This month's Fast Company was laying around yesterday and caught me by surprise. A local design hero & innovator, David Butler, VP of Global Design for Coca-Cola, was featured on the cover.

David has taken one of the most intimidating and daunting tasks a designer could embark, the visual management of a billion dollar brand. Coke has over 450 brands operating in 200 countries, and 20,000 retailers selling 1.6 Billion servings of Coke products per day (that's 1/6th of the world's population)- which is 18,000 servings per second, is that daunting enough?

After reading the article, I'm most impressed with David's persona of humility, straight talk, and quest for value. It's very easy for designers (even legends) to fall into the trap of designer talk. David's goal is simple, "Here, it's about creating more value. How do we sell more of something?"

Butler inherited the Coke brand when turmoil was on the horizon for the behemoth organization. Global brands like Coke face the challenge of globalization and the temptation for a decentralized brand system. Just a few years ago, If a local distributor wanted to add local flair (ie- clovers and cloudy days for wee ole' Ireland), Coke's philosophy was "so be it". This quickly translated into a system malfunction nightmare, even reaching here in the states.

Thus, enter the knight in shinning armor, David Butler. "When I came," Butler says, "people recognized that they had a business problem. They just didn't know it was a design problem." After a few days on the job he wrote a three-page manifesto, titled "Designing on Purpose". "I wanted to show how you could create value for the business through design. I had no organization, no influence, nothing to point to, but now we had that statement out there — a flag in the ground."

He has indeed proven the value of design. In-fact case volume was up 4% for the second quarter and profits exceeded expectations. Coke's market share has increased to 42.7% compared to Pepsi's 30.8%. All of the credit isn't to his domain, with the "open happiness" campaign and the acquired giant Vitamin Water, but Joe Tripodi, Coke's global marketing chief, was quoted as saying "Butler happens to be one of the most visible and biggest facilitators of how we will win in the marketplace."

What I admire most about David is his presentation of design as a business device and the value it drives all the way down to the end user. Buying anything is emotional, and great design connects and allures those emotions to our fullest realization.

David ended the articles with a quote:

"This is not a design story," he tells me yet again. "I understand there are some people who would like to hear the words ‘design-driven' come out of our CEO's mouth. Honestly, I don't care. We're leveraging design to drive innovation and to win at the point of sale, which is fundamental to our business. Full stop."

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