Coca-Cola’s 70-20-10 Marketing Investment Strategy

What Is the 70-20-10 Marketing Framework?

Allocating your marketing budget effectively is challenging. Coca-Cola, one of the world's most successful brands, uses a simple yet powerful budgeting approach called the 70-20-10 framework. This method helps marketers balance proven strategies with innovation, ensuring consistent growth and competitive advantage.

The 70-20-10 framework divides your marketing spend into three clear categories:

• 70% (Now): Proven marketing channels and tactics that consistently deliver results.

• 20% (Next): Emerging trends and channels that have shown early promise.

• 10% (New): Completely new, untested ideas and experiments.

This structured approach helps marketers maintain reliable performance while continuously exploring new opportunities.

How Coca-Cola Implements the 70-20-10 Framework

Coca-Cola refers to this budgeting strategy as their NOW/NEXT/NEW approach:

• NOW (70%): Coca-Cola invests most of its marketing budget into proven channels and campaigns. These are reliable methods that consistently deliver results, maintain brand awareness, and drive revenue.

• NEXT (20%): This portion of the budget goes towards emerging trends and channels that have demonstrated potential. These are relatively safe bets, allowing Coca-Cola to capitalise on new opportunities before competitors.

• NEW (10%): The final 10% is reserved for completely new, untested ideas. Coca-Cola uses this budget to experiment with innovative marketing techniques, new platforms, or creative campaigns that could become future growth drivers.

Why the 70-20-10 Framework Works

The 70-20-10 framework provides a structured yet flexible approach to marketing investment. It ensures businesses:

• Maintain consistent performance by investing heavily in proven marketing methods.

• Stay agile by allocating resources to emerging trends and opportunities.

• Encourage innovation by dedicating budget to experimental ideas that could deliver significant future growth.

By balancing stability with innovation, marketers can continuously optimise their strategies and stay ahead of competitors.

Implementing the 70-20-10 Framework in Your Marketing Team

To successfully adopt the 70-20-10 framework, your marketing team needs a systematic approach to ideation, experimentation, and analysis. Traditional task management tools like Asana, ClickUp, or Monday.com can help organise tasks, but they often fall short when it comes to managing growth marketing effectively.

This is where Growth Method can help. Growth Method is the only work management platform built specifically for growth marketers, combining ideation, experimentation, and analytics into one intuitive platform.

• Ideation: Growth Method's intuitive ideation system ensures your marketing ideas align with team goals, follow hypothesis best practices, and are automatically categorised. Ideas are shared with your entire team for feedback, keeping everyone informed.

• Experimentation: Growth Method incorporates best practices from leading growth teams. Experiments move through four clear stages—building, live, analysing, and complete—with enforced time periods at each stage to increase velocity and maximise learnings.

• Reporting: Growth Method integrates seamlessly with analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, Amplitude, and MixPanel. It provides detailed, professional reports that clearly demonstrate the ROI of your marketing investments, making it easy to communicate value to stakeholders.

"We are on-track to deliver a 43% increase in inbound leads this year. There is no doubt the adoption of Growth Method is the primary driver behind these results." Laura Perrott, Colt Technology Services

Final Thoughts

The 70-20-10 framework is a proven marketing investment strategy that helps businesses balance reliable performance with innovation. By adopting this structured approach, your marketing team can consistently deliver results while staying ahead of industry trends.

Growth Method is the only work management platform built specifically for growth marketers. We help companies implement a systematic approach to grow leads and revenue. Book a call today to learn how Growth Method can help your team implement the 70-20-10 framework effectively.