Coca-Cola’s move away from brand love will shift marketing, argues Mark Ritson

Mark Ritson, a former marketing professor and brand consultant, argues that Coca-Cola's decision to drop brand love as its main marketing measure ought to alter the way the industry approaches growth.

Speaking last Wednesday at the ANA's Masters of Marketing event in Orlando, Coca-Cola's Manolo Arroyo said: “With age and with experience, I do not believe any more in love.” Ritson calls it the most important sentence from a Coca-Cola executive in a very long time.

A decade of love and flat sales

Ritson recalls that in 2013 Jonathan Mildenhall, then Coke's head of global advertising, spoke at Cannes after the company was named Creative Marketer of the Year, talking about desire, people wanting to wear the T-shirt and how “creativity sparks brand love”.

A decade earlier Kevin Roberts had placed Coke at the top of his Lovemarks ranking. ‘Open Happiness’ ran for seven years, and Coke built a vending machine in Singapore that gave a free can to anyone who hugged it. For more than two decades, Coke's marketing teams in Atlanta were judged, rewarded and promoted against a perception metric named Brand Love.

The problem, Ritson writes, was sales. By the mid-2010s Coca-Cola's volumes had been flagging for close to ten years, with Trademark Coke growing at about 1% a year. For most of that time the brand love score kept rising. In the words later used by Coke's own marketing chief, millions of people said they loved Coca-Cola and proudly wore the T-shirt but rarely drank one.

Arroyo's record

Ritson sets out Arroyo's career. Arroyo started at Coke in brand management in Madrid in 1995. He went on to lead Iberia, then Mexico and then all of Asia Pacific, before leaving to run an olive oil company as chief executive and later coming back. He was appointed global CMO in January 2020, roughly six weeks before the pandemic shut bars, cinemas and stadiums around the world. This year his remit expanded to take in customer and commercial operations. Ritson describes him as a smart marketer and “almost certainly a shoo-in for the big job when it next opens up.”

He calls Coca-Cola the most consistently excellent marketing company in the world. The company has exceeded Wall Street earnings estimates for 12 consecutive quarters, and global unit case volume grew 5% in this year's second quarter. Its portfolio has shrunk from 400 brands to under half that number. And after 20 years of struggling to attract new drinkers, it has gained 160m consumers since 2022.

Arroyo now puts a bottom-of-the-funnel measure first: how many people consume a Coke product at least weekly. In other words, penetration.

“Love can be increased as well,” said Arroyo, “but it follows the behavior.” Ritson notes that while attitudes do precede and predict behaviour, it is often more accurate to say behaviour drives attitudes.

From Kotler to Sharp

Ritson traces how marketing fell for love in the 1990s. Fred Reichheld's The Loyalty Effect (1996) argued that small gains in retention were worth large profits, Peppers and Rogers promoted one-to-one marketing, and Susan Fournier described consumers having real relationships with brands. Conference speakers regularly showed consumers with brand tattoos as the ultimate sign of success.

John Beasley, BrewDog's CMO and a Monster Energy alumnus, has described the energy drink brand getting over 100 photos a week from people with its logo tattooed on their bodies. “People don’t do this stuff that lightly,” he said.

In 2010 Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow argued that penetration, not loyalty, is the main engine of brand growth, that heavy buyers are few, and that growth comes from the vast number of light, occasional buyers. On this view loyalty reflects a brand's size rather than how much people like it.

Ritson argues that the Kotler era is giving way to the Sharp era, and draws on Thomas Kuhn and Max Planck to note that paradigms rarely shift through argument and proof alone. Planck observed that new scientific truths win out as their opponents die off and a younger generation grows up with them, which is often summarised as science advancing one funeral at a time. One thing that speeds change is a company such as Coca-Cola changing its KPI. He cites P&G at Cannes in 2019, when Pritchard prioritised reach ahead of frequency, after which the frequency cap vanished within a couple of years, and Simon Peel, Adidas's global media director, admitting at IPA EffWorks later that year that the company had overinvested in performance after being misled by last-click attribution.

“Coke just did the same for brand love,” he writes. “Mass marketing is back. Salience is more important than image. Distinctiveness trumps differentiation. And if you are focused on generating more love, get a puppy.”

Overcorrection

Ritson says he is not a full convert to the Ehrenberg-Bass approach. Paradigms, he argues, tend to overcorrect, as psychology did in swinging from behaviourism to the cognitive revolution and economics did in moving from Keynes to Friedman and back. He describes Hegel's sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

He believes the Sharp paradigm is right and needed but will overshoot. At some point in the next decade, he predicts, a CMO, quite possibly at Coke, will realise that brands built purely on penetration, with no affection, can be overtaken by the next brand doing the same. Fournier's work will then be rediscovered and love will come back as a secondary measure with a less awkward label.

Ritson argues that Arroyo's “love follows the behavior” is already that synthesis: he has not killed love, but put it in the right place.