Coca-Cola Consolidated Design Council

The Challenge

Coca-Cola Consolidated operates one of the most complex digital ecosystems in the beverage industry, with digital properties, internal platforms, and branded experiences spanning IT, Marketing, eCommerce, Corporate Communications, HR, Equipment Services, Red Classic, CONA, Data Ventures, and Corporate Services. Each function was making independent design decisions. There was no shared standard, no cross-functional visibility, and no governing body to ensure that what shipped across those touchpoints was consistent, on-brand, or strategically aligned. The cumulative effect was brand drift at enterprise scale: not dramatic, but persistent, and expensive to unwind.

The Approach

I founded and chaired the Coca-Cola Consolidated Design Council, a cross-functional governance body with representation from every major business unit in the organization, meeting monthly. I authored the Design Council Charter, a formal governing document that established the council's scope, objectives, methodology, compliance strategy, and KPI framework. The charter was written for an audience of executive leadership, IT leadership, business leaders, the PMO, and enterprise architects, and structured to live as a versioned, annually reviewed organizational document.

The council's four core objectives were Responsive and Adaptive Design, Design Assessment and Standardization, Strategic Business Alignment, and Design Consolidation. Each had defined expected outcomes tied to measurable KPIs: scale of design influence across the organization, growth in design-related investment, depth of embedded design process, executive-level design representation, and integration of design into innovation culture. The compliance strategy introduced Brand Impact Assessments and Brand Compliance Reviews as standing functions of the council, with metrics designed to quantify progress over time rather than rely on subjective judgment.

The Outcome

One concrete example of the drift the council was built to catch: designers and teams across departments were each using a slightly different shade of Coca-Cola red, the single most identity-defining color the brand has. A Brand Compliance Review surfaced this and led to a standardized red being adopted across the teams represented on the council. It's a small example on its own, but it's the kind of inconsistency that compounds silently across a large organization, and exactly what the council's review process was designed to catch before it spread further.

More broadly, the Design Council gave Coca-Cola Consolidated a recurring forum, meeting monthly for the better part of a year, where stakeholders across 5+ business units reviewed work against a shared, documented standard instead of relying on individual judgment calls. The charter itself remains a versioned, organizational document built to outlast any single contributor's tenure on the council.