Digital marketing for Coca Cola Company

Coca Cola is the leading soft drink company all over the world with its presence in over 200 countries selling over 400 brands of soft drinks. Coca Cola’s origin is a soda fountain in the inner city of Atlanta Georgia in 1986 where it was retailed in a drugstore (Choueke, 2009). The Coca-Cola Company was established in the year 1892 with its first beverages being vended in bottles in the year 1894. The Corporation has over the years grown from one item to more than 500 products and this includes 3,500 soft drinks products where the company sells seventeen billion dollars per day in all the countries that it is situated. The Coca Cola Company continues to increase its presence in the global market; solidifying its trademark and advancing its international drive every instant. To attain this, the corporation is operating with its international bottling associates in sustenance of its vision of 2020 that the company disclosed in the year 2009.

The brand possesses and warrants its brands that comprise nourishment drinks, water, juices, coffees, teas and energy drinks. The corporation dispenses its products through the retail stores as well as grocery stores, drug stores and convenience stores among others. The food service and hospitality business most specifically the fast foods outlets has come to be a major delivery station for these products.  Most of Coca Cola’s products are sold in cans made of aluminium and plastic bottles (Szabist, 2016). The operation of the business is prearranged in such a system that the immediate clients for the corporation are the suppliers. These are the individuals that act as its bottling associates, the corporation essentially creates the syrup and then vends it to the bottlers who are generally certified to reproduce it and then package the goods as is itemized by the brand (Choueke, 2009).

These distributors function as the connection between the company and the buyers of the soft drinks. This is inclusive of persons in all age groups, revenue brackets and geographic counties whose different needs are met by offering different brands (Hitesh, 2018). Coca cola markets its products based on demographic segmentation and also geographic segmentation. This segmentation replicates the requirements in the brand subjects and it effects the advertising approaches that are used like digital advertising that is usually appropriate for the target segments.

As one of the most inclusive brands all over the globe, Coca Cola Company celebrates the concept of diversity, equality and inclusion something that has grown to be the culture of the company (Egol et al., 2014). This commitment by Coca Cola to unite people of all cultures has been manifested in its advertisements most especially its digital marketing and also in its daily operations. The company has protected the rights of every employee from discrimination against gender identity and expression. The Coca Cola Company has created its brand starting with the strong contrast red and white colours that convey an impressive brand identity to its customers (Szabist, 2016). The taste of its famous coca cola drink is unique and it has a distinctive taste from their competitors such as Pepsi making it a unique drink for their customers. It is very easy to recognize a coca cola product in a shop because of its colourfulness as well as its unique branding.

Customers’ decision to buy a brand is always dependent on whether that brand is worth a repeated purchase. A significant factor that affects a customer’s choice making is the societal ethnic variances amid that product and the preference of the customers (Choueke, 2009). Coca Cola endorses its products in every life setting which has made it widely known by almost every one all around the world. People in all walks of life are familiar with the Coca Cola bottle because of its repeated exposures in music, movies, sports and many other elements of life thus making the brand to be connected with the lives of people (Hitesh, 2018). Coca Cola maintains its attractiveness in the social cultural differences that exists in the society by creating innovative products to fit every group for instance water, coffee, juice, teas and various snacks which ensures that every potential consumer feels covered. This helps the brand to stay relevant in different cultures as well as age groups.

Persona profile for Coca Cola

Coca Cola targets the world at large; it has created segmentation in its products which allows it to cater for the needs of people of all ages from the children to the aged (Taylor, 2015). Segmentation aids the brand to outline the suitable produces for the diverse consumers (Szabist, 2016). Coca Cola adapts its promotion strategy by developing new produces often which help cater for the special needs of every person in the society.

