Coca-Cola: marketing masterclass of beverage industry

Coca Cola has long been a well- known beverage enterprise all around the world, the promotion channel of Coca Cola has been famous for its innovative, surprising and unexpecting style. This time, Coca Cola hit a great success on its new marketing campaign- “Share a Coke”, which is related to a buzz- like, interpersonal- oriented program, which leads to an unprecedented success on increasing the consumption and sales volume eventually.

According to the findings of the Coca Cola, teenagers ranging from 18-25 years old has recorded as the most fast- growing percentages of customer segments. Thanks to the proliferation usage of social media, aims and the correct positioning of consumers’ psychology, Coca Cola leads a transformation of traditional marketing strategies to a new “consumer- oriented, buzz and social media- oriented” marketing channel.

The impact of “Share a Coke” has proved to be meaningful and astonishing, not only establish greater social bonds with peers and families, but successfully pacify the conflicts and discontents between two ethnic groups. The analysis below will examine the factors of the unprecedented success of this innovative marketing tactics, the implications of this successful campaign, as to conclude the difference between traditional and current new marketing modes.

Background abstract of “Share a Coke” campaign:

Established in 2011, The marketing teams of Coca Cola in Australia incubated the innovative marketing strategies, that collect the most famous 150 names in Australia and printed on the bottle sleeves of Coca Cola cans and bottles, published and promoted on social media with the hashtag #ShareaCoke. Due to the huge success of this promotion that consumers rushed to buy the Coke with their name on it, the campaign extends to the other countries like Singapore, USA, Mainland China and even Hong Kong.

The marketing strategies also undergo transformation in the latter stage, names are not the only thing printed on the cover but with the slangs and pop song lyrics originated from the millennial age, furthermore, pop-up store and kiosks are set up to sell personalize coke to the public, the influence of this strategies relate to the massive promotion with social media, TV, radio broadcasting channels, and even packaging pop songs into official Coca Cola music videos. This compilation of marketing mix proves to be a splendid reference related to new product innovation process, psychological retailing, and e- commerce retailing, which will be discussed further in the next part.

New Product innovation cycle

The development process of “Share a Coke” campaign has been a great example of illustrating the innovation cycle of new products. A new marketing idea are the idea delivery with careful research, packaging and risk-and-gain evaluation, instead of swiftly developed and launched to the market. In the scope of new product innovation, there are different stage a brand-new idea need to undergo to ensure its successfulness. The campaign proves its careful evaluation on each stage.

There are 5 main stages embodies in the development process, the first one is the opportunity (and risk) identification, where the Australian marketer started to incubate its ideas with detailed purpose: What is our main customer segments? What is our aims? How can we provide additional values to the customers, rather than satisfy their needs of thirst? A series of market research has been processing and find out that the competitive advantage of Coca Cola has been declined and nearly surpassed by other beverage brands like Pepsi, they also notice the main customer segments are teenagers from the research.

Focusing on how to win the hearts of them, the process moves to the second stage that is concept generation. The idea is generated by adding the top 150 names among Australian, finding out that customers will tend to be more interested by having their names on the bottle, they need to consider what forms, which technology and what benefits can be provided to end users. Finally, they also draw the intended outcomes that the campaign will be a physical form of mass selling of name printed coke, using innovative marketing channels (no technology is needed in the initial stage) to satisfy the psychological needs of customer that leave the impressions of being appreciated.

Then they need to perform the third stage – Concept evaluation, this related to the Public Relation works, the campaign should not be launched immediately, they should have a full analysis on the choice of names? How to carry out the initial market testing (In local or global scale)? How to deal with the difficulties that the consumers that their names are not included in the campaign? The respond of Coca Cola is they will carry out and promote the campaign on the social media, and collect public opinions or suggestions of names. Coca Cola also be conservative that they will implement it on Australia first.

The two final stages are design & development and launching, Coca Cola had prototyped its strategy as a chain and a series of marketing programs like further extends the campaign into more worldwide scale, position its campaign delivery channel into hashtag, buzz- like retails targeting on teens born on millennium era by focusing heavily on social media. Consequently, the campaign is promoted alongside with auxiliary strategies like setting up pop-up stores by assisting consumers to tailor-made their names on the coke cover.

The above stages illustrate cautious analysis on product and idea development. Coca Cola has performed a considerable reference on strictly aligning with the principles of different stages. With the creativity added and step-by-step approaches on implanting the campaign, the success of “Share a Coke” is not by luck, but by the diligence and careful planning on the idea process development.

Psychological retailing

The original retailing and marketing concepts is the billboard, MTR tunnel displays and TV commercials, which the features are unilaterally offering products and services to the customers. Customers have a choice to accept or decline the offers. For some of the cases, even though the customers accept the offers, they are not willing to accept, or even they are forced to accept by no alternative choices provided to them.

Similar to the beverage industries, Coca Cola and Pepsi nearly monopolised the coke industries in the globe, although customers may have limited choice, still they enjoy Coca Cola the most, the reason to explain the phenomenon is, Coca Cola had done a great example of positioning its retail concepts on customers psychograph and demographics, by clearly assessing the favours, tendencies, and features of the customer segments, moreover, examining the cultural landscape for their targeted countries and markets.

Take the psychographic of the millennium teenagers for an example, Coca Cola investigated that the characteristics of the teenagers or couples, they tend like to be the one who gained attractiveness with each other, and they are willing to try adventurous things that they have never came across with. In addition, they tend to use some “slangs” like Goddess, BFF, LMAO, these kinds of abbreviations used on social media to deliver their thoughts. These observations are being put into campaign, personalization of coke makes the young customers feel they are being appreciated and their superiority and supremacy is likely gain. Moreover, coca Cola further put the common slangs on the bottle also increase the awareness of them, since they can communicate each other by passing the slangs they want to describe to their friends, their actions just align the concept of the campaign, which is sharing happiness, leave great impressions on them, that arouse their intentions and interests to share their cokes with names, or something they want to say, to the buddies, families or even the beloved one.

