The Coca-Cola Company announced a leadership reshuffling last week, effective March 31, that sees digital strategy responsibilities moving from CFO John Murphy to a brand-new CDO role, with customer and commercial leadership also shifting from Murphy to an expanded CMO position. The changes coincide with a CEO transition—Henrique Braun taking over from James Quincey, who moves to Executive Chairman.
TL;DR: What it is
- A domain unbundling. Murphy keeps finance, strategy, investor relations, and enterprise services. Digital goes to new CDO Sedef Salingan Sahin. Customer and commercial goes to CMO Manolo Arroyo (now “Chief Marketing and Customer Commercial Officer”). What was once one portfolio is now three.
- An elevation of digital to the C-suite; CDO ≠ CIO ≠ CTO. Sahin will lead “digital strategy, data, and operational excellence”—the consumer-facing stuff, not the infrastructure stuff. She reports directly to the CEO.
- A bet on internal talent. Sahin has been at Coca-Cola since 2003. She ran Eurasia and Middle East operations, led the nutrition/juice/dairy category, and by all accounts drove digital transformation in both roles. Arroyo is a boomerang! One 19-year stint that started in 1995 as a Brand Manager, a couple years in the outside world, and then back to Coke, where he took on a series of unit president roles starting in 2017.
- I’m at the reorg. I’m at the succession plan. I’m at the combination reorg and succession plan. Incoming CEO Braun (also joined KO in 1996, like Quincey) gets to reshape his leadership team on day one. In 30 years at the company, he's worked in supply chain, new business development, marketing, innovation, general management, and bottling operations across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia before becoming COO. Quincey moves to Chairman.
How Quincey did
A quick sidebar on the outgoing CEO: James Quincey had a genuinely successful run. He took over in 2016 with a mandate to turn Coca-Cola from a soda company into a “total beverage company”—and largely delivered. He killed about 200 underperforming brands (roughly half the portfolio), added more than 10 billion-dollar brands including BodyArmor, Topo Chico, and Fairlife, completed the refranchising of the North American bottling network, and pushed into alcohol through partnerships with Molson Coors and Brown-Forman. Warren Buffett publicly endorsed him. Yale gave him a Legend in Leadership Award. The stock is near all-time highs.
So as mentioned, this has been in the works for a long time. Quincey is stepping back at 61 after nine years, staying on as Executive Chairman, and handing the reins to his COO with the board’s blessing. The reorg happening simultaneously is the new CEO putting his fingerprints on the structure.
What “customer commercial” actually means
“Customer” in CPG-speak means the retailer, not the end consumer.
“Customer commercial” is the function that manages those retail relationships. It includes: negotiating shelf placement and slotting fees, designing trade promotions (e.g. BOGO), coordinating with retail media networks (Walmart Connect, Kroger’s 84.51°), and managing the army of account managers who call on each retail partner. It’s where the marketing strategy meets the point of sale.
This function used to live under the CFO because trade promotion is *expensive* — it’s one of the largest line items in any CPG budget. Having it under finance made sense when the job was mostly managing spend. But retail has gotten more complex, and the line between “marketing” and “commercial” has blurred. Moving it to the CMO signals that Coca-Cola now sees this as a growth lever.
Context
The CDO role has had a bumpy decade. A 2019 Deloitte report famously predicted the role would cease to exist by 2020—the idea being that once digital becomes everyone’s job, you don’t need a dedicated leader for it. That didn’t happen. Per MIT Sloan, 84% of organizations now have a CDO or CDAO, up from 12% in 2012. But tenure is brutal: more than half serve less than three years.
Coca-Cola’s version is interesting because of where it’s carving from. The CFO-as-digital-strategist model made sense for a while—digital transformation is expensive. But there’s a limit to how much any one executive can span. Murphy was overseeing: finance, strategy, corporate development, investor relations, customer relationships, commercial leadership, *and* digital strategy. That’s a lot of domains for one portfolio.
The OD angle
Coca-Cola is essentially saying: digital is now big enough and distinct enough to be its own domain. It can’t be a part-time responsibility bolted onto finance. And the person who runs it needs to be able to make decisions without navigating through another executive’s priorities.
There’s also a Pace Layers dimension here. Finance operates at a certain cadence — quarterly reporting, annual budgets, multi-year planning. Digital consumer engagement operates at a completely different speed. Putting both under the same leader creates an unrewarded collision. Separating them lets each move at its natural rhythm.
And notice who *got* the responsibilities: not outside hires but internal operators who’d already demonstrated they could drive transformation in their previous roles. IMO this is a great example of Emergent Leadership at work — leadership emerging from demonstrated competence rather than being assigned by title.
Unresolved issues
The obvious tension: Arroyo now owns marketing *and* customer commercial. Sahin owns digital strategy. But digital marketing is… what, exactly? And who owns the AI-generated content Coca-Cola has been experimenting with? The boundary between “digital” and “marketing” is porous at best. There will be turf negotiations.
There’s also the question of whether creating a CDO is a forward-looking move or a catching-up move. Coca-Cola’s $1.1 billion Microsoft deal in 2024 suggests they’ve been serious about AI and cloud for a while. But appointing a CDO in 2026, when some companies are already sunsetting the role, raises the question: is this the beginning of Coca-Cola’s digital chapter, or are they institutionalizing what others have already integrated?
What to watch
- The Arroyo-Sahin boundary. Will marketing and digital operate as partners or rivals? The test will be who leads integrated campaigns where the line between “content” and “tech” disappears.
- Sahin’s mandate scope. She’s been asked to “assess how to organize the teams responsible for digital across the enterprise.” That’s either an invitation to restructure or a delay tactic. Six months from now, has the org chart changed?
- CFO Murphy’s portfolio. He still has a lot. Strategy, corporate development, investor relations, enterprise services. If the unbundling continues, that’s the next place to look.
- Tenure. CDO is a short-lived role industry-wide. Does Sahin last three years? Five? If she’s there in 2030, Coca-Cola will have beaten the odds.