Coca-Cola's global marketing function operated with significant variation in practices, governance, and capability levels across markets. Building a consistent approach to marketing excellence — one that standardized the right things while allowing for local flexibility — was essential for ensuring that global brand investments delivered consistent returns.
Vivaldi developed a global marketing excellence framework that defined shared marketing standards, governance models, and capability development priorities. Centers of excellence were established, and a training program was designed to elevate marketing practice consistently across Coca-Cola's worldwide organization.
The marketing excellence program aligned Coca-Cola's global marketing function around shared standards and disciplines — improving the consistency of brand execution worldwide and building the organizational capability to sustain marketing excellence over time.
Coca-Cola partnered with Vivaldi to build a global marketing excellence framework that aligned its worldwide marketing function around shared standards, governance models, and capability development priorities. Vivaldi established centers of excellence and designed a training program that elevated marketing practice consistently across markets, improving brand execution worldwide while preserving the local flexibility Coca-Cola needs to operate in over 200 countries.
The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, selling more than 200 brands across more than 200 countries and generating annual revenues exceeding $45 billion. Founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1886, Coca-Cola is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most recognized and valuable brands, with a portfolio spanning sparkling drinks, water, juice, dairy, plant-based beverages, tea, coffee, and sports drinks.
Vivaldi developed a global marketing excellence framework that defined shared marketing standards, governance models, and capability development priorities for Coca-Cola’s worldwide function. The program established centers of excellence and a training curriculum that elevated marketing practice consistently across markets, improving the consistency of brand execution and building the organizational capability to sustain that excellence over time.
The framework standardized the disciplines that needed to be the same everywhere, such as brand governance, planning rigor, and measurement methodology, while leaving room for local adaptation in the elements where market context actually changes outcomes, such as cultural relevance, channel mix, and pricing. Drawing that line explicitly is what allows a global program to feel disciplined rather than bureaucratic, and locally relevant rather than chaotic.
Global brands operate dozens or hundreds of marketing teams whose performance varies more by market than by underlying capability, which means brand investment compounds unevenly and the global average drifts toward the weakest practice unless something actively counters it. A marketing excellence program raises the floor across the network so that the brand benefits from the same disciplined execution everywhere, which is the only way a global brand investment generates a return that matches its scale.
A center of excellence is the organizational unit that owns a specific marketing capability across the global network, including the standards, the training, the tooling, and the active coaching of market teams as they apply that capability. Done well, a COE is the difference between a multinational where each market reinvents marketing practice from scratch every year and a multinational where capability gets built once centrally and deployed at speed wherever it is needed.
