What Coca-Cola can teach us about brand growth today
Article 25 of 26 in series: The Great Reach Reset
Coca-Cola’s success is a reminder that brand growth depends on being easy to recognise, easy to remember and easy to buy. The media landscape has changed dramatically, but the fundamentals remain: build distinctive brand assets, reach more category buyers and keep refreshing the memory structures that make a brand come to mind.
In 1915, Coca-Cola challenged American glass manufacturers to create a bottle so distinctive that it could be recognised by touch in the dark or even when lying broken on the ground, because the company was facing a growing number of imitators and wanted a physical brand asset that consumers could identify even without seeing the name or logo.
The winning design came from the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana, and more than a century later the contour bottle is still instantly recognisable, which makes the story much more than an interesting piece of design history because it shows how deliberately Coca-Cola set out to make the brand easier to recognise, easier to remember and ultimately easier to buy.
In the language of Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Coca-Cola was building mental and physical availability long before those terms became part of modern marketing language.
So the question I find interesting is this: if we had to build the Coca-Cola brand from scratch in 2026, how would we do it?
Mental availability remains central to brand growth
Byron Sharp’s argument is, in many ways, surprisingly simple because he argues that brands primarily grow by increasing penetration, which means reaching more category buyers and making the brand easy to notice, easy to remember and easy to buy when a purchasing situation arises.
Mental availability is central to that idea, because it describes the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, and the more situations in which a brand can be retrieved from memory, the stronger that brand’s mental availability becomes.
This means that marketing is not only a race to optimise conversion among the people already closest to the brand, but a much broader effort to build and continuously refresh memory structures across as many potential buyers as possible.
Coca-Cola’s bottle did exactly that, but so did its red colour, its typography, its advertising and the many other distinctive assets that were repeated consistently over decades and at enormous scale, gradually creating a network of memory cues that made the brand easy to recognise and buy.
The challenge today is that building those memory structures has become more complicated because, for much of the twentieth century, massive reach was concentrated in relatively few places, whereas television, radio, print and outdoor could put a brand in front of very large parts of a population through relatively simple media plans.
Today, attention is distributed across linear television, streaming, online video, social platforms, audio, publishers, retail media and many other environments, which means that mass audiences have not disappeared, but the simplicity of reaching them has.
Massive reach is harder to build across fragmented media
Imagine launching Coca-Cola today and trying to build it into one of the world’s most mentally available brands.
We would probably spend a great deal of time discussing targeting, audience segments, optimisation, retargeting and short-term performance, all of which can be valuable, but if the ambition were genuinely to create the next Coca-Cola, I think the more fundamental question would be: how many category buyers can we expose to the brand, and how many additional people does each media investment actually add?
That distinction matters because ten platforms each reporting ten million reached consumers does not mean that the brand has reached one hundred million people, since many of those consumers will be the same people appearing repeatedly across different media environments while others remain completely untouched.
Massive reach in 2026 is therefore not simply a question of finding one large platform, but of understanding the combined and deduplicated reach of the entire media plan and, once that becomes visible, understanding which channels are genuinely adding new people rather than simply increasing frequency among audiences that have already been reached and that is where incremental reach becomes strategically important.
The most valuable next euro may not necessarily belong on the platform producing the cheapest impression, the highest click-through rate or even the strongest short-term response, because from a brand-building perspective it may be more valuable to invest in the medium that introduces the brand to the largest number of category buyers who have not yet been reached elsewhere.
This is where Byron Sharp’s thinking connects directly with cross-media measurement, because if brand growth depends on reaching more buyers and building stronger memory structures, then understanding deduplicated and incremental reach is no longer just a technical measurement exercise performed after the media plan has been executed.
It becomes part of the brand strategy itself.
Measurement should show whether brands are creating the conditions for growth
Much of modern marketing measurement focuses on what happens immediately after advertising, whether that is a click, a search, a site visit, a conversion or a sale, and while those metrics clearly matter, they do not fully describe what Coca-Cola spent more than a century creating.
A significant part of branding happens inside people’s heads long before a sale occurs, which means that if we were building the Coca-Cola brand today, I would want measurement to tell us whether we are reaching enough category buyers across the full media plan, whether each new investment is adding people rather than simply adding more frequency among the same audiences, and whether our distinctive brand assets are actually becoming easier to recognise and retrieve from memory.
That creates an important distinction between different kinds of measurement, as cross-media measurement measures the distribution of the opportunity to build memory, while brand measurement tells us whether the memory was actually built.
I think this is a useful way to think about the role of measurement, because cross-media measurement should not simply reconcile numbers between television, streaming and digital platforms, but should help advertisers understand whether their investments are creating the conditions for brands to grow.
The Coca-Cola bottle designed more than a century ago is therefore a reminder that some of the strongest marketing decisions are durable, even if the media environment around them changes completely.
If we were trying to create the next Coca-Cola today, we would undoubtedly use AI, algorithms, sophisticated audiences and enormous amounts of data, but the fundamental principles would remain the same: we would need to build distinctive assets, reach as many category buyers as possible, refresh those memory structures and create massive reach, because the modern equivalent of creating a bottle recognisable in the dark is creating a brand recognisable everywhere.
This article is 25 of 26 in our series: The Great Reach Reset
About this article series
In a fragmented media landscape, reach is no longer a simple KPI - it is a strategic growth lever. In this article series, AudienceProject explores why advertisers are not failing at reach, but at measuring it properly, and why incremental, deduplicated cross-media reach has become essential to driving penetration, controlling frequency, and unlocking sustainable growth.
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