How Coca Cola uses AI

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If you sell hundreds of different products across multiple countries, perceptions and customer behaviour can vary greatly from market to market. Understanding these differences helps tailor specific messages for different markets, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach.When you’re dealing with global brands, user data from social media or generated through your own systems (such as vending machines) is vast and messy. AI provides a viable method of structuring this data and drawing out insights.Computer vision technology such as image recognition tools can analyse millions of social media images to help a brand understand when, how and by whom its products are enjoyed.As well as making marketing decisions, brands that are fully invested in AI are beginning to use it for designing new products and services

As the world’s largest beverage company, Coca-Cola serves more than 1.9 billion drinks every day, across over 500 brands, including Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Fanta, Sprite, Dasani, Powerade, Schweppes and Minute Maid.Big data and artificial intelligence (AI) power everything that the business does.

The Coca Cola company is a shining example of a business which has re-ordered itself based on data and intelligence. It has long shown an appreciation of the fact that today’s technology offers unprecedented opportunity to reassess just about every aspect of how business is conducted. Rethinking itself as a technology driven company with a focus on strategic implementation of data and AI means it is likely to retain its place at the head of the pack for the foreseeable future.Artificial intelligence is driving many of the digital initiatives being pushed forward in today’s
industries, and Coca-Cola is using the technology to drive its own unique purchasing experiences.

The original Coca-Cola recipe was developed by John Pemberton as a medical solution to treat his own morphine addiction. Initially branded as French Wine Coca in 1885, the non-alcoholic version, Coca-Cola, was developed the following year. Originally sold as a patent medicine, Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola with claims it could cure ailments as wide-ranging as indigestion, nerve disorders, headaches, and impotence. From there, the brand grew exponentially – eventually dropping the medical pretensions and being marketed as a pure soft drink instead.
Today, Coca-Cola is one of the world’s largest most recognizable brands. The company employs over 100,000 people and has revenues of $41,863 million, placing it at #64 on the Fortune 500.

Marketing soft drinks around the world is not a “one-size-fits-all affair”. Coca-Cola products are marketed and sold in over 200 countries.In each of these markets there are local differences concerning flavours, sugar and calorie contents, marketing preferences and competitors faced by the brand.This means that to stay on top of the game in every territory, it must collect and analyse huge amounts of data from disparate sources to determine which of its 500 brands are likely to be well received. The taste of their most well-known brands will even differ from country to country, and understanding these local preferences is a hugely complex task.

Coca-Cola collects data on local drink preferences through the interfaces on its touch-screen vending machines – over 1 million of them are installed in Japan alone.To understand how its products are discussed and shared on social media, the company has set up 37 “social centers” to collect data and analyse it for insights using the Salesforce platform. The aim is to create more of the content that is shown to be effective at generating positive engagement. In the past, the process of creating this content was carried out by humans; however, the company has been actively looking at developing automated systems that will create adverts and social content informed by social data.It also uses image recognition technology to target users who share pictures on social media inferring that they could be potential customers.

In one example of this strategy in action, Coca-Cola targeted adverts for its Gold Peak brand of iced tea at those who posted images that suggested they enjoy iced tea, or in which the image recognition algorithms spotted logos of competing brands. Once the algorithms determined that specific individuals were likely to be fans of iced tea, and active social media users who shared images with their friends, the company knows that targeting these users with adverts is likely to be an efficient use of their advertising revenue.For purchase verification, off-the-shelf image recognition technology proved to be insufficient for reading the low-resolution dot matrix printing used to stamp product codes onto packaging. So, Coca-Cola worked to develop its own image recognition solution using Google’s TensorFlow technology.

Analysis of the data from vending machines by AI algorithms allows Coca-Cola to more accurately understand how the buying habits of its billions of customers varies across the globe.Computer vision analysis and natural language processing of social media posts, as well as deep learning-driven analysis of social engagement metrics, allows Coca-Cola to produce social advertising that is more likely to resonate with customers and drive sales of its products.
Applying TensorFlow to create convolutional neural networks enabled scanners to recognise product codes from a simple photograph, increasing customer engagement with Coca-Cola’s different loyalty programs around the world.The famous soft drink has been around for a long time, but one of the ways in which Coca-Cola is driving innovation today is by incorporating advanced artificial intelligence technology into its worldwide network of branded vending machines.Artificial intelligence is going to be at the forefront of all digital and omnichannel marketing in the future, and we can surely expect to see many more innovations like Coca-Cola’s vending machines moving forwards.

References:
1. https://artificialintelligence-news.com/2019/05/07/how-coca-cola-is-using-ai-to-stay-at-the-top-of-the-soft-drinks-market/
2.https://foodandbeverage.wbresearch.com/blog/coca-cola-artificial-intelligence-ai-omnichannel-strategy
3.https://bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1171
4.https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/how_cocacola_does_ai/41582

How Coca Cola is Leveraging Machine Learning in the Hyper-competitive CPG Industry

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