The Coca-Cola Company’s Marketing and E-Commerce

Introduction

Coca Cola Company is a leading universal brand in the sale of beverages and other consumables. The company was started in 1892 as an American corporation. Today, the company has operations in more than 200 branches globally selling more than 2800 products, including soft drinks and other carbonated beverages. The company enjoys corporate global image as a result of effective planning and intensive investment in research and technology. Their products are strategically placed in the market to help in marketing and sales promotion.

Strategies/ Initiatives within Coca Cola

Coca Cola uses market segmentation as a major strategy to venture into global market space and target new consumers in the world. Evidently, it has established branches in more than 200 countries operating with distinctive policies (Patil & Mayuresh Nikam, 2018). The main approach used was to analyze emerging market systems and establish valuable strategies to ensure captivity of any market gap. This technique has been pivotal in global growth of the company enabling its expansion in various regions worldwide. The analysis of the market depended on the nature of the countries, whereby in the developing nations, the firm would focus on the financial balance sheet to maximize profits.

The other strategy is brand establishment and good customer relations. Primarily, the firm established a major investment in customer relation and unique brand by creating marketing techniques which would create impacts on the lives of their target markets and ensure there is a good brand image within the industry (Banks, 2016). One of the incidences showcased in their breakthrough in 2015 was the launch of a global marketing strategy involving brand name tagged “Taste the Feeling” (Patil & Mayureshnikam, 2018). The slogan resonates with many consumers and provides a sense of enjoyment, which makes the target yearn to consume more of Coca Cola products.

Moreover, focusing on unique business models and core competence has enabled the organization to become a global giant in this industry. In essence, it has been very difficult for competitors to counterfeit Coca Cola products. Thus, they utilize their process efficiency as a secret in the industry to produce drinks with outstanding tastes. These strategies are fundamental in the continued growth and development of the company.

Technologies Used in Coca-Cola Company (Disruptive or Sustaining)

Definitively, disruptive technology breaks the norms and introduces new ways of operation to meet the demands of existing consumers within the market. Coca Cola has used disruptive technology to create new products that meet the demands and taste of their consumers. Some of their techniques include artificial intelligence bots and computerized ads to lure consumers into buying their goods in the market. At the same time, this firm has designed a strategic plan to evaluate the existing online platform to ensure a successful paradigm shift with new-normal around the universe. As a technology-sound company, the management combines big data from real-life analysis to develop mechanisms that help to remain at the top of the market segment as the global leader in soft drinks and beverages (Lacy-Nichols, Scrinis, & Carey, 2020). Their most renowned innovation is the use of augmented reality in their bottling centers. Historically, the firm has maintained secrecy over its formula in beverage production and no competitor can grasp their traditional approach to production to generate exact type of drinks.

Disruptive technology requires consistent understanding of the trends in the market. Consequently, Coca Cola has had intensive investment in the use of modern technology and big data to generate the best decisions for marketing and sales promotions. The company has more than 500 types of beverage products and serves more than 1.9 billion drinks to consumers a day (Marr, 2020). One of the key reasons as to why the company has remained at the top of the market is because of its ability to embrace change in technology, investing in artificial intelligence and intensive research and development. The machines offer varieties of flavor which tend to remain ambiguous to competitors. In 2017, for instance, Coca Cola launched the Cherry Sprite as a new flavor in the market (Patil & Mayureshnikam, 2018). This move created a new wave of consumers in the market.

Likewise, the company utilizes the artificial intelligence bots as an innovative technology to enhance consumer experience as it personalizes vending procedures for consumers in several ways. The approach involves the use of the machines to give the consumers self-experience which might involve providing tastes that suits the demands of the clients at some points (Jelassi, & Martínez-López, 2020). Likewise, they also behave differently in response to different environmental factors in play. These vending machines have become pivotal in sales and distribution of the drinks with ease.