Another characteristic of them is - they are technology-savvy segments, which means they are having a heavy reliance on mobile phones and social medias. On the other hands, they are having a strong habit of sharing online posts or contexts (the most typical example is sharing memes- captions with funny slangs added, by tagging names on the comment box on Facebook or Instagram). Coca Cola discovered their strong intentions of sharing, as they want to be part of the people who helps to promote some things which are extraordinary or innovative to them, therefore, Coca Cola decides to promote this campaign mainly on the social media, by using the hashtag symbol to create massive and buzz promotion effects on the campaign. The purpose of using massive social media channels is to create a multiplatform retailing channel to the teenagers, where they can use the hashtag to share with each other, the merit is they are granted autonomy for them to promote the products, which gains their sense of accomplishment and achievement by sharing, second, by transferring the marketing autonomy from Coca Cola to the millennium customers, it will be more able for Coca Cola to extend its influence among the teenagers and increases its sales volume.

In a broader view of social aspect, Coca Cola also focuses on a more obvious problem in the community, which is the interpersonal relationships. It comes to the knowledge that the millennium teenagers have a close relationship with their peers, however, relatively, loose and sparse relationships with families are common all over the world. Moreover, the metropolitan citizens though their material lives are abundant, their psychological worlds may seem to be empty, for example, having discontent with someone, or they have no clues on how to deliver their thankfulness with each other. Based on the observations of this phenomenon, the ideas of this campaign is developed, alongside with the aim of sharing, encouraging people to be thankful and promoting harmony throughout the society.

The typical examples are in Singapore and Hong Kong. The Singaporean case, reflected in the TV ads is, the residents of an apartment buildings have no clues or intentions to interact with the neighbours, therefore, there is a buzz marketing campaigns that a delivery team gives some residents a name- printed coke, and persuade them to give to the neighbours and thanks them. Eventually, happy faces appear on each resident face. The Hong Kong case refers to, the marketer of Hong Kong also implemented the sharing campaign on 2015 by printing pop song lyrics related to love and affections on the cans, as to promote immediate confessions among the couples, and the idea of thankfulness, according to their TV ads. The above advertisement case illustrates the distinctive aspects of the retailing strategies of Coca Cola, which is habits, psychological and value-added tactics in their marketing campaigns, which are the extraordinary factors of the campaign success.

In a global point of view, Coca Cola focused on a breakthrough concepts of retailing and marketing, that is the national unity and hopes. Coca Cola extends the share a coke campaign into transformed format, including pop up kiosks and play station to share happiness among them, aligning the psychological desire of national unity and the peace of world through the campaign.

In 2013, Coca Cola launched a campaign called small world machine, which is the setting up play station kiosk between India and Pakistan, which are conflicting ethnic groups, people are virtually connected and both of peoples can get a free can of coke in exchange of drawing heart, smiley faces or even dance in front of the screens to deliver their friendliness. The marketing campaign transform into the delivering of national messages and mass opinion of war abandonment and cross- border love. This proves that Coca Cola implemented an alternate retailing strategies not hard selling on the hard features of the coke related to its appearances and tastes, but related more to the psychological background of the targeted customer segments, as well as attracting emotions and affections towards some issues to leave a deep impression on the consumers mind. Coca Cola’s marketing strategies can be considered as an interactive, affection- based, consumer-oriented and story- telling.

E- Commerce influences on marketing

The resurgence of social media creates a new climate in the advertising and marketing field, which symbolises that the channel of advertisements is not narrowly confined with TV, newspapers or billboards. With the most typical examples, Facebook and Instagram retailing becomes a global trend, as the coverage of audience is massive, and thanks to the functions of them, the online retailers are blessed by the personalized functions of targeting appropriate customer segments to the retailers.

The introduction of hashtag also brings a new phenomenon on the advertising methods, which is buzz, looks like pyramid scheme to promote the products to more customers or peers. Alongside with creative marketing concepts, with the leverage on social medias, it can provide a gigantic scale of customer participations and feedbacks during a campaign.

The most notable example is the “Ice Bucket Challenge campaign, the pyramid strategy is being used to share the videos of pouring ice water to 3 peoples plus donation, has proven the success of using hashtag as retailing purpose.

Similarly, like Coca Cola, the use of interactive way also thanks to the hashtag functions of spreading messages of coke sharing. The participants can share the coke to other friends by tagging them in the Facebook posts or adding hashtags. The online retailing tactics has been transformed into the co-existed help of consumers and the retailers, where they can use social media to create additional benefits and values, which is not perishable and having special and meaningful impacts on the consumers, just like they perform as a facilitator to promote the goodwill of the brands.

Conclusions / Reflections

The Coca Cola “Share a Coke” marked a revolutionary change of retailing strategy from unilateral to bilateral, the focusing point is not concentrated solely on profit maximisation anymore, but attempts to create and figure out additional values which will bring meaningfulness and accomplishments to the consumers. Marketing is not just about selling hard items to the consumers as to obtain short term profits, but to create an incentive of customer to have retention behaviours on consuming the brands.

Marketing also need to be creative, not only focusing on the distinctive or breakthrough outlooks of the products but also on the implicit level which means can the services suits the needs of the consumers in a surprising way. In a short conclusion, with the sophisticated launching and huge success from the sharing campaign, Coca Cola transformed itself into a brand of not concentrating on solving immediate thirsts and coolness on the taste experience, it also “value-added” on the psychological sharing of happiness, promoting harmony, and even unity all around the world.