Let’s talk about the Coca-Cola rebrand.

A few weeks ago I drove past some World Cup signage on the way to the airport and something stopped me. Coca-Cola signage, which I’ve driven past a thousand times in this city without a second thought, because Coca-Cola is Atlanta and Atlanta is Coca-Cola and their branding is so deeply embedded in the visual fabric of this place that it registers as background noise. Except this time it didn’t. Something felt slightly off about the typography. Not wrong exactly. Just... not quite as polished as it usually is. Shaking off the thought that they might possibly have let the interns do the World Cup work, I filed it away and kept driving.

Then earlier this week, I read about the rebrand and suddenly I understood what my eyes had been trying to tell me. It wasn’t necessarily the kerning — though honestly, maybe that too. It was the typeface itself. My eyes had spent years calibrating to what Coca-Cola looks like, and this didn’t quite match that calibration. Not wrong enough to name. Just enough to register.

On July 20th, Coca-Cola unveiled a new global brand identity rolling out across 200+ markets. Developed with multiple agencies — JKR for brand identity, Brody Associates for a new (to most of us) proprietary typeface called “Better With,” Adobe for governance tools — the refresh amplifies existing assets rather than replacing them. The red and white palette, the Dynamic Ribbon, the Spencerian script — all still there, all “more Coca-Cola than ever,” according to the people who made it. The big change underneath the surface: AI-powered design tools standardizing creative output globally and speeding up internal approvals without the traditional bottlenecks.

Which is interesting. And also worth asking some questions about.

When a brand decision is made primarily for operational reasons, does it matter that it’s dressed up in creative language?

Let’s start with the honest version of what happened here. One outlet described it as “a cost structure wearing a nicer outfit” — and that’s not entirely unfair. The case for this rebrand wasn’t primarily creative. It was operational: how do you maintain brand consistency across 200 markets, multiple agencies, dozens of languages, and thousands of assets without every execution going through a lengthy approval process? The answer, apparently, is AI-powered governance tools that make the brand legible to software, which can then produce consistent outputs at scale without human review at every step.

That’s actually a legitimate problem to solve. Brand consistency at Coca-Cola’s scale is incredibly hard. The question is whether “making the brand legible to software” and “making the brand more expressive and human” are compatible goals — or whether optimizing for one inevitably compromises the other.

The answer showed up in the details. Specifically, in a typeface that a lot of people think looks like Marlboro.

“Better With,” commissioned from Brody Associates, has actually been around since 2023, when it was used for the brand’s holiday campaign and lived quietly without much notice. The retro serif designed to express “the brand’s unique personality, movement, and playfulness” is also def giving Marlboro. Oops. Not identical — designers have been quick to clarify it’s technically a different typeface and it is, but it’s similar enough that the comparison spread immediately.

“Love that they just leaned into the fact that soda is the new cigarettes by just straight up doing the Marlboro font,” one Reddit user wrote. Another: “The most self-aware thing a sugar company has ever done. Yikes.

So while the font isn’t new, what is new is that it’s now front and center across the entire global identity. Put it everywhere at global scale and suddenly everyone sees it. Which tells you something important about how context shapes brand perception — and what happens when you take something that worked in one environment and deploy it in every environment simultaneously.

Scale changes everything. A font that reads as warm and nostalgic in a holiday campaign reads very differently plastered across 200 markets in summer. Humans somehow missed it. Scale exposed it.

Of course Coca-Cola will be fine. Marlborogate is maybe just their latest New Coke moment — except New Coke was obvious and immediate. This one is quieter. Harder to rally against.

This tension at the heart of every brand decision made primarily for operational efficiency: the things that make a brand feel right — the nuance, the cultural awareness, the instinct that says “this feels slightly off” — are exactly the things that are hardest to systematize. They live in people, not in software. And when you optimize the brand for consistency at scale, you inevitably trade some of that human judgment for reproducibility.

Maybe that’s the right trade for a brand operating in 200 markets. Maybe the consistency gains outweigh the craft losses. Maybe “close enough to right, everywhere” is genuinely better than “exactly right, some places, inconsistently.” These are real arguments and Coca-Cola is smart enough to have made them.

My own team recently looked at the Adobe governance tools that are part of this system. And honestly? They’re impressive. But we’re nowhere near the scale where we’d need them — we don’t create enough assets across enough markets to justify that kind of infrastructure. Which is actually the point: these tools are built for brands operating at a scope that most of us will never reach. The question is whether the tools that solve Coca-Cola’s problems are the right aspiration for everyone else — or whether smaller brands are better served by the human judgment that Coke just partially outsourced.

But I keep thinking about what my eyes noticed before my brain caught up. The something-slightly-off feeling that registered without me being able to name it. Because that feeling — that instinctive human response to when a brand isn’t quite doing what it’s supposed to do — is what great brand work is designed to prevent. And it’s exactly what AI governance tools can’t feel.

The rebrand will settle. The font will either grow on people or quietly get revised. That’s how these things go. But the question underneath it — what do you sacrifice when you optimize a great brand for scale? — doesn’t go away. And for brands a fraction of Coca-Cola’s size making similar decisions for similar reasons, it’s worth considering.

The phrase “more iconic than ever.”

It appeared in Coca-Cola’s rebrand materials. It appears in approximately every rebrand announcement ever made. It is doing the opposite of what it intends. Because if you have to say you’re more iconic than ever, the work probably isn’t. Iconic things don’t announce their iconicness. They just are. Cut it every time. Replace it with something specific about what actually changed and why. “More iconic than ever” is what you write when you’ve run out of things to say about the work itself. And that, more than any font choice, is the thing worth paying attention to.

Homework: Look at the last brand refresh or update your organization made. Was it primarily a creative decision or an operational one? And were you honest — with yourselves and with the world — about which one it was? The answer might explain more than you’d expect about how it landed.Kristin
Creative director. Brand obsessed. Agency life ex-pat. ✌️