ACTY 6220 - What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola Summary PDF

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What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola Summary

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Melinda Gates presents an interesting comparison between Coca-Cola's success around the world to the struggles that are faced by the health and development market. She brings CocaCola as example that nonprofits can use for success, specifically three things. The first is that they take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. The second is that they tap into local entrepreneurial talent. The third is that they do incredible marketing. Before she dives into the core content of the Ted Talk, she discusses part of her job at the Gates Foundation. She finds commonalities between her and the women in the developing world because they both wanted their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. As expected she sees a lot of poverty, often dirty floors, no running water, and no electricity. Yet, in the midst of this dire poverty, Coca-Cola is everywhere in the developing world, making it feel ubiquitous. Data is key for Coca-Cola because it’s what they use to measure progress towards their bottom line making it the first thing presented. They have a well-developed, continuous feedback loop. Everything that they learn from their real-time data, they put it back into the product and the market. By collecting a multitude of information, they are able to easily identify problems that arise and address those issues. Nonprofits could learn a lot from this first lesson presented. While these organizations may collect data, they don’t perform evaluations until the very end of the program. At this point, it is way too late to use the data. Unlike the collection and use of realtime data that Coca-Cola has shown to be effective. The second thing that Coca-Cola is good at is tapping into local entrepreneurial talent. When the company expanded to Africa, they found it difficult to reach distant markets because there wasn’t good roads. The locals took action into their own hands by buying in bulk and reselling it in those hard-to-reach places. The company began to take note of what was

What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola Summary

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happening and began to train these local entrepreneurs and gave out small loans. They now have 3,000 micro-distriction centers, where 15,000 are employed including sales people who go out on their bicycles, pushcarts, and wheelbarrows to sell Coke products. Nonprofits and governments need to follow Coca-Cola’s example in using locals to reach hard-to-serve places. The Ethiopian government has already put this practice into action by training health extension workers, which increased their ratio from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people within five years. Other NGOs need to tap into this talent and unlock the potential of locals. The third thing that has led to Coca-Cola’s success is their incredible marketing. The only way that their micro-entrepreneurs can sell is that they rely on the company for their marketing. Coca-Cola stands out because they associate their product with a kind of life that people want to life, making it aspirational. Even though they are a global company, they do very localized campaigns by going to different regions to find out what makes people happy in that area. They found that in Latin America happiness is associated with family life and in South Africa its associated with community respect, which their ads have reflected accordingly. The health and development market doesn’t take this same appeal of celebration and unity, instead they assume that if people need something, we don’t have to make them want it. However, this is a mistake and luckily it is starting to change, particularly with sanitation. Melinda explains how toilets were built to help prevent childhood deaths from diarrhea and then they weren’t used. This is because they didn’t work with the community and make innovative marketing campaigns. In order to change communities and whole nations, it is essential to start to understand what people really want in health and development.

What nonprofits can learn from Coca-Cola Summary

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After explaining the three lessons from Coca-Cola, she presents a comprehensive example of how these three things can successful come together. This powerful example is Polio, which has had a 99 percent reduction in 20 years. This has occurred because countries like India have thousands of doctors and clinicians, along with millions of vaccinators. Through the use of genetic testings, they are able to lead mop-up campaigns in the specific area where it was transmitted to prevent a huge outbreak from spreading by vaccinated the millions that live there. This shows how the use of real-time data and local health experts can be influential. The marketing aspect is still lacking because donor nations aren’t willing to fund polio because it is 99 percent of the way to its goal. If marketing could be done more aspirational like Coca-Cola does, the entire disease could be eradicated and become the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. In order to speed up progress and try to meet the Millennium Development Goals, Melinda explains that we need to learn from the innovators from every single sector and apply those lessons for the public good. Melinda ends the talk by saying if we can learn from lessons, happiness can become just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola....