Today, from theoretical conceptualisation and hard won practical experience, we can say that our reality is becoming stranger than fiction.
This slogan summarises the puzzlement caused by events such as the emergence of the yellow vests in France, Brexit in Great Britain, Trump’s electoral victory in the United States or Bolsonaro’s win in Brazil.
The problem is not that we are allergic to surprises or that we do not like adrenaline. The problem is that the unpredictable realities we are experiencing today cause the epistemology of our work to fall into crisis because most companies are structurally prepared to operate according to long-term plans and most research agencies produce insights for “linear worlds”.
The challenge lies in “embracing change”
If change and instability are the new reality and if we want our work to be effective and relevant in these new times, it is necessary to reformat our thoughts and our way of approaching processes.
This is painful and complex, but necessary so we can incorporate in the company’s day-to-day, mechanisms that decode the situation in real time, and reinterpret it into a strategy that then moves down to specific actions of real value for the consumer.
We are opening this debate because it is the situation we have been going through at The Coca-Cola Company together with Moiguer Compañía de Negocios in South Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay) for more than 10 years: learning how to operate strategically in volatile and complicated contexts for our brands.
The last two decades in Latin America put more than one board of directors in our continent on full alert, and at The Coca-Cola Company, we were not the exception. We swiftly moved from discussing “how to take advantage of the growth of economies” to discussing “how to mitigate the crisis”. And in such a context, the risk is to stick to “mere tactics”, becoming reactive to the situation and putting branding values at risk.
To sum up, we started with a tool to track consumer humour, which over time became a working mechanism, and today is a lens that goes through all strategic thoughts and the day-to-day actions of our brands.
The keys to the process
Deliverables in company code: not only to provide information, but to deeply understand the business needs and bring the consumer context closer in the way that the company culture can process it. At first glance, this may be one of the “most obvious” points, but, it is undoubtedly, the most complex. Building a “common language” between customer and agency, through the different areas of the company and among suppliers is an intrinsic work of the tool that took time, effort and a long debate from the very beginning.
Real time: clearly, in changing contexts, the logical due times for the generation of information become obsolete and it is important to redefine the natural cycle of the methodology so that it adapts to, and is functional with the decision making times.
And this leads to the following key because when there is not enough time, when the phenomena are complex and we are still redefining the methodologies to tackle them, we need to have something else.
Open and collaborative sources: information and knowledge should be at the service of a problem and not of “intellectual property”.
In order to do this, it is necessary to change the radio system of one-to-one dialogue between customer and supplier, to make up a transversal and horizontal dialogue where information flows and each member is at the service of the problem to be solved and not of “his project”.
This implies leadership skills on the part of the customer, talent for the articulation and integration of tools (because sources become multiple, diverse and often times contradictory with each other) and over all, respect, acknowledgement and opening between parts.
Organisational flexibility: the organisation needs to incorporate dynamism into its structure. The achievement of online decisions and actions requires a working model where positions are both tactical and strategic, capable of analysing, designing, evaluating and operating at the same time.
Change is a constant
Although at this point it is a hackneyed expression, companies and brands still have a hard time embodying it. We use the word “dropping”, but it is not always easy to put it into practice.
The only way in which we can go through the troubled and volatile times we are living, and as a brand, offer a relevant proposal to the consumer is to make a cultural change in our mindset. In that sense, Consumer Mood as a tool ends up being an excuse for the company to strategically and culturally process the reality within which it operates day by day.