Age

When it comes to age, the brand does not necessarily have an exact age aim and their products and marketing strategies are addressed to everyone, though its main customers are people amid the ages of 12 to 30 years (Szabist, 2016). The brand has products for every age segment whereby there are fruit juices for the children aged between 3 and 10 years like Minute Maid which have different flavours to entice the kids. Though there are no main products for people above the age 50, the brand has succeeded in reaching them because of its value among the consumers (Hitesh, 2018). The core target for the brand can hence be defined to be the young people who love to be associated with vibrant drinks like the ones that Coca Cola provides (Taylor, 2015). Coca Cola’s consumer targeting is not really based on gender, since their products are consumed by both male and females at an equal rate.

For Coca Cola, every person is a target and hence a prospective consumer. People of all age groups are targeted but the peak latent groups are the young people that are between the ages of 18 and 25 years and this is why most of the brands advertising features this age group (Szabist, 2016). This a very ideal age group because they are people that love and enjoy having fun, not forgetting their interest  in exploring new experiences.

Life style

There is no specific lifestyle that the Coca Cola brand targets, though the people that are ever busy and mobile who are mostly the youths are considered as the most important part of the brand’s consumers (Taylor, 2015).

Occupation

The people that the brand targets are mostly students and family oriented people, that frequently come together to enjoy some soft drinks as they have fun and enjoy their time together (Taylor, 2015).

Customer media habits

Given that their consumers are mainly the young people that are aged between 18 and 30 years, their presence in the social media is very high (Hitesh, 2018). This is the millennial generation that is very actively involved in the social media and everything around them revolves around using the internet (Szabist, 2016). They enjoy sharing trending items because that way, they are involved. They like innovations and they love surprises which gives the Coca Cola brand a very good opportunity to earn their attention with vibrant media connections.

Coca Cola’s online presence and its limitations

Coca Cola has been effective in its advertising especially with its good use of the internet where it conducts most of its direct interactions with the consumers. The management of Coca Cola understands the importance of maintaining regular contact with the consumers because it is what helps to build and sustain consumer customer relations (Ryan & Jones, 2009). This has steered the company to apply digital marketing which is an efficient strategy that links the customers to the consumers and the company. Interactivity in the digital media offers a better method for consumers to understand a business much better. This is also a good plat form for the consumers to make any form of enquiries to the company which will equally help the business to understand their consumer needs and work towards meeting these needs. The use of digital promotion approach is constructed on the foundation that modern advertising is shifting the exchange of goods and services to service eminence, collaboration, customer associations and augmenting connectivity. Coca Cola has about 90 million supporters on its social media channels which give it a wide platform of interaction with the consumers.

Most of the posts that they make on their social media is effectively designed to help them connect with their consumers and this basically helps to show that they care for them and they do all they can to meet their needs (Taylor, 2015). Coca Cola has been able to use the power of social sharing by allowing the consumers a chance to send links of coke campaigns to their friends anywhere and this gives them a chance to make their orders of the soft drinks in any cinema location, a platform that is currently operational within the US (Szabist, 2016). Coca Cola has established its knowledge on the fact that a good digital marketing strategy normally begin with some simple elements like knowing the audience. When a business has understood who its target consumers are, it becomes easy to target them directly and hence address their specific needs. Coca Cola has always targeted a wide range of population with its varied products meeting the needs of the different types of consumers.

 In its latest successful digital campaign, its target consumers were the young people ‘millennial’ and this was conducted through the use of customized packaging on the soft drinks (Taylor, 2015). In this case, the company instead of using the usual ‘coke’ branding on the bottles, used the most popular names in every culture which greatly impressed the target groups and spiked the sales (Coca Cola, 2018). In this case, Coca Cola understood the needs of their target consumers the millennial who are always impressed by content that they can share on their social media and also their interest in experiences and products that they can co-create. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was perfect for this campaign and customers could not wait to find bottles with their names or their friends names on after which their shared photos on their social pages once they found them (Taylor, 2015). This sharing motivated more and more customers to purchase the products and hence the increased sales. It is estimated that over 500,000 photos were posted in various social sites with the hashtag #shareacoke which greatly increased its popularity in the digital world (Coca Cola, 2018).

