Ged Carroll

Search results for: “coca-cola”

  • The Three Tensions by Dodd and Favaro

    While reading The Three Tensions I was reminded of a plaque that I used to have. It was one of them demotivational poster designs.

    The Three Tensions

    When I was leaving a previous agency I was given the plaque as a leaving present. On the plaque is the message ‘If you can’t solve a problem, there is good money to be made in prolonging it‘.

    Consultants and management thinking yo-yo from one area to another. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s conglomerates were the fashionable way to go, for instance ITT, Xerox (who had an insurance business to balance their cash flow) and Coca-Cola who owned a film studio. Now there is a focus on the companies core competences, in fact organisations often outsource so much of their infrastructure that they scarcely have any physical existence.

    An extreme example of this was Enron, who was advised by management consultants to move away from being a natural resources infrastructure company to a more asset light structure. Throw in some corruption and the rest is history.

    Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro in their book The Three Tensions aim for a more balanced approach to moving a business forward. The three tensions of the title are:

    • Profitablity vs. growth
    • Short term vs. long term
    • Whole vs. parts

    The authors relied on long term research of a number of companies. The balance that the book advises businesses to obtain is not easy. The book also makes it easier to diagnose the faults within an organisation. More on the book here. More business related posts here.

  • Coca Cola marketing stunt

    Coca Cola, the troubled beverage company is in the midst of a major marketing promotion to try and bolster sales of its signature drink. Throughout the US, Coca-Cola has put 120 special cans into multipacks of original Coke. These cans look like a Coke, feel like a Coke, but instead of the secret formula contain a GPS device and a cell phone courtesy of Airtel.

    You find the can, you activate it and the marketing team can show up at any time in a Bell Jetranger to drop a giant 4WD off for you – with surprise being the operative word. This is in a country where security is verging on paranoia since 11/9/2001, has the highest number of gun nuts, conspiracy theorists and gangbangers.

    Now, not that I am prejudiced or anything but why would you want to be surprised by a bunch of Coca Cola marketers playing at being the NSA a la Sneakers or Enemy of the State?

    Big Brother Awards

    Privacy International tackles some of the most prevalent civil rights abuses currently occuring in the West. The decline of the right to privacy. Here is details of their forthcoming Big Brother Awards to be held at the London School of Economics. More marketing related content here.

  • Dasani’s UK problems

    Coca-Cola’s Dasani have had a rough couple of weeks with their entry into the UK bottled water market.

    Dasani is a respected brands in the US, China and across the developing world. Its manufactured approach to mineral water is at odds with the bottled at source manufacturers that dominate in Europe.

    A few weeks ago the UK tabloid press ‘exposed’ Dasani as tap water from Sidcup. To be fair Dasani does use some interesting NASA developed purification technology and then re-adds minerals in a carefully controlled amount to provide consistent taste. Then the water mains burst in Sidcup, and now Dasani have bromate contamination. This contamination forced parent company Coca-Cola to initiate a complete product recall, pulling Dasani off supermarket shelves around Britain.

    Of course this did not stop me pouring petrol on the fire by bending over backwards to help a CNBC Europe researcher who phoned up looking for expert comment on how this may affect the Coca-Cola and Dasani brands, I managed to place Mark North, creative director of Henrion Ludlow Schmidt’s London office on the European Closing Bell programme as an expert commentator. The product recall means that it will be very hard for Coca-Cola to relaunch the brand in the UK – at least in the near term. Their main concern will be protecting the reputation of Dasani in markets were it is currently established and successful.  Coca-Cola’s misfortune wouldn’t stop me drinking Dasani whilst travelling as it provides safer drinking water in places like China.

    What really astonished me was that in less two hours after the story broke in the late editions of London’s Evening Standard it had appeared on 89 different news sites listed by Google News including the San Jose Mercury and Straits Times. There is no longer such a thing as a local brand. News truly is 24 hours and global in nature….

    More on Coca-Cola here.

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