As the vice president of design at Coca-Cola, Butler has an influence on culture that is unparalleled. He is the design ambassador to an audience of billions. Imagining the present and future of the Coca-Cola brand, he is both a brand guardian and a brand visionary: He ensures the continuity of Coke’s design legacy and simultaneously conjures the brand’s future. He shapes the experiences that consumers will have when they interact with Coca-Cola and its family of brands.
Butler is an advocate for the importance of design strategy and has been working to make design integral to the company culture and infrastructure—which it wasn’t when he arrived at the company in 1994. Butler’s experience searching Coca-Cola’s archive is itself revelatory in that regard. When he asked Coke’s archivist about the company’s design history, the archivist responded, “What do you mean by ‘design’?”
As part of his responsibilities, Butler has become intimately familiar with key milestones of Coca-Cola’s design history. He’s become well-versed in the interplay between business, brand, and design. He’s seen the original brief that led to the creation of the iconic contour bottle. He’s pored through Coke’s history, looking at everything from vintage point-of-sale materials to a clothing brand Coke started. All of this helps him to consider the way that design influenced and defined the brand’s success.
In seeking to maintain Coke’s visual integrity, Butler noticed that the design of the Coke can had become too frilly—too frivolous. He led to the initiative to simplify its design. He’s also led the effort to transform and modernize Coca-Cola’s vending machines so that they become 21st-century multimedia experiences of their own. The new machines, equipped with screens, provide Coke with yet another platform to connect with consumers. They are a model for the way that brands must seek to engage customers at every touchpoint possible.
Coca-Cola, as Butler observes, plays a very significant role in people’s lives. It is an icon present at key moments and transitions in the life narratives of millions of people. It is an avatar of democracy, freedom, optimism, and economic growth. All those associations are essential to Coke’s success, which means that the brand legacy must be carefully shepherded into the future. Yet if it’s not carefully tended, the brand could easily become stale, or—in a worst-case scenario—shunned. Butler is very conscious that the challenge for Coca-Cola is to be simultaneously familiar yet surprising. He balances on the razor-edge between innovation and brand continuity. Butler’s vision is to create a brand that allows Coca-Cola to “design the future that we want to have.”
Why did you decide to become a graphic designer?
I have three daughters—nine, six, and four—and the other day, one of them asked me what I recall wanting to be when I was their age, and I told them exactly what I remembered. I wanted to be a dentist. Now, to go from dentistry to design may be a stretch, but in looking back, I realized that what fascinated me about the world of medicine was its system of interrelationships. You can’t work on one tooth without considering the whole mouth, its history, its hygiene, and so forth. I’ve always been fascinated with systems involving people, organizations, and environments.
So in the beginning, it was all about teeth.
I can’t really explain that one. Now that I’m thinking about it, I remember being ten or twelve years old, and there was a poster competition in my school in which we had to promote dental health. We needed to communicate that the path to happiness involved brushing and flossing your teeth. I designed a poster for the contest, and it won. From that time on, I thought, “Wow, I can do this!”
Years later, I went to college in Tampa and spent a lot of time studying Marshall McLuhan. After graduating, I worked at a small design firm. During the mid-’90s, this thing called the “World Wide Web” captivated me. The typical assessment at the time was that this new form of media was simply a fad, and it would pass. But being the brash person who I was, I decided to start my own design firm with a few friends so we could find out. We designed the first streaming radio and video player on CNN.com. Our little firm started growing. I had big aspirations, but my partners didn’t. I decided to sell them my share of the business and joined Studio Archetype to work on building digital brands with Clement Mok. It was an incredibly exciting time to be alive and to be a designer.
You worked in the strategic planning role when you were at Studio Archetype. Did you start first as a strategist and then work as a designer, or were you always a bit of both?
Debbie, I was always a brilliant thinker! I’ll tell you how it happened. My time at Studio Archetype was during the rise and fall of the dot-com bubble. I became fascinated with the opportunity to rethink business models and rethink how people interact with companies and brands. My fascination developed to the point where I didn’t want to do design anymore. I lost interest in winning design awards and looking cool. I hated that small way of thinking about design. So I went to Clement and asked him if I could start a consulting group inside the company. He gave me the opportunity to do that, and I formally moved out of the design function. But what I realized was that the thinking remained the same. You can call it “design,” or you can call it “design thinking,” but to me, it’s the same.