Possibilities for Coca Cola

Potentially, online business has a huge consumer base that requires critical understanding of what strategy to apply. There are countless opportunities that the company can venture into within the recent space of technology-bound business operations. Using the brand image, the company has the opportunity to develop new products. The application of technology may sometimes be unselective as to whether it is a sustaining or disruptive approach in application. Moreover, the social media data has also become crucial in helping the company develop a current database with exact account of consumers from every part of the market. According to Marr (2020), Coca Cola enjoys a massive following in these platforms, having more than 35 million twitter followers and 105 million Facebook fans. Such platforms help the firm to interact with their consumers, establish the type of customers they have and know where their consumers live (Perera, Victoria, M., & Brand, 2017). Concurrently, they are able to generate modern data on what is happening in the system and initiate new strategies based on big data approach. The company’s global brand image and the opportunistic approach to enhancing peace among countries enables them to endure substantial opportunity for growth. Their strategies include direct foreign investment, market segmentation along the use of modern technology to ensure sustainable growth in all sectors of trade.

Challenges of E-business

E-commerce is a new form of trade that is slowly becoming the normal strategy in business. With the surge in technology advancement and the global penetration of internet services even to remote areas, e-business has become a major component in universal trade. The main business tools used in these platforms include e-mails, videoconferencing, instant messaging, web conferencing, podcasts, and content management systems (Chu, 2020). In essence, some of the main models of e-commerce include business-to-business, business-to-consumers, consumers-to-business, consumer-to –consumer, as well as other mechanisms of income generation within webs.

From the business-to-business approach, finding a stable market segment to reach the retailers is a major challenge within the platforms. Sometimes online platforms create fake traffic of followers whose intention may not be to purchase the products but to understand how they can also create similar goods to sell to the market (Gehani, 2016). Moreover, the growth of sales in such platforms may be a major challenge for many companies including the food and beverage industry. Likewise, companies such as Coca Cola may find it difficult to maintain consumer trust amidst growing trend of counterfeiting and fake website developers.

From the business-to-consumers perspective, one of the challenges faced include ensuring consumer protection. Notably, there has been prevailing concerns over cyber security in several platforms. Firms and individuals use these systems to extort money from unsuspecting clients in pretense of different companies. As a result, it is a major challenge to establish a protective system that enhances protection of loyal buyers and enhances sustainable relations (Hilton, 2017). The other challenge is on the variation in taxation across different countries. At the same time, it becomes difficult to establish the most convenient taxation regime for global companies such as Coca Cola.

Coca-Cola’s E-business Strategies

With the prevailing consequences of COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have opted for digital marketing and online operations to comply with the recommendations of the World Health Organization. Such precautionary mechanisms seem to set a new normal in many industries around the world. E-commerce is becoming one of the global giants in recent times with focus on investment in different forms of technology, disruptive and innovative strategies. Concurrently, many companies have made new strategies to ensure sustainable growth (Cheptegei & Yabs, 2016). Coca Cola is embracing the pandemic-fueled e-commerce situation to generate new ideas in the market.

One of the approaches includes prioritization of preferred brands to meet virtual demand. Accordingly, the company is currently collaborating with different retailers to shift their supply chain into the virtual space to ensure sustainable sales. Their priority is to promote preferred brands within this space and ensure value addition to consumers. The company manages its e-commerce platforms through investment in technology and research. The information and communication systems establish first-hand information about the market and enable the teams in different countries to respond to the needs of their consumers promptly to avoid losing any client.

Notably, the company has both business-to-business (B2B) outlets as well as virtual retailers who sell directly to the consumers in all countries where they have set branches. This strategy helps to identify specific market segments during market (Augulyte, Saraniemi, & Hurmelinna-Laukkanen, 2020). They also participate in corporate social responsibilities to meet the consumers for critic or beneficial feedback that helps in designing new models to approach the modern market online.

Conclusion

Coca Cola is a global giant in soft drinks and other beverages with the most long-standing experience in this field. Consequently, the current analysis reveals some of the technologies utilized by this company to maintain their brand image alongside sustaining their sales during the pandemic. Understanding these concepts will help establish the key variables in e-commerce and help generate strategic techniques applicable in the modern era of business operation. The use of disruptive technology by understanding the trends in the markets has helped the company to maintain a higher global image among consumers and consistently provide high quality drinks. Therefore, there is a need to invest in comprehensive research and market evaluation to ensure that there is competent decision-making within the firm. Such procedures would help to avoid uncertainties and losses in the long run. Likewise, executing the corporate social responsibilities would help position the firm for better competition opportunities because the consumers will feel the growth and enhance brand image in various ways.

References

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Marr, B. (2020). Coca-Cola: Driving success with AI and big data. Web.

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