Coca-Cola doesn’t believe in love anymore. So what does it believe in?

Coca-Cola’s global CMO, Manolo Arroyo, stood in front of the ANA Masters of Marketing in Orlando last week and told the room he no longer believes in love. Brand love, that is.

For most companies that would be a passing remark. For Coca-Cola it’s a small earthquake. As Mark Ritson sets out in his column for The Drum this week, Coke has measured, paid and promoted its marketing teams on a perception metric called Brand Love since around the turn of the century. Open Happiness, Lovemarks, a vending machine you could hug for a free can. Love was the strategy, and love was the scoreboard.

Now the scoreboard has changed. I’d like to explain why I think every brand should be paying attention.

When the brand metric and the sales disagree

Ritson’s account is well worth reading in full. The short version: for the best part of a decade, Coke’s brand love score kept climbing while volumes flagged and the flagship trademark grew at roughly 1% a year. Marketing had one number going up. Sales had another going sideways. Plenty of people said they loved Coke. Far fewer were actually drinking one.

I’m sure you’ve sat in a version of that meeting. The tracker says awareness and consideration are up. The CFO says revenue isn’t. Both are reading their numbers correctly. They’re simply measuring different things: one measures what people say, the other what people do.

When those two disagree, the till wins. It always does, eventually.

What Coke measures now

Arroyo’s new primary metric sits right at the bottom of the funnel: the number of people who drink a Coca-Cola product at least once a week. Penetration, in other words. Love can still grow, he told the room, but it follows the behavior.

And the behavior has moved. According to Ritson, Coke has added 160 million consumers since 2022, after two decades of struggling to recruit new drinkers. The latest quarter points the same way: on October 27, Coke reported third-quarter results ahead of Wall Street’s expectations, with unit case volume up 5% for the second quarter in a row and growth led by volume rather than price, though volume in North America was flat.

That isn’t proof that changing a KPI caused the growth. But it does tell you what one of the most consistently effective marketers on the planet now trusts to tell it whether its marketing is working.

Why behavior comes first

None of this will surprise anyone who has read Byron Sharp. How Brands Grow made the case in 2010: brands grow mainly by winning more buyers, most of them light and occasional, rather than by deepening the affection of a loyal few. Loyalty tends to follow size, not the other way around. And attitudes largely follow behavior. People say they love the brands they already buy.

That last point is the trap in attitudinal measurement. Ask a panel how they feel about your brand and you mostly hear from the customers you already have. It flatters the brand that’s standing still, and it misses the one quietly winning new buyers.

There’s a second trap. Your competitors never answer your brand survey. A tracker can tell you how your own brand is perceived. It struggles to tell you, like-for-like, who is gaining buyers in your category and why.

Ritson makes a lovely point about how paradigms shift. They move less on argument than on big companies changing what they measure: P&G putting reach over frequency, Adidas admitting it had overinvested in performance, and now Coke on love. When Atlanta moves its KPI, the rest of marketing tends to follow.

Love isn’t dead. It’s in the right place

Ritson is careful here, and I agree with him. He expects the behavioral paradigm to overshoot, as paradigms do, and for brand affection to return one day as a secondary measure. Read properly, he argues, Arroyo hasn’t killed love. He has put it after behavior instead of in front of it.

That’s the right order. Reputation still matters a great deal. It just shows up in behavior too: in reviews, in what people say about you unprompted, in whether they come back. Attitude is useful color. You don’t steer a brand by it.

Putting behavior first

1. Make a behavioral number your headline brand metric. Buyers, purchase frequency, share of category demand. Something your CFO recognizes as commercial.
2. Demote attitudinal metrics to diagnostics. Keep them. Use them to explain movement, not to declare victory.
3. Watch your competitors’ behavior, not only your own. Search interest, site visits, share of conversation, where they’re spending, and how often AI assistants recommend them. Momentum is relative.
4. When your brand metric and your sales disagree, believe sales, then find out why. Coke lived with that gap for years.
5. Measure as often as you decide. A picture that arrives a quarter late tells you about a moment you’ve already missed.

Coca-Cola didn’t stop caring about how people feel. It stopped treating feeling as if it were buying. Every brand can make that same switch.