Lessons from a Global Marketeer
Konstantinos, based in Milan, joined Emma in London, to share his lessons learnt globe-trotting in service of some of the world’s biggest brands.
Raised by a designer and seeing the magic of how brands are created, Konstantinos took to studying marketing in the 90’s inspired by Wolf Ollins and David Ogilvy.
Konstantinos has an impressive CV as a brand marketeer and business leader, starting out on Fisherman’s Friend lozenges, working for the Coca-Cola Company in Greece, Atlanta HQ, Russia, Thailand and Japan, Danone in the Netherlands and Kraft Heinz in Italy. What’s brilliant about his story is that coke was banned in his house as a kid!
Konstantinos has first-hand experience of finding relevance, and building brand equity and loyalty, where market leadership is contested. He’s a huge advocate of making brands useful in a timely and meaningful way.
In our conversation, we explored:
● Ensuring that brand playbooks are culturally relevant
● Not being distracted by a competitor’s successes
● Using brands to foster a greater good
● A cautionary tale about marketing losing its edge
Creating brand play-books that are culturally relevant
Global businesses like the Coca Cola company are successful the world over because they have regional and local marketing teams that ensure relevance across time and borders.
The functional benefit of coke is an uplift, provided by sugar, aromatics and bubbles, whether it’s for digestion in Spain, to refresh you on a hot day in Georgia, or to provide refreshment and street cred for teens in India.
As a cult brand, Coke has leveraged its symbolism across the decades but has tweaked this symbolism to be relevant within the current cultural backdrop. Coke has always been about the power of togetherness to make moments better. This concept of togetherness has evolved over time, influenced by the cultural context. The idea of the American dream post-World War 2 celebrating liberation, prosperity and peace evolved to one of tolerance and inclusivity in the 70’s and then again to optimism and happiness, epitomised in its Christmas campaign.
Brand leaders must create culturally relevant brands that keep the global promise
Much of Konstantinos work has been to drive business turnaround in local markets. This has often meant having difficult conversations with global teams to deviate from the global ‘one size fits all’ play-book while building highly performing local teams and insights. His passion for local market ethnography to generate category insights has been at the heart of much of his decision making and in-market success.
“Looking from outside, you would think Coca-Cola is very consistent around the world. It's the same thing. People react to it the same way. The reality is it's not the case. It was dramatically different working for Coke in Russia versus Thailand versus Japan. I had on occasion to step out and see the name on the building to make sure that I was in the right place.”
Coke’s global play-book focussed on youth recruitment away from home, with chilled distribution, leading to in home consumption of larger, multi-serve formats with food.
When Coke shifted its global strategy to increase frequency and volume of consumption to multi-serve packs, it did so by focussing on ‘refreshment’, a concept which didn’t land well in Asia due to a different competitive set. This focus on refreshment meant that the competitive set extended beyond Pepsi and other carbonated soft drinks, to soups and teas, which are firmly embedded in culture.
At the time, because refreshment through a carbonated drink was seen as an alien context, the local cultural context meant that taste was a more powerful.
“There are eleven kinds of teas in Japan, for different seasons, making it difficult for Coke to own refreshment. When I landed in Asia, first in Thailand, then in Japan, we also demonstrated that because soup fell inside the competitive landscape, it needed to be about taste rather than refreshment. So for me, the simple but not simplistic triangle of Coke is uplift, togetherness and original taste. And then it can be tweaked according to where it is sold”
Understanding that what originally made brands successful could build relevance today
Although Bledina, a French baby food brand was created over 100 years ago as a blended flour drink for children who were lactose intolerant to keep them nourished and help them to grow, it really took off in the middle of the last century. As more women in France entered the workforce in the 1950’s and 1960’s, their time became more precious. Bledina launched a range of of food in cans and jars to help the working woman take care of her children in a natural and convenient way. While this new generation of working French women didn’t have the same time that previous generations had to shop for and scratch cook with natural and fresh ingredients, they could gain confidence that Bledina did things properly for them.
“I'm going to be successful in my career as a wife and as a mother because Bledina helps me take care of my kids in a natural, convenient, acceptable way.”
At the core of the brand, Bledina is about helping French mums and dads to feed their families well. Zoom forward to the 21st Century, and French families were concerned about the disappearance of loved and trusted French farmers.
“How do we help protect the French farmers?
With local ingredients, local protection, local support, because without French farmers there is no food for French kids”
Bledina and its parent company Danone, provide training, technical and financial support to French farmers to move towards regenerative agriculture.
Consumer centricity builds relevance and penetration
In Russia in 2010, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Coca-Cola was in decline, and Pepsi was the market leader. Coke, which had only been in the market for 20 years was seen as industrial, artificial and foreign, when cultural pride in Russian products was in resurgence. Deep consumer insight revealed that because mums had not grown up with coke, they were unlikely to accept it into their homes due to negative associations. The strategy of serving coke with food, to improve the taste of food, was also irrelevant in Russia as drinks are not consumed with food.
The objective was to drive in-home penetration. The path of least resistance with the most attractive target was recruiting teens away from home who were socialising with snacks. By providing the right price pack architecture and building acceptance among mums that coke was part of healthy teenager interactions, slowly but surely the brand had permission to enter the home in larger formats and grew its penetration and frequency.
