How Coca-Cola and Collage are Turning Cultural Intelligence Into Growth Opportunities
The Challenge
For a global organization like Coca-Cola, creating culturally relevant marketing across brands, audiences, and channels requires more than a dedicated team of cultural experts.
With cultural specialists unable to participate in every marketing decision, Coca-Cola needed a scalable way to equip broader teams with the knowledge and practical guidance to connect more meaningfully with consumers.
The opportunity was particularly significant among Hispanic Americans, a key growth audience for the company.
The Approach
Coca-Cola partnered with Collage to deepen its teams’ understanding of Hispanic consumers and translate cultural intelligence into actionable marketing guidance.
Together, the teams developed workshops and a repeatable playbook grounded in Collage’s cultural insights.
The work focused on understanding the diversity of Hispanic American experiences, including the intersection of cultural heritage, language, identity, and everyday life.
The resulting framework introduced four practical principles to guide marketing decisions:
- Connect global brands to local cultural experiences
- Use language authentically and with purpose
- Celebrate culturally meaningful moments
- Build credibility through relevant partnerships and engagement
Rather than introducing entirely new marketing processes, Coca-Cola worked to integrate these learnings into existing workflows, from briefs and creative development to media planning.
The Insight
Cultural resonance is not simply a measure of brand relevance. It has measurable implications for purchase intent and potential business growth.
Collage research identified a relationship between cultural resonance and purchase intent, finding that a one-point increase in cultural resonance corresponds to a 0.79-percentage-point increase in purchase intent.
For Coca-Cola, this created an opportunity to connect cultural marketing efforts with a more tangible financial framework.
The partnership also reinforced the importance of moving beyond broad demographic definitions to understand the distinct cultural experiences that influence how consumers connect with brands.
The Impact
Coca-Cola’s efforts to strengthen cultural resonance among U.S. Hispanic consumers have delivered measurable improvements, while its partnership with Collage has helped quantify the resulting business opportunity.
Over the past year, Coca-Cola increased its cultural resonance among Hispanic consumers by 7.15 points. Using Collage’s research-based relationship between cultural resonance and purchase intent, the analysis identified:
Beyond quantifying the opportunity, the partnership helped Coca-Cola equip marketing teams with practical frameworks, workshops, and cultural insights that could be applied earlier in campaign development.
The work is ongoing, with Coca-Cola and Collage exploring additional ways to embed cultural intelligence throughout the marketing process.
Interested in learning the growth opportunity of cultural resonance for your brand? Sign up for a complimentary brand cultural resonance audit to identify the growth opportunity of a specific consumer segment.