Coca-Cola And Engagement

Wendy Davis at MediaPost captures some of Coca-Cola’s questions about “engagement”:

John Stichweh, director of global interactive marketing for The Coca-Cola Company, this morning cast doubt on whether the company thinks engagement is a goal worth pursuing. The measurement that really matters, he said, is sales. “How many more cases of Coke am I selling? I don’t know,” he said at the Ad:Tech conference in New York.

In fact, Stichweh proposed that the concept of “engagement,” as well as other metrics like “brand awareness” that serve as proxies for sales, fall far short of what marketers require. “What am I getting for the shareholder?” he asked, rhetorically. “I don’t know.”

At the end of the day, sales are what are important for a marketer. But short of sales, can’t engagement also be hugely important if it ties to a pre-defined business outcome, like a changed attitude, preference or behavior?