After reading my latest submission for Chief Marketer, the editor remarked that my brain seems to be swarming with oodles of arcane knowledge. It’s true that I usually do well with “Jeopardy!” topics that concern obscure people, things and events in history. It's the important stuff that often escapes me.
This particular article begins with a reference to Leon Battista Alberti, the Renaissance-era cryptographer who invented the cipher disk, a device that served as the basis for the “secret decoder” premiums that were often included in breakfast cereals and snack foods, beginning in the 1930s. By the way, I find it interesting that kids have always had a fascination with secret codes for sending and deciphering hidden messages. Just yesterday, my six-year-old refused to leave FAO Schwartz without a “Spy Case” packed with secret marker pens and undercover secret codes “to completely disguise important information so that even the cleverest guard or enemy can’t spot it.”
Alberti was a great cryptographer. But a single profession does not a Renaissance man make. So he also became a great painter, poet, linguist, philosopher, musician and architect. Yet still apparently feeling inadequate, Alberti decided to further embellish his accomplishments. In his autobigraphy, he wrote that he "excelled in all bodily exercises; could, with feet tied, leap over a standing man; could in the great cathedral, throw a coin far up to ring against the vault; amused himself by taming wild horses and climbing mountains." Yesterday, in Battery Park, I saw a street performer leap over five standing children. But, alas, his feet weren’t tied.
My article focuses on the evolution of code promotions. It discusses how the advent of specialized technologies and analytic capabilities now enable innovative marketers to use dedicated websites built around code promotions to collect far more than just basic demographic info from their consumers. The My Coke Rewards program offers perhaps the most sophisticated example of how brands can utilize code promotions to also capture behavioral and psychographic info, including insights into their favorite music groups, sports teams, hobbies and other specific passions.
As it happens, I recently wrote a lengthy article on the My Coke Rewards program in the context of Coke’s new marketing decision management platform, which my colleagues at Fair Isaac helped develop. The platform serves as the foundation for all of the company’s interactive marketing programs, across all thirteen brands within the Coke product portfolio and on a global scale. It’s enabling the company to make intelligent marketing decisions about the treatment of individual consumers each and every time it touches them.
Think of it as Coke’s new secret formula for building consumer relationships. But unlike Coke's other secret formula, which is reportedly kept in a security vault in a federal building in Atlanta, this one contains no coca leaf or kola nut extract.
