Coca-Cola’s CMO Says “Brand Love” Isn’t Enough. Here’s What Businesses Can Learn From It

September 19, 2026


For decades, Coca-Cola has been one of the clearest examples of the power of branding.

Few companies have built the kind of global recognition, nostalgia and cultural relevance associated with the Coca-Cola name.


But Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer, Manuel Arroyo, has been making a distinction that matters far beyond one of the world’s largest advertisers: people liking your brand is not the same as people buying from it.


Speaking about Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy and what the company wants from its agency partners, Arroyo has emphasized a greater focus on consumer behavior, consumption and the ability to connect marketing investment with actual business results.


For business owners, the lesson is surprisingly simple.


Marketing should ultimately change what people do.


People Can Love Your Brand and Still Not Buy


Brand awareness matters. Reputation matters. Having customers who recognize and like your company certainly matters.

But those things aren't the final objective.


Arroyo has used Coca-Cola itself to illustrate the problem. People can wear Coca-Cola merchandise, display its logo and express affection for the brand without necessarily consuming more Coca-Cola.


That creates an important distinction between brand sentiment and customer behavior.

The same problem exists on a smaller scale every day.


A business can accumulate Instagram likes without generating sales. A LinkedIn post can receive thousands of impressions without producing a qualified lead. A company can have a recognizable brand while struggling to convert that recognition into customers.


Those metrics aren't worthless. They simply don't tell the entire story.


Coca-Cola Changed What It Measured


Coca-Cola began shifting its marketing focus away from relying heavily on measures such as "brand love" and toward understanding what consumers actually do.


That meant putting greater emphasis on behavior and consumption.


According to Arroyo, the change wasn't automatically embraced internally. When traditional brand metrics and sales performance appeared to tell different stories, it created debate over which measurements actually mattered.


The broader principle is useful for almost any company:


The metrics a business chooses influence the marketing it creates.


If the objective is engagement, teams optimize for engagement.


If the objective is traffic, they optimize for clicks.


If the objective is qualified leads, bookings, purchases or repeat customers, marketing starts being evaluated very differently.


Marketing Should Change Behavior


Every marketing campaign should eventually face a straightforward question:


What did someone do differently because of it?


Did they:


> purchase a product?

> request a quote?

> book an appointment?

> subscribe?

> visit a store?

> return and buy again?


That doesn't mean every advertisement needs to produce an immediate transaction. Awareness and consideration still play important roles in how customers make decisions.


But businesses should understand how those activities contribute to the behaviors that actually move the company forward.


Otherwise, it becomes very easy to confuse activity with results.


Coca-Cola Wants Marketing Connected to Sales


This philosophy is also showing up in where Coca-Cola is putting its attention.


The company has a massive global media, data and technology account under review, reportedly worth roughly $4 billion. Among the areas Arroyo has identified as priorities are creators and influencers, retail media and commerce, and better attribution connecting marketing investment to sales.


Those priorities point toward a larger change taking place across digital marketing.


The boundaries between advertising and commerce are becoming increasingly blurred.


A creator can introduce a product and generate a sale. A retail media advertisement can appear close to the point of purchase. Social and live commerce can move customers from discovery to checkout within the same platform.


As those connections become easier to measure, businesses have more opportunities to understand whether marketing actually influenced revenue.


You Don't Need Coca-Cola's Budget to Apply the Same Thinking


Most businesses aren't managing billions of dollars in advertising.


The underlying discipline still applies.


Start by identifying the actions that matter most to the business.


For an ecommerce company, that might be purchases, conversion rate, repeat purchases or customer acquisition cost.


For a service business, it could be qualified leads, consultations, appointments or closed deals.


For a local business, it might be bookings, calls, store visits or returning customers.

Then work backward.


Which channels generate those actions? Which campaigns contribute to them? Which content attracts people who eventually become customers? Where are potential customers disappearing before they convert?


Suddenly, marketing becomes less about generating impressive-looking numbers and more about understanding what actually moves the business.


Measure What Moves the Business


There is nothing wrong with people liking your company.


Strong brands have enormous value, and Coca-Cola itself is perhaps one of the best demonstrations of that fact.