Even with this presence on the social media, there are some weaknesses that have been noticed. One of the weaknesses with Coca Cola online presence is the fact that it is not consistent in its interactions with the clients. It takes so long for them to make a post in their social media pages or even to respond to queries that are made by the consumers about their products (Coca Cola, 2018). The social network teams of the company rarely make straight forward marketing messages which become a bit hard for the consumers to understand.  This affects the relationship between the company and the consumers because they do not have the trust on the company meeting their needs and they easily opt to follow other brands.

Coca Cola has a website which defines the company’s mission and overall objective; it also showcases some of the company’s products and gives frequent updates on the any products that the company is launching. Though the website is detailed and beneficial for the consumers in helping them understand the company much better, it is still inadequate because it does not always rank in the first page in a search engine result which basically means that most people are not able to see it easily.

Digital marketing strategy that could be incorporated by Coca Cola

The idea

The fact that Coca Cola is widely established throughout the world gives it a chance to come up with a single strategy that will work on people of all age groups and cultures. A good digital campaign strategy that will work is ‘spread the love’ which will be established by personalizing coke bottles with different quotes that are themed on encouragement, love, kindness and hard work to replace their Coca Cola brand name. Some examples of the quotes are I love you, congratulations dear, get well soon; you are beautiful among many others. These quotes will be used in the different packaging of the coke bottles in every country. The quotes will be customized depending on the culture of that society and also the language which will be easy given that the bottling partners are diverse and they each country has its own bottling company.

The Logic

The ‘spread the love’ campaign will be interesting for people of all age groups as they come across familiar quotes from their cultures and this will excite them to share this with their family and friends. This is something new that has never been used by any other company in the soft drinks industry and it will hence bring along a lot of excitement for the consumers. The excitement will lead them to take photos and videos which they will share on their social media and hence increased engagement, brand appeals and sales. This strategy will be effective in that it will unite people from all over the world through Coca Cola as they share their different quotes through social media explaining what their quotes mean to the rest of the world.

This level of personalization will serve people in various regions in their respective countries whether in the urban centre or in the rural areas. Most often the people in the rural areas do not get the privilege of sharing the trends that are happening with their favourite brands in the urban areas because these trends are not given a platform to reach the consumers in the rural areas. This ‘spread the love’ campaign strategy will be affected in such a manner that the newly quoted bottles of coke will be distributed all over the country without any form of bias. The social media management of the brand will request people to share their quotes in Coca Cola social media pages which will help the company to know the areas that have not yet been reached by this new packaging.

This ‘spread the love’ campaign strategy just like the ‘share a coke’ campaign will encourage the consumers to buy the company’s products which will increase the sales and its online presence. This strategy is however much better because it will not only target the young people like the other campaigns. The quotes that will be used in the packaging will be all inclusive and they can be used by any individual in any social class and age group. The encouragement quotes can be used by a parent to their child, child to a parent, friends, lovers, or from a colleague to another, this basically showing the diversity of this quotes. This will be a fun activity that will help people in different age groups and diversity to pass on a message of love and encouragement in a fun and exciting manner.

How to effect the strategy

For this campaign to work, the first thing will be to rebrand the company’s website. To help keep the people interested and engaged on Coca Cola’s site, a custom design that reflects the brand and makes it easy for people to find information that they need is required. The website should be more advanced such that it is mobile responsive which allows consumers to access the website easily at any place using their mobile phones (Ryan & Jones, 2009). Human beings are visual oriented beings and they are thus influenced by images and videos as opposed to posts or articles (Choueke, 2009). Coca Cola’s website hence needs to be re-launched and modified through the incorporation of high visuals.

