Coca-Cola, the soft drinks giant, is seeking to leverage social media, mobile and database marketing in a bid to achieve the "holy grail" of digital communications.
In response to the shifting habits of consumers, the beverage maker has rolled out fewer campaign microsites in favour of a continuous presence on portals like Facebook and Twitter.
"That's a change for marketers, because they tend to think in campaigns and campaign periods, whereas now we have an ongoing dialogue with our customers," Carol Kruse, its vp, interactive media, told New Media Age.
While it could be assumed this might place a drain on resources given the imperative to regularly supply fresh material, practice proved different from theory.
"You would think [that], except that we're not the fans' first focus, we're not constantly needing to entertain them. They're leading with a lot of the content, we're just participating in a conversation."
Such a finding is in keeping with the fact Coke's Facebook brand page was constructed by two fans, before the social network stated Coca-Cola must become involved.
"At first we felt we needed to moderate our page, and we were paying for moderation in ten languages. We realised that less than 1% of what was put up there we'd consider taking down."
"We found there's such incredible content from our consumers expressing how they feel about our brands that it's better to amplify that. It's very genuine, the voice of the consumer. That's true brand advocacy."
To allow its individual units across the globe to generate the best results, Coke has boosted the size of its central social media team and developed "turnkey" tools adaptable at the local level.
"If they're a smaller market and want to do something with Facebook, they don't have to set anything up, it's already there," said Kruse. "So they can focus on how social integrates with paid, owned and earned media."
On mobile, the company is running trials of location-based service Foursquare in Australia, and Kruse predicted the recently-unveiled Facebook Places, a similar platform, will have a significant impact.
Despite the need to tread carefully, Kruse suggested Coca-Cola should be able to derive major benefits from this emerging channel.
"You could have a mobile experience with Coke that's very relevant," she argued.
"We're really starting to get close to the holy grail of marketing of the right message at the right time to the right person when they're most receptive."
In-depth shopper insights are also crucial to reaching this goal, and Coca-Cola boasts a database containing details on 58m people worldwide.
Alongside 30m customers in China, records cover 14m users of its MyCokeRewards US online loyalty scheme, and their 1.5m counterparts accessing its parallel offering, Coke Zone, in the UK.
In one demonstration of how this can facilitate a personalised approach, MyCokeRewards attempts to tailor the "consumption experience" using the browsing history, location and preferences of individual visitors.
"If I were to receive a message around a sports drink because I'm an athlete, that would be very relevant," Kruse argued.
"That's really exciting, when you look at data-driven marketing, relationship marketing and understand the behaviour of the consumer."
Thus far, the organisation has found the best-performing targeted communications initiatives deliver incremental sales growth of some 25%.
