You’ve probably heard of The Coca-Cola Company.

In addition to its flagship Coke brand, you will have encountered at least some of its countless other beverages, from Sprite and Fanta to Five Alive and Powerade.

Today, Coca-Cola has almost 140,000 employees around the world, with over 3,500 products on-sale in over two hundred countries. And with a history dating back 125 years, Coca-Cola is now the most valuable and globally recognisable brand on the planet.

Going global? Think local

So why am I talking to you about Coca-Cola on the blur Group blog? Well, following on from last week’s blog post on how smaller creative agencies can compete with WPP, I really started thinking about localisation and how big businesses understand that to ‘go global’ they need to think local.

WPP attained ‘world’s largest advertising agency’ status because of its global reach – 146,000 employees in 2,400 offices working across 107 countries. And it’s this set-up that we know the Creative Services Exchange is well-equipped to compete with, with only a fraction of the overheads of WPP.

But the Coca-Cola model is worth looking at from a global perspective too, to see how it has managed 49 consecutive years of increased dividends for its shareholders. And it’s quite a simple model really.

Coca-Cola: a glorified marketing company

Coca-cola, for all intents and purposes, is just a glorified marketing company as it franchises its entire distribution ecosystem. The company does still produce the syrup concentrate, but this is sold to over 300 bottling companies around the world who hold the exclusive rights to a designated territory and sell the end canned and bottled products to retail stores, vending machines and restaurants for everyone to enjoy.

It’s important to note that Coca-Cola doesn’t own or control the vast majority of its bottling partners, which means it doesn’t have any of the associated overheads of running operations locally.

Coca-cola then works closely with each bottling partner to develop localised marketing plans for each country. These localised marketing initiatives helps ensure the local culture is catered for in each market, because what appeals to US or UK consumers won’t necessarily resonate with its target markets across Africa or Asia. The importance of culture when marketing a brand cannot be overstated and that’s where Coke excels.

This is a very simple but sophisticated model. Coca-cola is now one of the most globally recognisable brands because of how it has gone about its localisation efforts from early on. It makes syrup and it markets its brand…that’s all it really does in-house. But wherever you go in the world, Coke tastes and looks the same.

And this leads me nicely to a key point regarding the Creative Services Exchange. Given that we have nigh-on ten thousand vetted creatives across six continents, companies of all sizes can tap into the local cultural knowledge of writers, designers and developers anywhere.

Creating a new website for Australian audiences? You’ll probably want a design/development team ‘Down Under’ working on your brief. If it’s good enough for Coca-Cola, it should be good enough for you too.