The content of the website should be themed around pop culture, social media, marketing campaigns, career advice and brand history. This will help to give the website and the brand at large a human impression which will make it distinct from the traditional corporate website. Also to help change Coca Cola’s image online, a search engine optimization needs to be considered and the first thing will be to create some quality content that are able to answer the questions of the searchers. Doing this will allow the searchers to view the coca cola page among the first pages and it will prompt them to visit its sites and learn more about its products which could steer them to prospect consumers. The other strategy will be to clean up the codes of the site and increase the speed of the pages, this will help prospect consumers to be able to view content more easily and faster hence motivating their interest in the company’s products. By doing all this, the company will increase the chances of the consumers having easy access to the company’s information and hence increased motivation for purchase of the brands’ products. Though search engine optimization is a long term process, ensuring frequent maintenance helps to ensure top rankings which are an overall good investment for the business (Choueke, 2009).

The site will be redesigned in such a way that it creates a platform for the consumers to take part in this new quotes campaign by giving some of the quotes that they would love to see in their respective countries. This will be an exciting concept that will make the consumers feel like they are part of the campaign, which is what many people wish to have as consumers of various products. This will greatly encourage more people to visit the company’s website and check out their new products thus increasing the brand’s sales as well as their presence in the society.

Music is an important element in communication, a commercial anthem produced by renowned international artists will be created to help unite people from all over the world. The anthem will be engaging and interesting to people all over the world because it will incorporate people from different diversities. It will present a series of moments that are linked by Coca Cola quotes for instance graduations, weddings, baby showers, first job and even sickness moments.

The process that will be followed in effecting the ‘spread the love’ campaign strategy

Figure 1; showing Gantt chart illustrating the process of the digital marketing strategy

Phases		Tasks to be conducted				start date	End date	Duration days
Phase 1		creation of a budget for the campaign				01-Jul	15-Jul	15
phase 2		Coming up with the quotes				01-Aug	01-Sep	30
phase 3		creating a commercial for the campaign				15-Sep	15-Oct	30
phase 4		creating the campaign anthem				01-Nov	01-Dec	30
phase 5		Launching the campaign				12-Dec	30-Dec	18

Phase 1

The first thing in this ‘spread the love’ campaign strategy will come up with a budget for the campaign taking into considerations, the adverts that will be used for the campaign, the anthem for the campaign and the overall branding price for the new bottles. The whole budget for the campaign will be $ 4 billion a year which will cover all the adverts, the bottling companies in the various countries will take charge of the packaging which is not expected to be too much given that it is a change of the logo.

Phase 2

The second phase will be to come up with some of the quotes that will be used in the campaign for each of the countries. In this phase, the company’s website will be rebranded to make it easy for consumers to take part in this exercise by providing the quotes they most prefer. The quotes will have to be things that are common to people in that community, a quote that is easy to understand and one that captures the attention of the consumer. This will require intensive research to understand the quotes that people understand and also relate to in different situations.

Phase 3

The third phase will be to come up with the best commercial advert that will be effective for this campaign. The advert must be diverse in nature thus ensuring that it incorporates different cultures and also people from different racial backgrounds without creating any form of biasness. The advert will show people engaging in different activities common to people from all cultures as they share a coke with their favourite theme quotes to match the occasion.

Phase 4

The fourth phase will be to come up with the right anthem for the campaign. This will require a concrete selection of the best artists from different cultures to act as brand ambassadors of this campaign. The anthem that the artist will create should be interesting and at the same time themed on the element of unity, peace and love which is something that people in all cultures identify with.

Phase 5

The last phase will be the launching where, the advert will be official aired in different platforms and the new personalized coke bottles will be official introduced in the market. A link will be created in the company’s website and all other social media channels will allow the consumers to share their ideas as well as experiences in regard to this new ‘spread the love’ campaign.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

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            Four clear paths for winning

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            https://www. Marketing91. com/marketing-strategy-of-coca-cola/

Coca Cola (2018). Marketing Analysis Project Report. Retrieved from Boha Ala: https://

bohatala.com/coca-cola-marketing-analysis-project-report/

Szabist, S. Z. (2016, April). Strategic Marketing Plan for Coca-Cola - 2016. Retrieved

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