What would you say is the most important thing you learned from Clement?
Clement Mok has the most intuitive—almost religious—understanding of user-centered design. That’s why I wanted to work there. What he taught me still influences everything I work on now.
Tell me a little more about user-centered design. How would you explain that to someone who’d never heard the term before?
User-centered design is about creating systems that are intuitive, inevitable, and quite natural. This is very hard to do. It has to be something intentional—something you do through an act of creativity yet that feels completely inevitable when it’s finished.
Can you give me some examples of how you’re trying to use more intentional, user-centered design in the work you’re doing at Coca-Cola?
One example is our vending machines. A vending machine is a pretty benign object, right? For as long as I can remember, vending machines have been pretty innocuous—they’ve been in the background of most people’s lives. So we took that as a challenge and looked at how we could actually use those vending machines to create a whole new experience.
At Coca-Cola, our vending business is primarily in two markets: North America and Japan. About 60–70 percent of our sales in Japan are done through vending machines. Japan is one of our top ten markets, so it’s quite significant for our business. Yet, as I said, the vending machine itself is a pretty benign experience.
So we wondered, how could we redesign that in a very cost-effective way? And rather than redesign the whole machine, we asked ourselves if we could redesign a piece of it to create a modular element that could snap on to what we already had. So, essentially, we decided to redesign the door. We redesigned the door and the interface to include a forty-four-inch touch screen monitor that can display any kind of digital content that we create. As you can imagine, we create a lot of digital content in the form of advertising and other things, so these monitors created a whole new media channel for us. Not only does it vend products—you still put money in and get a Coke out of it—but it actually created a whole new communication channel for us. We completely redesigned the whole interface of the machine, which includes the way you do the transactions, where you put your money, and how you get the product—as well as how you make your selection and how you interface with the machine in general.
So when we put that vending machine in a mall or similar venue, it creates a dramatic new experience and has led to double-digit increases in sales volumes. And it’s created a whole new connection platform for teenagers who we’re always trying to encourage to fall in love with our brand.
Coke has certainly been much adored by consumers even before these new interfaces debuted. That leads to my next question: Why do you think people fall in love with brands?
I think people love brands that play a critical role in their lives or that help them form their identity. This is the case with Coke everywhere around the world. From Africa to India, people describe Coke as their favorite “national brand.” But Coke is international; it’s global. It’s no single country’s brand, but people everywhere consider it their favorite national brand. This is utterly fascinating to me.
Why do you think this is the case? There has to be more to it than the fact that people think it tastes good.
I think it’s because the brand plays a role in their culture.
How so?
In India, everything is growing at a hyper speed. We play a role in the lives of our customers in India that is completely different from the role we play in North America. That’s by design, but it is very difficult to do.
Can you be more specific about the role that the brand plays for customers in India?
We refer to it as “freedom within a framework.” We come up with an idea we can scale, and then we tailor and customize that idea for a local market. In a macro sense, Coke stands for optimism. We intend for it to be the most optimistic brand on the planet. Everything we do in relation to Coke is intended to bring optimism to whatever the company touches—people, our portfolio, and our customers. But the way that’s experienced is different in each market. It means different things in different countries and markets.
How did you arrive at “optimism”? Was it something you planned, and wanted the brand to achieve? Or do you feel that you discovered this expression of the brand while analyzing your consumer?
That’s a great question, and it has a complicated answer. In terms of the way you’ve framed it, our process involves elements of both. Coke has been around for 125 years, and we’re constantly working to maintain the connective equities of the brand. People connect over a Coke, and with a Coke, in numerous ways. Connections and optimism are two equities that Coke owns and has owned for many, many years. So the challenge is to continue to maintain our equity but to create a sense of surprise around it as well.
We actually have a design principle that helps us to achieve this. We want to be utterly familiar—we want people to know that everything we create is Coke, and to expect the same high quality that they’ve gotten for years. But we know if we do this in a repetitive way, we become as invisible as wallpaper: where we’re everywhere but now here at once. The challenge in developed markets is to be continually surprising. So we have to consider, how do we do that? How do we say that? How do we allow you to experience the brand in a new way?
