Felicia Hale is the chief of staff, North America, in the office of the president for The Coca-Cola Company Company.
During the Essence Festival of Culture weekend, the executive shared the company’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion as well as their continued commitment to support Black media.
Hale discussed the inspiration for Coca-Cola’s activations and the main focus for this year’s event.
How did the Coca-Cola activations become part of the Essence Festival?
This is really a year’s worth of planning. Honestly, everything that you see here, we started our partnership with Essence 28 years ago. It’s been a long-standing partnership as the presenting sponsor at the festival. When I say a year, we take the learnings from the prior year’s activation. We want to make sure that we bring a fresh and new experience of Black women here at the festival.
The focal point is our Coke stage. We have music artists that are showing up every hour, we have performances, and we also have a SmartWater activation, which is taking place. We are product sampling with high energy and we really just want to make sure that we show up strong every year. This year, we have three separate activations.
As Coca-Cola’s chief of staff North America, what does your day-to-day look like?
My position is all things as chief of staff, which is awesome. I have the opportunity to work across the North America leadership team, which includes our marketing organization responsible for the activation that you see here at the festival. I work with our leaders to ensure that we have a strong strategy that helps amplify and deliver on the business results that we’ve set out to do.
It’s problem-solving and partnering with our leaders to make sure that we deliver on the consumer touch points that we want to activate, and then ultimately [to] deliver on those experiences for our consumers and our customers.
What advice do you have for the youth of today?
The advice that I would give is just to stay hungry [and] always listen. Listen to your mentors, whether they be consumers, customers, or your managers. For me, it’s about listening and making sure that you take in feedback. Also, find people that you look up to and aspire to maybe want to mirror your career … and partner with them to help you shape whether it be a development plan, or a coaching opportunity to help you kind of shape your path to get to where your ultimate goal is. Staying hungry is really what I would say is number one, and always stay focused to achieve your goals.
