to balance the romance of the brand.”

Well, WTF does that mean? It turns out that ‘monadical’ stems from a philosophical idea (see Leibnitz), and in this context means (roughly) that Coke is an indivisible and impenetrable physical entity or unit of substance.

Clear? No, nor exactly to me, but I think he means that in many markets Coke is so taken for granted it’s lost its magic and has become carbonated wallpaper.

The latest results bear this out, with the latest quarter (and coming off the back of a flat World Cup), showing a small value decline. As a result Muhtar is kick-starting a radical change in Coke marketing.

It has two interesting elements. The first is the introduction of zero-based budgeting, which essentially means that for every brand in every market, Coke marketing executives kick off the year having to justify every penny/cent of marketing spend, not just any incremental change on the previous year.

Hmm, yes, well this sounds eminently sensible, especially given rapid changes in the media environment. On the other hand, just imagine how much time will be spent – wasted? – doing the budgeting. In an organisation the size and complexity of Coca-Cola, you can imagine spreadsheets whizzing around every which way for months on end.

Every week a marketer spends doing this, they’re not doing any marketing. I can imagine a number will conclude this is not what they signed up for and leave.

The second, as Kent stresses, is a focus on point of sale (POS). Coke’s creative and media agencies might want to watch this. Here’s an example – 2 million individual bottle designs for Diet Coke. It’s brilliant, but stuff like this will take a serious chunk out of creative and media budgets.

And while POS can be very powerful, especially if linked to price promotions, it’s the sales equivalent of crack cocaine: expensive, and the hit becomes shorter and shorter term.

But, to return to Mr Kent (and by the way, I admire any CEO who eschews the usual corporate crap in their annual statements), developments like this will breathe some new romance into the brand, but whether it’ll shrink Coke’s monads – if that is the right term – I have no idea.

The Evening Standard is now…the Daily Delevingne

A screen-grab from last week’s Standard.co.uk

I have nothing against supermodel, actress, whatever, Cara Delevingne – her of the wildly untrimmed eyebrows – but I am getting heartily sick of seeing her face in the Evening Standard.

She managed every day last week, culminating a pile of so-called ‘lifestyle’ mush on Friday pun-tastically entitled ‘Cara Chameleon‘.

Readers of a certain vintage – actually only a decade ago – will remember the way The Daily Telegraph hitched its wagon to Liz Hurley, stuck a picture of her in the paper as often as it could, and became known as The Daily Hurley.

And look what happened to both of them, you might say.

And so it is with the Evening Standard, which when it fails with Cara, reaches for her older sister Poppy.

I can only imagine an order has come down from on high – the editor, or the proprietor perhaps – and the grim task of engineering a story, preferably with a picture, seems to fall to the Diary or News Editor. Bloody hell, it’s tough.

You can see just how tough with one story last week – perhaps the nadir of the paper’s obsession – wondering, on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever – sorry, a rumour – if Cara was in line to be in an upcoming Warner Brothers film. And it’s not even a real film – just a rumoured one.

Tenuous doesn’t even begin to describe it. Nerds, or Cara fans, can get a full list of other tenuous mentions here. She’s been in every day for the last three weeks, possibly longer, except that I lost the will to go farther back.

Does this matter? Well, you might say, it doesn’t. Cara is effectively editorial ad-bait, used to lure in cool, trendy, upmarket fashion and lifestyle advertisers and a vehicle through which the Standard can demonstrate its on-style credentials. In this area – and hats off to the advertising team – the Standard looks to be doing a good job.

As a reader, however, it seems to me the paper’s Delevingne diarrhoea is indicative of a wider malaise: that it is losing touch with real Londoners.

We’re all familiar with the notion that, economically and culturally, London has detached itself from the rest of the UK thanks to the influx of hot money, Gulf state princelings, oligarchs and overpaid investment bankers.

The Standard’s relentless hero-worship of these individuals and social fluff like Cara means that the paper is in real danger of becoming detached from real Londoners, those who make up 99.9 per cent of its readership.

The London it writes about is not one I recognise. Where is the focus on the real issues that bother real Londoners? Transport, housing, education, crime, green-belt development, news of the localities where we live and to which we commute.

The answer is that they are becoming more absent by the day, replaced by faux-trend/lifestyle features – with all the substance of a marshmallow – such as (from last week) how to get a pay rise and, er, ‘chivsters’, a new tribe from Hoxton that likes to wear shell suits.

Some areas of the paper are as good as any of the nationals: sport, business, arts and culture reviews, and the op-ed think-pieces. But the rest is like Tatler gone mass-market.

The management will point to increased pagination and distribution as evidence of the paper’s success – and I cannot deny those, nor that the new owners have breathed life into a once-moribund paper. Free distribution will prop up ad revenues for some time.

But the moment a paper loses touch with its readers, or they cannot identify with it, it’s on the slippery slope