Chasing Sergio; Sergio Zyman picked himself up after the New Coke debacle and became keeper of the brand equity flame at Coca-Cola - Coca-Cola''s chief marketing officer leaving in May 1998

Brandweek, March 30, 1998 by Karen Benezra, Eleftheria Parpis

Sergio Zyman picked himself up after the New Coke debacle and became keeper of the brand equity flame at Coca-Cola. As he exits, how does Zyman's performance rate?

It was one of those moments that should have been among Coca-Cola's finest. With millions of fans around the globe tuning into this year's Super Bowl weekend festivities, the company fired off a global marketing blitz with new ads for four of its core brands--Coke Classic, Diet Coke, Sprite and its newest teen magnet, Surge--targeting audiences of prime sports and entertainment programming. But somehow along the way, Coke's creative engines misfired. One spot for Coke Classic from Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, offered up goofy nicknames for redheads, while another featured gritty images of ice hockey players.

The quirky ads eschewed any talk of benefits, like refreshment, focusing instead on the company's link with the color red. Next morning, Coke had finished dead last in at least one consumer advertising survey, and many soft drink watchers were left shaking their heads. What exactly did these images say about the world's best-loved soft drink? That's been a recurring question of late in the hallways of the Coca-Cola Co. in Atlanta, and along Madison Avenue, as one of the world's premier brand marketers, with some $1.6 billion to spend worldwide on ads, has charted a creative course that some observers say has little or no strategic underpinnings and appears more concerned with selling attitude and glitzy techno-gimmickry than cases of soda pop. The anything-goes positioning, with creative that is designed more to entertain than sell, has influenced marketers of everything from Miller Lite to Nissan and Levi's. And it stands as the most visible part of the storied legacy of Coke's chief marketing officer, Sergio Zyman, who will leave one of marketing's most coveted and challenging jobs in May after a heady five-year reign.

Zyman, 52, who's won a reputation both as a creative genius and a brash, unpredictable autocrat, changed the way Coke marketed its soft drinks and dismantled its stodgy culture. He imported over 125 new executives, many from outside the beverage industry, to inject new thinking at headquarters. He refocused energies on packaging, promotions, pricing and in-store efforts. Digging deep inside the company's own treasure trove, he polished up such overlooked brand icons as Coke's red disk logo and its signature curvy bottle. In between, he made the flagship brand hip again, jettisoned celebrities--both dead and alive--from Diet Coke's creative stable, greenlighted an edgy repositiong for Sprite and launched the trippy, dippy Fruitopia brand as a "fruit-centric" alternative drink to combat rivals like Snapple. Combined with his earlier stint at Coca-Cola from 1979 to 1985, Zyman has shephered more new ideas to the beverage aisle, from hits like Diet Coke and Cherry Coke to duds like New Coke and OK Soda, than perhaps any other marketer in the category.

For all his brilliance, Zyman will long be remembered and, in some quarters, reviled for running amok in adland, increasing Coke's agency network to well over two dozen shops and drawing on hot, creative talent across the globe. But the regime pitted agencies against one another on narrowly focused assignments and treated them more like vendors than strategic partners. Zyman also changed Coke's compensation system so agencies were paid based on such measures as purchase intent and sales, not consumer likeability or awards. Among agencies, Zyman's hard-charging tyrannical style was both a curse for incumbents and a blessing for outsiders eager to pitch new ideas.

But as Zyman has often reminded audiences, advertising is just one component of the company's marketing mix. Coca-Cola, powered by a vast distribution network, sells over I billion servings of its products daily in more than 196 countries. Volume is growing at a rate of 7% a year on average, while operating income topped a record $5 billion in 1997. Net earnings rose an impressive 19% in each of the past three years. As Zyman's successor, Charles Frenette, 45, ponders his moves over the next few months, herewith is a Brandweek report card on its major brands, with a critique from Adweek Creative Editor Eleftheria Parpis.

With the confidence only a worldwide dominator like Coca-Cola can exude, the king of all beverages embarked on an ambitious journey five years ago. Abandoning conventional advertising formulas, including the traditional ad agency system, Coke turned to Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency to create a branding campaign like no other in its then 108-year history. A six-syllable jingle with an uncanny memorability factor, a red disk flaunting Coca-Cola's famed script logo, and the "Always Coca-Cola" tagline provided the framework for a smorgasbord of commercial styles. Directors frequently provided the rest. The first batch of CAA work included contributions from feature-film heavyweights such as Richard Donner and Rob Reiner. Coca-Cola set the parameters for its commercials wide, to entertain, and is perhaps the only brand of its size to buy commercials on spec.