Case Study: How Coca-Cola Accelerated RTD Coffee Innovation with Dig Insights
By Dig Insights
- case study
- Innovation Research
- Innovation Testing
- Ideation
- Concept Screening
- Concept Testing
The Coca-Cola Company, a beverage manufacturer with over 2.2 billion daily product servings, wanted to identify and progress RTD coffee innovations across four markets: the US, UK, Japan, and China. The Global Director of Human Insights sought a new approach to the innovation sprint process to surface the strongest ideas per region and align four separate business units around clear development priorities. Previously, innovation pipelines had been managed in siloed, region-by-region processes, limiting the potential scale of ideas generated.
Coca-Cola partnered with Dig Insights and used their proprietary research platform, Upsiide, as the testing mechanism for a three-day in-person innovation workshop in Tokyo attended by marketing, research, SRA, finance, and legal stakeholders from all four markets. Pre-existing ideas were tested against Coca-Cola’s established RTD coffee benchmark before the workshop began. On day two, 34 net-new ideas generated in the room were fielded overnight across all four regions simultaneously, with each idea benchmarked against the existing RTD Coffee Latte standard.
Seven of the 34 ideas tested overnight outperformed the existing RTD coffee benchmark, giving teams clear, data-backed development priorities by day three. Testing all 34 ideas across all four regions simultaneously revealed both regional and global opportunities. The sprint replaced an estimated six months of iterative back-and-forth, saving approximately one million dollars in lost productivity. Since adopting Upsiide in 2021, 168 global Coca-Cola users have run studies in 44 countries, testing over 22,000 ideas.
“Once we mandated it, people started buying in. Upsiide is fast, it’s cost-effective, and most importantly – we’ve got worldwide adoption because it just makes sense.” — Billy Fletcher, Global Director of Human Insights, The Coca-Cola Company
