Growth Strategy

Driving Balanced Growth Across our Total Beverage Portfolio

Compelling Opportunity by Any Measure

Over the past three decades, the beverage industry has benefitted from a relatively consistent pattern of growth. No matter how you slice it – by consumer, by customer, by beverage category, by geography — we have vast opportunities ahead of us. In developed markets, which comprise approximately 20% of the global population, The Coca-Cola Company has significant headroom to gain share from competitors. In developing and emerging markets, which comprise approximately 80% of the global population, nearly 70% of people do not consume any commercial beverages. In these markets, The Coca-Cola Company has a significant opportunity to develop the beverage industry from the ground up. We believe both the scale of the Coca-Cola system and our growth mindset are key differentiators to satisfy the evolving daily needs of people throughout the world.

(a) 2024 industry volume per internal estimates; (b) Coca-Cola Trademark, Hawkeye study findings, excluding China and India; (c) 2024 NARTD industry retail value based on internal estimates and excluding hot beverages; (d) Kantar Q3 2024

Scaling our Total Beverage Portfolio with Increased Local Edge

The power of our portfolio, amplified by our system’s unique capabilities – demonstrated by our global franchise operating model that combines the benefits of scale with deep local market intimacy – is a clear advantage to win in the marketplace. Our mindset is to continuously improve every aspect of how we do business, and we take a consumer-centric and customer-focused viewpoint to all critical business decisions.

We remain committed to driving balanced growth across our total beverage portfolio and delivering on our purpose to refresh the world and make a difference. Our growth strategy is fueled by our topline flywheel which contains four distinct nodes: Marketing, Innovation, Revenue Growth Management (RGM), and Integrated Execution.
Click on a node below to learn more.

Accelerating Our Strategic Growth Flywheel

Click on each flywheel icon to learn about how we fuel our topline growth.

Marketing

Great marketing begins with human insights – understanding what the consumer wants, making a superior-tasting product, and telling a brand’s story in a relatable way by leveraging consumer passion points. We then use these insights to craft a powerful portfolio across beverage categories on a global scale that is tailored to local consumer needs.

We operate with a networked marketing model that integrates product, digital, live and retail experiences and harnesses passion points to reach consumers in personalized ways. To recruit the next generation of drinkers and ensure long-term growth, we have shifted our marketing approach from a TV-centric to a digital-first model that balances local market intimacy, scale, and flexibility. Our digital mix has gone from less than 30% in 2019 to approximately 65% of our total media spend in 2024. In 2023, in partnership with WPP, we created Studio X, our digital marketing ecosystem that sits in 9 locations globally. Studio X has transformed our marketing capabilities and is allowing us to create ideas faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost.

Our culture increasingly emphasizes acting boldly, learning, and scaling successes. In 2024 our Coca-Cola Christmas ad was created with Generative AI for the first time, combining emerging technology with human creativity, which allowed us to produce the ad faster and at a lower cost. The power of emerging technologies like Generative AI are still in early stages and we will continue to lead and iterate our approach.

Innovation

Our innovation framework complements our work to build great brands, and focuses on prioritizing bigger and bolder bets. Each of our innovations has a clear objective and goes beyond just new flavors and brands to include products, packages, and equipment. In 2024, innovation contributed strongly to revenue growth, and our innovation success rates improved versus the prior year. Examples include new launches of mini-cans, Ayataka Tea and Topo Chico Sabores.

Revenue Growth Management (RGM)

RGM is a key commercial capability that focuses on identifying revenue pools (where to play) and revenue growth strategies (how to win). Our company continues to exemplify leadership in RGM by utilizing our full suite of RGM capabilities to better tailor our brand-price-package architecture to consumers’ and customers’ needs. In 2024, we led the beverage industry in customer value creation for the seventh consecutive year.

Integrated Execution

Our success as a company is depends on a harmonized system in which our bottlers can grow and thrive in the marketplace. Our system is step-changing execution by fully integrating our marketing and commercial plans, investing heavily in digital capabilities and sticking to the fundamentals of commercial excellence to accelerate consumer recruitment, increase consumption and win in the market.

Ensuring product availability is one of our system's greatest strengths, yet we still have tremendous opportunity in this area. While our system improved share of visible inventory in 2024 and our brands are found in ~33 million outlets across the world, there remains ample headroom to increase outlet coverage, reduce out-of-stock inventory and better tailor our offerings with the right placements.

Basket incidence is another opportunity. To drive basket incidence, our system is focused on better activating integrated marketing campaigns in key channels, increasing point-of-sale displays and winning impulse zones outside the traditional beverage aisle.

Finally, cold drink equipment is one of the strongest consumption drivers in our system’s toolbox with approximately 14 million units of cold drink equipment present in our ~33 million customer outlets. We have significant opportunity to drive additional consumption of our beverages by placing more cold drink equipment in customer outlets across the world.