Our vending machine redesign is a great example of this. It’s just a vending machine—a technology that, by now, has been around forever—but by creating the touch screen display and pumping digital content through it, it becomes surprising. That’s where our design principle comes to bear.
How is it that after 125 years, Coke is still one of the biggest brands on the planet?
One reason is quality. We go to great pains to maintain the same taste, the same flavor profile—which is our secret formula—around the world. When you drink Coke in Thailand, it tastes the same as it does in North America or Mexico.
You must go to great lengths to achieve this, because water is one of the ingredients in Coke, and water tastes differently everywhere.
Exactly. We have incredibly high standards for everything, whether we’re talking about the temperature of our products, the design of our packaging, or the recipe of the product inside. This is how we’ve been able to maintain our brand status for so long.
Do you ever personally worry about being unable to fulfill the promise of the brand in any of the creative work that you do?
Every day. It’s a huge responsibility to carry the weight of the brand’s equity. A lot of people ask me, “What’s your favorite thing about working at Coke? And what’s the thing you like the least about working at Coke?” I have the same answer for both questions: scale. When you take advantage of our scale, we can sell a lot more Coke. But this can work in reverse as well. The scale that we operate in is like no other, so a misstep in our design can have a big impact on us. We hear a lot of talk now about brands that are design-driven, like Apple and Nike, but even those companies don’t approach our size. We operate locally in 206 countries. A quarter of the Earth’s population drinks something from our company every day.
Are you bothered by people who criticize the brand for being unhealthy?
Actually, quite the opposite. Think about our scale—we have a brand portfolio of five hundred brands. That’s not products, that’s brands. We have three thousand products and five hundred brands.
To be honest, the thing that keeps me up at night is how to build Minute Maid, Dasani, or Sprite into icons like Coke.
That’s actually a much bigger challenge.
You mentioned before that you consider yourself to be a brash person. Do you bring that brashness to your work?
I’m not really brash. I’ve found that brashness doesn’t work inside of a large environment like this. Collaboration is essential. Design is a team sport. It’s not about one person. You have to work with people, with teams. Nothing brash or personality-driven works well inside this environment. We focus on building a design-driven capability, not personal reputations.
I certainly didn’t bring this notion to the organization. When I was first invited to join Coke, the company was in the midst of turmoil. It was 2004, the stock price was very low, and the company had a very complicated portfolio as well as a very complicated operational model. It was at that time that the senior leadership wanted to try to regain the competitive edge the organization had historically had because of design, and they created a “vice president of design” position. When I arrived, I was given a tremendous amount of support, but I quickly realized that there was no infrastructure or culture around design. So, for the last six years, I’ve been a consultant, a practitioner, and a teacher of design. I’ve used every metaphor, every illustration, and many, many examples to continually articulate the value of design.
What was the first thing you did to try to ignite a culture of design?
I went to the archives. The archives here are quite vast.
I can only imagine!
Ah, but you’d be surprised what the material is and how it’s organized. In this company, we sell brands; we don’t sell design. This company is focused on driving shareholder value, not winning design awards. As a designer living in a very small community—in the sense that design was not a major focus at Coca-Cola before I came here—entering this very large system is daunting. You can get lost in the culture that is the Coca-Cola Company. So I went to the archives and I asked our archivist, Phil Mooney, “If I were to learn about design, where would I start?” And he responded, “Well, what do you mean by ‘design’?” So I changed my approach and asked about packaging, the role of the contour bottle, the point-of-sale materials, and the posters. I asked him to tell me about the clothing line Coca-Cola started in the ’80s. Through this process of learning about the business, I began to see how design affected and impacted the organization. Applying what I know about design to the context of business—as opposed to the other way around—has been the most challenging aspect of this job.
Is it true that the original Coca-Cola bottle was designed so that if you opened up an icebox in the middle of the night, you could find it by feeling the unique contour shape of the bottle? Or is that an urban myth?
It’s true! There was actually a design brief—and it included two objectives: One, they wanted a package that was so unique and so differentiated that you could find it in the dark. The second was even more surprising.