The mistake is treating admiration as the finish line.


For businesses spending money and time on marketing, the more useful question is what happens next.


People saw it. People liked it. People remembered it.


But did they do anything?


That is the measurement that ultimately matters.


Source: Adweek: Coca-Cola’s Top Marketer Reveals What He’s Looking for in His Next Agency

Your Next Marketer Might Need to Code

October 26, 2026
Marketing is becoming more technical. As businesses adopt AI tools, automation and increasingly complex software, a new kind of specialist is emerging: the marketing engineer. For years, businesses have built marketing teams around familiar responsibilities: advertising, content creation, search engine optimization, social media and lead generation. Those responsibilities haven't disappeared. But the technology behind them has become increasingly complicated. Businesses now rely on advertising platforms, customer relationship management systems, email automation, website analytics, e-commerce software and AI tools. Making those systems work together is becoming an important part of marketing performance. That's where the marketing engineer comes in. What Is a Marketing Engineer? A marketing engineer combines marketing knowledge with technical skills. Traditional marketing specialists might develop a campaign strategy, create content or manage advertising budgets. A marketing engineer can help build the technical systems that make those activities more effective. That might involve connecting a CRM to advertising platforms, automating reporting, improving conversion tracking, integrating customer data or developing workflows using APIs and AI tools. The role connects marketing strategy with technical execution. Rather than relying entirely on separate developers, analysts and software specialists, businesses can use technical marketing expertise to bridge those functions. The Problem With Disconnected Marketing Systems Many businesses already have the technology they need. The challenge is getting it to work together. A company might use Google Ads to attract customers, Shopify to process orders, Klaviyo for email marketing and a CRM to manage relationships. Each platform collects information, but that doesn't necessarily mean the information is connected. Employees may still need to download reports, transfer leads between systems, update spreadsheets or manually compare campaign results against actual sales. Those disconnected processes can make marketing slower and more difficult to measure. Marketing engineering focuses on improving the connections between systems. When information moves reliably between platforms, businesses can reduce repetitive work and make decisions using more complete data. AI Search Is Changing How Businesses Get Discovered Technical marketing is also becoming more relevant as AI-powered search develops. Traditional search engine optimization focuses on helping websites appear in organic search results. But customers increasingly use AI-powered tools to research products, compare services and find answers. That has brought greater attention to two related concepts. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on making information clear, accessible and useful for answer-based discovery. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on improving how content can be discovered, understood and potentially referenced by generative AI systems. These approaches overlap with established SEO practices, including technically accessible websites, useful content and clear information architecture. They do not guarantee inclusion in AI-generated answers. For businesses, the practical lesson is that website content and technical structure need to support more than traditional search rankings. Automation Can Eliminate Repetitive Marketing Work Another opportunity is workflow automation. Marketing departments often spend considerable time on tasks that don't require much creative judgment. Downloading reports, updating spreadsheets, transferring customer information, preparing campaign summaries and moving data between applications are common examples. Many of these activities can be automated when systems are properly connected. That doesn't eliminate the need for marketers. It can give them more time to focus on strategy, creative development, customer relationships and improving campaign performance. The objective isn't to automate everything. It's to identify which tasks can be handled more reliably and efficiently through technology. Better Data Can Lead to Better Marketing Decisions One of the biggest challenges in marketing is understanding which activities actually contribute to revenue. A campaign might generate thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads without producing profitable customers. Marketing engineers can help businesses connect advertising activity with customer and sales information. That includes improving conversion tracking, integrating data sources and identifying where potential customers drop out of the buying process. The goal is to move beyond reporting what happened on an advertising platform and develop a clearer understanding of what happened across the business. Does Your Business Need a Marketing Engineer? Not every company needs to hire a full-time technical marketing specialist. For smaller businesses, the first step is identifying where disconnected systems, manual processes or unreliable data are creating problems. Consider whether your advertising and sales platforms share information, whether campaign performance can be connected to revenue and whether repetitive reporting tasks could be automated. It is also worth reviewing whether your website is technically accessible, well structured and capable of answering the questions potential customers are asking. Depending on the complexity of the business, these improvements might be handled by an internal employee, an outside specialist or a combination of both. The important decision isn't necessarily who to hire. It's determining which capabilities the business actually needs. The Future of Marketing Is More Connected Creative thinking, compelling messaging and customer relationships remain essential to effective marketing. But those strengths increasingly depend on the technology supporting them. Businesses need systems that communicate, data that can be trusted and processes that allow teams to work efficiently. Marketing engineering represents one approach to bringing those capabilities together. The next competitive advantage may not come from producing more content or launching more campaigns. It may come from building a marketing operation where everything works together.

