Kate Santore took the stage at Content Marketing World to share Coca-Cola’s storytelling ethos – and in the process inspired marketers to ask, “What if?”
“Sharing our strategies and approach to marketing has been a tradition at Coca-Cola to open the door for other brands to learn from our 130 years of marketing experience,” Kate says. “Sharing this ‘thought-ware’ collectively raises the bar for every brand and therefore makes us strive for bigger, better, bolder.”
Read on for the Chief Content Officer magazine interview with the senior integrated marketing content manager at The Coca-Cola Company.
CCO: You have spoken about Coca-Cola’s four story archetypes. Tell us more about each and why archetypes are so important for the brand.
Santore: At Coca-Cola, we want to create Coca-Cola stories and not stories by Coca-Cola. That holds true when our product is a character in the story with a credible role to play. There are four typical archetypes that we look to: object of desire, embodiment of an attitude, social connector, and functional offering or benefit. If you read a script or even partner-created content and say to yourself, “Can I tell this story without Coca-Cola?” and the answer is yes, then it’s a not a Coca-Cola story.
CCO: How do you strike a balance between trying new and exciting ideas, while safeguarding an iconic brand like Coca-Cola? How do you walk that tightrope of inventiveness versus controlled risk?
Santore: Walking a tightrope is a great way to describe it, but I don’t think it’s a balancing act reserved only for large iconic brands, but for every brand. I’m challenged every day to think about how we drive relevance and reconsideration for our brands today, tomorrow, and for the next 100 years. We must balance managing today while inventing tomorrow, constantly weighing what our brands…
