The client

Fourteen executives from Coca-Cola North Africa, from marketing, legal, operations, and human resources departments, including Curt Ferguson, BS’80, then President of Coca-Cola North Africa

The challenge

To expose Coca-Cola teams to new technology for internal and external use, to establish new collaboration techniques, and to learn new marketing approaches to reach the 18-25-year-old market in North Africa

The program

We constructed a multi-layered learning experience to increase exposure to new social media technologies (mobile, blogs, micro-blogs, consumer-created content, wikis, GPS, and so on) through a collaborative alternate reality game. Participants worked in teams to solve puzzles and accomplish tasks utilizing their teammates and technology. By directly experiencing new technologies, participants were better able to truly understand them. Rather than passively receiving the company’s message, the alternate reality game encouraged participants to engage and contribute.

The outcomes

The Coca-Cola North Africa program allowed participants to reflect on their strategies as a team, decide whether to cooperate or compete, and reflect on some of the cultural differences that both enhance and complicate their work. It also gave them firsthand experience engaging in brand-new technologies that could provide their consumers with positive and genuine ways to connect with the product.