Stephanie Eaddy is the Cultural Marketing Lead at Coca-Cola, and it was her mission to find a way to deepen Coca-Cola’s relationship and impact within the HBCU market. She and her team gathered some insights about what HBCU students and Gen-Z’ers would like to see more of and what they truly need, and The World Is My Yard program was born. Rolling out sat with Eaddy to hear more about Coca-Cola’s latest brainchild and the impact she hopes to see from it.
What exactly is the Coca-Cola’s World Is My Yard program?
The World Is My Yard is a platform that allows us to create memorable experiences for the Black Gen Z. It’s really built around three key pillars; Celebrating the culture and the magic that comes from an HBCU world. Readiness and delivering excellence beyond the classroom. And lastly, refresh and refuel, which is really about nurturing mind, body and spirit to ensure students have a moment to thrive and not just survive through their academic career. And so within each of those pillars, we have different ways that our brands can show up, bring value and nurture the student. Something to really build a meaningful and authentic relationship.
What are the requirements, if any, to join the World Is My Yard?
We really just require that you have an HBCU email so that when you go and sign up for the PlusOne app that will unlock The World Is My Yard exclusive experience within the app. And the reason why we chose that is because we wanted to make sure this is benefiting the students. We wanted the students to hear it first and we wanted them to feel special. But also important to note is this is available to all HBCU students, regardless of the relationship they may have with the Coca Cola Company.
What are some of the perks of this program?
Yeah, we have a couple of different perks. So when I look at our Refresh and Refuel pillar right now, what we’re doing is we’re providing students with opportunities to win Shutterfly premiums and goodies that can allow them to make their room their own or customize it so they have their own swag for their school. We also have premium Spotify accounts that’s going to help students to unwind or maybe create their perfect playlist as they’re studying or just vibing throughout their day. Then we also have some different certificates and access to Uber Eats so you can get Uber Eats credits so you can again make sure that you’re fueling yourself quite literally with food. But maybe just treat yourself right and, and step away from that cafeteria food from time to time. And those are just a few of the partnerships we have,
Why is mentorship so important?
Yeah, absolutely. So, again, one of the things that we heard from students was this need to bridge between being a student and getting out into the real world. And so mentorship and the opportunity to learn from real world experiences is one of the best ways to do that. And so, in partnership with our Black Employee Network, we call it BEN, they have already within there a number of different senior level and experienced professionals who can offer advice and wisdom to students. Many of those, including the president of BEN, is an HBCU alum. So we have some folks already in house that we feel are very well prepared to have those conversations, but even more than that, they’re passionate about having these conversations. So this is really about just creating a conduit for those relationships to build.
