My Coke Rewards: Consumer Action Mapping

Consumer Action Mapping: Vision and Strategy for the Coca-Cola Loyalty Program

Opportunity

My Coke Rewards is the long-standing loyalty program at the Coca-Cola company. The program was running at a loss and more importantly, was failing to reach target audiences to increase brand loyalty or brand perception. My agency was tasked with creating a future vision and to assist our client with gaining buy in and kicking off the project internally at the Coca-Cola Company.

Our vision was a program that would take the loyalty program from its current transactional system (save points from purchase to trade in for merchandise) to one that would be data-informed, user-focused and experiential.

At the time, MCR was a financial loss to the company and of little value to brands. The ask was very blue sky; come up with a 3-5 year vision, disregard budget, infrastructure, technology, etc., and recruit new members.

Internal complexity, a distributed group of internal stakeholders and a small, un-funded centralized marketing organization (our direct client), needed an approach and internal presentation tools that would help her gain buy-in.

Process

The project was staffed with a small three-person concepting team: Myself, a strategist and an art director. I led research activities, produced UX artifacts, collaborated on concepting the vision and collaborated with the team to define and present the approach, strategy and direction. I also directed a business analyst and a user researcher on the market analysis and user research survey.

The solution we defined consisted of three objectives: Connect coke’s disparate system of consumer touch points; Collect consumer data at those touch points; And leverage that data to inform and incent consumer purchase decisions moving forward.

Work

With the help of a business analyst, I conducted a survey of existing research into the intended audiences (both provided by the client and from external sources) to gain insights into digital and social behaviors and future trends of the target audiences.

The Coca-Cola Company had three audience segments for the program: Family Shoppers, Millennials and Teens. I started by diving into research on the digital and social habits and trends of these broad segments to create behavior-based personas that informed the scenarios we used to explore and illustrate an effective loyalty program.

I used the research insights to evolve the broad client audience segments into more specific and behaviorally-informed personas that would provide a useful and relevant basis for the program. These proved to be our most useful communication tool later, when our focus became helping our client sell the program internally.

Our team brainstormed a story based on each of the personas that would communicate how a connected marketing program would bring value to their brand and initiatives. We worked with an illustrator and copywriter to develop both animatics and voice-over of each story that could be used in presentation and also would be effective if watched in isolation. The following are a sample of the ten scenarios we developed:

This consumer action map was used as part of our presentation to internal stakeholders and strategic partners to introduce the concept and opportunities provided by a connected, data-driven, multi-channel marketing approach where the consumer is in control of their touchpoints with the brand and product experiences.

Another key stakeholder was the internal IT group at Coca-Cola, as the infrastructure needed to suport this vision was not insignificant! The IT group was eager to understand priorities and technical requirements so they could begin the effort of analyzing budget and resourcing needs to support it. I created the following conceptual data diagram to serve as a first move towards getting those conversations between the marketing and technical teams, by creating a shared (albeit very high-level) understanding of the data and infrastructure needs of the system.