Three things make Coca-Cola better at marketing than anyone

Coca-Cola constantly churns out great financial results, but there’s no secret to its success other than consistent marketing excellence on every level.

It is traditional when writing a column about marketing to write about something. Anything. A company did something new that was especially successful. Or something dumb likely to blow up in its face a few months from now. Someone said something clever. Someone else said something stupid. You know… something… stuff.

But this week marks a departure. This is a column about nothing. I mean, it is about a company. It’s about Coca-Cola. But it’s not about anything specific that Coke is or isn’t doing. Nothing newsworthy has happened to Coca-Cola. It hasn’t invented something. Or done anything especially interesting. It has just continued to be Coke. And I realised last week that was an awesome achievement.

I was giving a virtual talk on the ‘Five Levels of Advertising’ (free, excellent, nudity from the waist down) when this remarkable unremarkable thought hit me. I wanted an example for each level of my talk that illustrated how to do it right. And every time I started thinking of who illustrated each challenge best, every advertising road led back to the Rome of Coca-Cola.

Quietly smashing it

Make no mistake, there was nothing amazing in any of the Coke examples that came to mind. Nothing new. But they were all just excellent. Flawless. In a boring, Roger Federer kind of way that – if you aren’t careful – means you miss how good it is. All the time.

Look at Coke’s results. It is quietly smashing it. Over and over again. Despite persistent macroeconomic headwinds, slowing global growth, bonkers Americans, and inflationary pressures biting into consumer spending patterns, the company continues its relentless march. Its recently unveiled financial results for the end of 2024 and entering 2025 paint a picture of growth. Organic revenue (Coke’s non-GAAP measure of choice) is up 5-6%, as promised by CEO James Quincey.

And it’s not the usual story of revenues delivered at the expense of the bottom line either. In its most recent earnings release, the company reported a robust increase in operating margins driven by effective pricing strategies and disciplined cost management. Notable growth in emerging markets and a continued focus on higher-margin products have helped offset headwinds from rising input costs and global supply chain pressures.

When you wrap all that good news together, you have robust stock market performance in a time of great market volatility. Since the end of Covid, Coca-Cola stock has added roughly 50% in value while delivering generous dividends to delighted investors. By balancing disciplined earnings growth with shareholder-friendly policies, Coca-Cola has continued to solidify its status as a cornerstone of long-term investment portfolios.

But here’s my point. Coca-Cola has nothing new or improved to justify this stellar performance. Its portfolio has not been hugely augmented with hot acquisitions. Its categories are devoid of AI hoo-ha. Long-established global status means it has no major vectors of geographic growth to lean into. Like Alexander exiting his tent and weeping at the lack of worlds to conquer, Coca-Cola has done it all already. And, perhaps most remarkably, at the heart of the business is a century-old off-trend sugar-permeated caffeinated beverage that still sells through the supermarket and vending channels it did a lifetime ago.

Coca-Cola is the epitome of marketing excellence. A company that anyone can learn from.

Its executives might not like me saying this, but Coca-Cola is the definition of a mature, legacy business. In most narratives, Coca-Cola would surely now be into a steep 21st-century decline. And yet, for all that implied inertia, it is a company that keeps spanking out growth and great results.

How is this even possible?

The short answer is marketing. Sure, there are other elements of excellence that make up Coca-Cola’s success. But at the end of the day, very much like its ancient marketing mate P&G, when you boil down its prominence and continued progress to key drivers, you come back to amazing fucking marketing.

I use these three words and of course you go off and think about AI or influencers or something, with headsets and asteroids and whatever the latest over-hyped marketing cock is all about. But, in truth, with Coca-Cola we glimpse an older, more established marketing truth.

Coca-Cola excels at fundamentally fantastic marketing across all levels. Again, the use of ‘fundamental’ might make it sound like I am saying they are basic players. Nothing could be further from the truth. Coca-Cola is the epitome of marketing excellence. A company that anyone can learn from.

Its constant market orientation borders on paranoid, which is exactly the kind of corporate mindset you need to stay at the top for decades. Its insights and diagnostics team scour the planet for data and the whole organisation is attuned to the trends. Strategically, Coke keeps it simple, mass and distinctive. And when it comes to tactical execution, there is a Coke playbook for product variants, pricing excellence, comms and distribution mastery that other brands simply cannot match.

The three things that set Coke apart

Coca-Cola is better at marketing than anyone else. Talking to old-time Coke people, three core themes emerge to explain this superiority.

First, the strange separation that sees Coca-Cola handle the core business and its independent bottlers take on the pointy end of sales creates a perfect division of labour. When physical availability is handed off to others, the focus on the mental availability challenges of brand and marketing can be absolute and unadulterated.

Second, Coca-Cola has fashioned its global/local matrix to its own advantage. That might sound obvious, but you need to see the fuckfest that most multinationals operate within when it comes to their international structure to appreciate just how good Coke is. Anyone who has spent time in local affiliates or global HQ can tell you just how fucked up marketing gets across the dreaded global/local matrix. Country teams hate their global counterparts in HQ. HQ resents the global teams because they don’t do what they are told. Regional offices are caught up in the eternal power games that take place between these two extremes as an endless war of top-down versus bottom-up wages across most big multinationals.

Not Coca-Cola. It empowers local markets to innovate and experiment. And when it works, the global team swoop in, learn and spread the successful new approach far and wide while maintaining local cultural nuance.

In 2011, Lucie Austin wrote a 151-word brief in her Sydney office for Coca-Cola. Incumbent agency Ogilvy responded with a crazy idea to play with the Coke logo and put people’s names on its bottles and logos. Over the subsequent summer the company sold a quarter of a billion of them – more than 10 for every Australian – and the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was born.

The point isn’t how smart the Australians were, the point is that over the following years Coke took that local idea and played it out brilliantly around the world. What’s more, the brand hasn’t been afraid to rekindle and evolve the campaign globally in 2025.

The final factor in Coke’s marketing prowess is its employer brand. Imagine a job offer from a ‘large beverage company’ and another from Coca-Cola. The latter just sounds better, more attractive, irresistible. Coke knows how to select great marketers. And rarely does a marketer say no to the company that pretty much built modern FMCG marketing. And once they are there, they tend to stick around. Partly because it’s Coca-Cola, partly because of the general marketing talent all around them, and partly because of the widespread corporate respect that exists for marketing and its place in the pecking order.

I accept there’s nothing particularly new or radical in any of these success factors. The company focuses on brand and marketing, works its global/local angles well and has great people. But, again, that’s the point. Coca-Cola is just inherently, repeatedly, annoyingly, tediously good at marketing. So good that maybe we have all forgotten just how amazing they really are.