P&G Rebuilt Its Operations and Saved $600 Million. Here's How.

October 23, 2026
Procter & Gamble didn't simply outsource its support operations. It first rebuilt how they worked, then brought in outside partners. By 2008, its business-services transformation had generated approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. In the late 1990s, Procter & Gamble faced a problem familiar to businesses of almost every size: too many teams performing similar work. Finance, human resources and other support functions were spread across different parts of the company. That meant duplicated activities, inconsistent processes and unnecessary costs. Instead of continuing to expand those departments independently, P&G decided to fundamentally change how its business operated. First, P&G Fixed Its Internal Operations In 1999, P&G began bringing its support functions into a single global organization. Over the following three years, the company consolidated and standardized more than 70 services. It also established shared-service centers to support operations around the world. The goal was to replace fragmented systems with a more consistent and efficient operating structure. Importantly, P&G didn't begin by handing all these functions to outside companies. It first reorganized how the work was performed internally. That foundation would make the next phase possible. Then Came $4.2 Billion in Outsourcing Agreements In 2003, P&G entered into outsourcing partnerships valued at approximately $4.2 billion. Outside specialists took responsibility for selected operations, including IT infrastructure, payroll support, accounts payable and facilities management. Rather than maintaining every capability internally, P&G could rely on partners with specialized expertise, established systems and the scale to manage these activities. But it didn't outsource everything. The company retained control of functions it considered strategically important, including procurement, logistics, IT architecture and technology-driven innovation. This distinction was central to the strategy. P&G wasn't trying to eliminate internal operations. It was deciding which activities made sense to manage itself and which could be handled more effectively by partners. The Benefits Went Beyond Cost Savings One of the clearest examples came during P&G's integration of Gillette. According to P&G's business-services leadership, its established systems and outsourcing partners helped the company mobilize approximately 750 additional people within weeks. The business-services integration was completed in 15 months, a process its leadership believed could otherwise have taken three to four years. That flexibility mattered. P&G could draw on existing capabilities and outside resources without having to build every part of the operation from scratch. By 2008, the company's broader business-services transformation had produced approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. Those savings came from a combination of internal consolidation, standardized processes and selective outsourcing, not outsourcing alone. What Smaller Businesses Can Learn Most businesses aren't managing P&G's scale or negotiating multibillion-dollar agreements. But the underlying decision is surprisingly relevant. As companies grow, they often add employees and departments without reconsidering how work gets done. Over time, the same problems can emerge: duplicated tasks, fragmented responsibilities, rising administrative costs and employees spending too much time on activities outside their core expertise. The first step isn't necessarily outsourcing. It's understanding the operation. Which processes are inefficient? Which functions require direct internal control? Which activities could a specialist handle more effectively? Customer support, bookkeeping, administrative work, creative production and certain technology operations may be candidates for outside support, depending on the business. But outsourcing a poorly defined process can simply transfer the problem to someone else. P&G's experience illustrates a more disciplined approach: improve the system, identify which capabilities are strategically important and use external partners where they offer a genuine advantage. You Don't Have to Build Everything In-House The most important lesson from P&G's transformation isn't that every business should outsource more. It's that growth doesn't require owning and managing every operational function. By combining stronger internal processes with carefully selected partners, businesses can reduce unnecessary complexity and concentrate their resources where they create the most value. Sometimes the smartest way to grow isn't to build another department. It's to rethink how the work gets done. Sources McKinsey & Company, From internal service provider to strategic partner: An interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G (2008). Procter & Gamble, 2008 Annual Report.