A seamless, scalable omnichannel program is crucial for delivering connected, consistent, and compelling brand experiences. But what does it actually take to create one?
The Coca-Cola Company is one of the rare brands that has done it. The 133-year-old company has taken several actions to achieve omnichannel success, including consolidating its tech stack, streamlining its processes to engage customers throughout their buying journey, developing a unified data model, and clearly defining roles and responsibilities to drive more effective collaboration.
Ryan Vann, senior director of data governance and supply chain at The Coca-Cola Company, recently spoke at the 2025 Digital Shelf Summit about how the company has harmonized its tech, teams, and content. Here are the major lessons from The Coca-Cola Company’s digital shelf strategy and what your brand can learn from it to stand up a successful omnichannel program.
Building the Foundation for Omnichannel Transformation
The Coca-Cola Company isn’t new to the digital shelf. The company has long had products listed across channels and has intently focused on master data management (MDM).
However, its internal teams and partners across the global markets it covers have faced challenges adopting its digital tools, Vann says.
“What is preventing our markets, our bottling franchise partners, and our customers from engaging with these tools and the capabilities that we have to publish the way that we want them to, which is a seamless experience?” Vann says. “So, we started looking at [our] current global tools and opening discussions with our vendors and suppliers to see what other options were out there.”
This fact-finding effort was the beginning of what The Coca-Cola Company’s team refers to as its “digital shelf excellence program.”
Embracing the Voice of the Customer
Vann says the company knew it had to lead with the voice of the customer to drive any meaningful transformation. That’s why The Coca-Cola Company gathered information from its markets, partners, and customers to uncover sticking points in its end-to-end digital shelf processes.
“We wanted to go all the way upstream for new product introduction,” Vann says. “What's driving our new product introduction, the creation of the label, artwork, the content, the data — all those different handoffs and capabilities? What's preventing it from getting to that picture of success … that we want on the digital shelf?”
The company discovered that fragmentation was an overarching challenge across its organization, which was hindering the scale and speed of its digital shelf execution. The Coca-Cola Company was determined to change this, so the company set a goal to transform its approach in its top 40 markets within two years.
Building a Future-Driven Tech Stack
Completely transforming its tech stack was one of the initial, and most significant, steps The Coca-Cola Company took.
Vann says the team realized early on that to move faster, it needed to harmonize its market-specific, fragmented infrastructure.
“We see these worlds of data management and content converging, not only in technical, but also in data practices. The teams are growing closer together. It's a natural thing that's occurring in our industry,” Vann says. “So, as we looked at our architecture, we were still siloed across it. So we said, ‘Hey, if that's where the industry's going, let's take advantage of a PXM [product experience management platform] like Salsify, where we can bring those worlds together.”
Using the Salsify PXM, The Coca-Cola Company hasn’t just brought product information management (PIM) into its tech stack and onboarded data. It’s optimized its end-to-end digital shelf ecosystem, worked more collaboratively with its partners, and transformed how it goes to market.
Working with the Salsify team to create a global, unified data model that harmonized its data was critical to The Coca-Cola Company’s success.
The Power of a Unified Data Model
Before onboarding the Salsify platform, The Coca-Cola Company had 10 different data models across 10 different catalogs.
“We knew we wanted one data model — one truly global PIM solution that you can separate by market and get to the information that way,” Vann says.
The Coca-Cola Company had used GS1 data standards to manage its product information, so it already had a solid foundation to build a global data model. This standard was also beneficial in helping it address market fragmentation, Vann says.
“By using an industry standard, I eliminated that from the conversation. I said, ‘This is what we're going to do. Your retailers already agreed to it in your market, and from that point, you can localize,’” Vann says. “There's always going to be reasons to localize for regulations and those types of areas, but what we didn't want to have to do is debate on what attributes go in the data model every time we go to a market, because again, we have to go fast.”
The Coca-Cola Company team kicked off its digital shelf excellence program by bringing a variety of internal and external stakeholders — including the Salsify team — together to define its data model. The team navigated complexities like data gaps across markets, ultimately deciding to enhance The Coca-Cola Company’s foundational GS1 data model with Salsify’s out-of-box capabilities to streamline the company’s data management activities within the Salsify platform.
The team landed on a data model that can evolve and scale with The Coca-Cola Company, preventing internal teams from having to do a massive rework every time they onboard a new market. The model also has sufficient governance, enabling the company to ensure brand consistency across markets. It took just three months for The Coca-Cola Company to rebuild its global data model from the ground up and four months to deploy it across 11 markets.
Vann says harmonizing The Coca-Cola Company’s product data within the Salsify PXM has helped the company better govern and activate product information across markets. The move has also helped The Coca-Cola Company avoid entering data into a PIM, sending it through a data pool to the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN), and then subsequently transferring it to other systems, which is a common industry practice.
“All those different data handoffs create risks and opportunities for mismappings or failure points in that transmission of information, which increases risk in your data quality. You end up spending a lot of time root-causing where the issues are,” Vann says. “The opportunity for us to bring up all those capabilities into the Salsify PXM was really exciting.”
People and Process: Driving Change Management
The Coca-Cola Company has focused on not only technology and data, but also people. Effective change management has been an essential part of its omnichannel transformation.
The company engaged partners like Salsify and VML, its marketing and creative agency, as well as product owners across the company.
“We brought them into the conversation, and we said, ‘This is what we believe our future state is. Join with us and shape that future together,’” Vann says. “That really gave them an opportunity to invest in what we were doing. They wanted to be part of that story.”
After creating its global data model, The Coca-Cola Company created three different workstreams to better manage its omnichannel program, each respectively responsible for:
- Integrations,
- Data management and overseeing the PXM, and
- Collaborating with The Coca-Cola Company’s digital shelf managers to ensure they have the necessary assets to support The Coca-Cola Company’s retail partners and execute successful campaigns.
Vann says that, although the company converged its tech stack to manage product data and syndication in the same tool, these teams’ roles didn’t have to merge. Instead, they all worked from the same, single source of truth to operate within their respective domains, which also fostered greater accountability.
“The clarity in those roles and responsibilities is something that we laid out very early on,” Vann says.
VML helped empower The Coca-Cola Company’s team by becoming “facilitators in helping us drive that change management, bringing the expertise into the marketplaces, helping us build out playbooks and questionnaires, so that when we engage those markets, we can move much faster,” Vann says. The Coca-Cola Company also works with Empasix, a technology services company, to handle its day-to-day data management activities, create data quality rules, and drive efficiencies across markets.
Laying the Groundwork for Lasting Omnichannel Success
The Coca-Cola Company demonstrates that the pathway to omnichannel success has to start with bridging silos across technology, data, content, and people.
The company has created a scalable, future-driven tech stack to harmonize its data; developed a global, unified data model; and collaborated with internal and external stakeholders to build buy-in, strengthen collaboration, and streamline digital shelf execution.
“If you're doing this type of work, spend a lot of time there, invest in the time to get the data model right, because that's going to set your foundation for everything else,” Vann advises.
But this is only one part of the equation for omnichannel success, he adds. The key is to “surround yourself with smart people. That’s the best advice — build that team.”
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