Similarly, to build penetration in Thailand the team needed to think differently about the food occasion. A consumer ethnographic deep dive identified the occasion of least resistance to enter Thai homes was the mid-afternoon …
“The insight was that people don't have lunch as a family because they're working out in the fields, they're stuck in Bangkok traffic … but in the afternoon there is a magic moment where kids come back from school where the family comes together. The family quality magic moment. And there is where Coke could enter the household alongside snacking because mums want to give love and fuel to their kids and then send them to study for five hours. By talking about social mobility, the social and cultural symbolism of the brand resonates.”
Not being distracted by the competition’s successes
If a market leader (in this case Pepsi) is driving success through the trilogy of football, music and celebrities, it’s tempting to want to mirror their success by investing in the same initiatives. Because Pepsi was the market leader in Thailand, Coke mirroring Pepsi’s marketing spend (even if on bigger football matches and more expensive celebrities) could easily be misattributed to Pepsi. Competitive benchmarking between Coca-Cola and Pepsi identified that coke needed to differentiate itself from Pepsi.
Following a successful campaign in Australia of printing names on cans, the ‘share a Coke campaign’ was rolled out in Thailand in a locally relevant way. Cultural insight highlighted three things:
A love for mum, with the word mum also being used to describe the Queen, for whom many Thai people had strong affections.
The complexity of long Thai names meant that people often used nicknames derived from animals, plants or nature
The natural politeness and respectfulness of Thai culture meant that people were not as forward or naturally flirtatious as other cultures, and that a prop such as a drink would give people permission to flirt.
Working with the bottler in Thailand, the local team re-created the name campaign to help people to overcome social barriers, enabling people to make deeper connections, thank their mums, flirt, and enjoy others’ company. They did this by adopting a global campaign driving togetherness that had worked in other countries but had local relevance and execution. This campaign was so successful that over it increased the brand’s market share by volume to overtake Pepsi, and Coke remains the market leader in both Bangkok and Thailand to this day.
Using brands to foster a greater good
Many brands have joined the purpose washing bandwagon, looking to drive engagement with a more scrutinous consumer. During his tenure at Heinz Italy, Konstantinos didn’t want to jump on a vacuous bandwagon. A declining birth rate in Italy was a wake-up call for Plasmon.
The origin story of Plasmon is fascinating, 120 years old, originally a generic protein incorporated into biscuits and rusks, so effective that even Ernest Shackleton took it to the South Pole with him. Post World War 2, Plasmon was a brand that saved the lives of countless Italian babies …
“The sales boom for Plasmon in Italy was right after the Second World War, where much of Italy was destroyed. There was huge famine post liberation and Plasmon had this amazing biscuit that had protein in it. So it was an amazing protein source that actually saved the lives of babies whose families did not even have enough money to buy milk, especially in rural parts of Italy.
Plasmon was essentially a protein that helps your baby to grow. The emotional benefit at its core was about nurturing the future of Italy.”
By 2023, Italy’s ageing population was second only to Japan, compounded by a declining birth rate. Rights and working conditions for parents in Italy were some of the worst in Europe. The Plasmon team decided to face this head on. The Effie award winning campaign Adamo, an 8-minute mockumentary about the last baby born in Italy set out to achieve the following objectives:
Start a serious conversation about Italy's demographic crisis
Pressure institutions and the government to implement supportive parenthood policies
Raise awareness about the long-term consequences of ignoring the problem
Alongside the campaign, Heinz increased their own working benefits and senior leadership training on how to support parents in the workplace. As a result of the campaign over ½ million people lobbied parliament to draft a bill to improve working conditions, and many companies joined Heinz in offering better conditions for working parents. This campaign created brand love and differentiation for Plasmon during a cost-of-living crisis where margins needed to be maintained.
A cautionary tale about marketing losing its edge
When Konstantinos started out in marketing, marketeers came from different educational backgrounds, bringing diversity of thought and execution. With the advent of digital tools and the dominance of Meta and Alphabet the risk is that brands will begin to converge and lose what makes them special.
In a drive for efficiency and adoption of technologies
People within marketing are losing their jobs
Talented advertising and design executives are losing their work to AI engines
Fake/AI generated content will make it difficult for consumers to establish the difference between reality and illusion
We are already beginning to see a backlash, with the rise of communities. People are going to Substack and similar sites to find their tribe in search for human connection, be it over Pokémon, Florida Man or their love of gardening.
As we live in the age of influencers and social media, for good or for bad, it's important to have real people, because people provoke purposeful participation in marketing. There is nothing like people, real people or influencers or idols or symbols provoking a reaction for you to participate, whether in the purchase or in the community of the brand, and especially when there is a purpose that asks for something more.
Brands must not take shortcuts at the expense of staying true to their roots and what they do for humankind.
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Read more Relevance Series perspectives here. These are personal and candid points of view on brand relevance. Participants include senior leaders at Pepsi Lipton, Mars Petcare, Beam Suntory, Philips Mother and Childcare, Mondelez, Santander, Emami and Unilever R&D.
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