The merits of the Elateral built marketing platform, ‘Design Machine’, are explained in a recent Fast Company article. Following is an extract from the full article:
I'm sitting in front of a laptop at Coke's Global Innovation Center, in an office park just down the road from the Atlanta headquarters. I've been invited to try my hand with Coke's new Design Machine, a Web-based design tool and digital-asset management system built to allow the smallest Coca-Cola marketer to create point-of-sale materials that are customized for local markets but adhere to the global brand strategy. "Junior designers in Bangalore can use this in a snap!" says Gerardo Garcia, global group design director, jinxing my test-drive before it begins.
"Pick a language," Garcia begins. I have a choice of 36. Kazakh it is. "Now a product." Of the 100 options, I'm guessing Fanta is a favorite on the steppe. "Now an occasion," he instructs. At leisure. I survey the options, and pick an image of smiling people gathered around the table, hoisting cans of Fanta; above is the message, "Open happiness!" in Kazakh. A perfect banner for my little shashlik stand in Almaty.
I hit send and the machine zips my design for local approval and legal review, then sends it off to the printer. The whole thing has taken less than 10 minutes.
The Design Machine addresses one of CEO Kent's major strategic goals: winning at the point of sale. What's more, it's a remarkably cost-efficient tool, reducing fees to local ad shops by 30%. And it's bonehead simple.
"We needed to develop a collaborative platform that could drive capability around the world," Garcia says. "A modular design that would allow us to scale was critical."
The machine, launched in 2007, holds more than 8,600 templates and is constantly being fed with new "best in class" materials generated around the world. So the smallest grocery store in Tokyo can take advantage of, say, the best of Turner Duckworth's work in San Francisco. And if a particularly clever designer in Guangzhou comes up with a great campaign for Chinese New Year, the work can be zapped around the planet.
Similarly, the Freestyle fountain machine may one day let local merchants tailor the selection of drinks they offer to the idiosyncratic tastes of their customers (in one test location in Atlanta, for example, Caffeine-Free Diet Coke became the third-best seller after 4 p.m.). The machine also eliminates the current need for 5-gallon bags of concentrate, replacing them with concentrated 46-ounce cartridges, reducing the product's carbon footprint drastically. What's more, an onboard computer monitors usage, enabling folks in Atlanta to analyze data about beverage consumption, peak times, and popular locations. Coke can also talk back to the machine, letting it know electronically if a particular flavor needs to be discontinued or recalled.
Both Freestyle and the Design Machine reflect Butler's efforts to integrate design and scale, to create systems that can leverage the best of both. "We were trying to create a standard of excellence around the world where it's easy to do the right thing, and difficult to do the wrong thing," he says.Please click here to read full feature story on David Butler.