They wanted glass that was so distinctive that even when it was shattered on the ground, you could still tell that it was once a Coke bottle.
This design emerged in 1916, when a packaged beverage was a relatively new thing and Coke was trying to expand a small regional Southern brand into a national brand. At the time, there were two ways that the product was sold—through fountain sales and through individual prepackaged purchases. Considering those two options in the marketplace, the decision was made to create a truly differentiated package. That was the design thinking back then! All of these decisions were intended to drive the business, to create a national brand and a national business.
During that same decade, Coca-Cola also designed the first franchise system. No one had ever designed a franchise system or a chain store before. We take all of this for granted now, but it didn’t exist before Coca-Cola created it.
As I perused through the archives, I found this incredible, magical decade from 1910–1920. So I started telling that original story, and people got incredibly excited and inspired by it.
When you were in the process of the redesign, was it hard to convince the marketers within your organization to take the images of bubbles off the pack? The bubbles had been a consistent feature on the packaging for a long time.
That was definitely a challenge.
How did you persuade them to do it?
I kept reiterating our goal: to design a 21st-century version of our beloved icon. The need for simplicity was implicit. We went deeper and deeper into the archives and kept proving the historical leadership, and significance, in the use of red, the Spencerian script, and the bottle.
This is a brand that has endured for 125 years. I read that the top three brands on Facebook are Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Skittles. After 125 years, Coke is a leader in a brand-new medium! What makes this brand such a beloved part of our culture?
I’ll share my personal view on this. I’m about to move to Mexico City on a six-month assignment, and I’ve been spending a lot of time learning Spanish and studying Mexican culture. Mexico is one of Coca-Cola’s top ten markets. On a per capita basis, every person in Mexico drinks three Coca-Colas per day. And after all these years, the brand is still growing volumetrically. You can’t help but step back and say, “Gosh, how does that happen? Every person in Mexico?” Again, I think it has to do with maintaining high standards of quality, but also with playing a significant role in people’s lives. There are certain aspects of the company that we don’t talk much about but that help to explain this.
Historically, we’ve been there for people when they’ve needed us most. Again, we don’t talk about this a lot, but whenever there is a national disaster—whether it be a hurricane or a tsunami—we immediately stop production of everything except water, and we distribute it all for free. We have the biggest distribution network in the world. We have more trucks on the road than FedEx, DHL, and UPS combined. So whenever we help people, we can do that in a way that no other company can.
But do you really think that’s why the people in Mexico are drinking three Cokes a day? Why are they drinking three Cokes a day as opposed to three Pepsis or three Dr Peppers? Why do people love Coke? Back in the 1980s, when New Coke was about to be launched, my father became so worried about losing “his brand” that he went and stockpiled as many bottles of Coca-Cola as he could find. I remember driving around with him going from store to store and collecting cases of Coca-Cola to keep in our basement. What is it about this brand that reaches so deep into somebody’s heart and takes hold of it?
On a completely practical level, it tastes better. And on an emotional level, people associate Coke with the special moments in their lives that they want to share with other people. As I said earlier, it represents optimism. It’s hard to explain, but we have all these established facts that I could share with you—such as the fact that people associate the contoured bottle with democracy, with higher ideals of freedom and optimism, and with economic growth. My challenge is to help maintain that by, and with, design.
You’ve said that Coca-Cola is one of the world’s largest design companies. That statement reminded me of something I heard from a very senior executive at McDonald’s during a conference many years ago. He said that he didn’t consider McDonald’s to be a fast-food company—he considered it to be an entertainment company because people go to McDonald’s to be happy and to experience good feelings. Is there something specific about Coca-Cola that brings you to consider it one of the world’s largest design companies?
It depends on how you define the word “design.” If you look at all of the problems in front of us, and you consider the power and the opportunities that corporations, companies, and brands like Coke have, it isn’t hard to realize that we have the resources, we have the reach, we have the distribution, the networks, the people, and the wherewithal to design the future that we want to have. As a designer and as a person who thinks about design in this more ambitious way, my hope is that we can leverage the opportunities we have to not only build our business, but also to change the world.