Coca-Cola’s Marketing Secret Analysed

On this new era, marketing is faced with different demographic, tradition and level of priority, thus reinvention is needed to match the realities and correlates with the audiences of today.

Marketing of today seems to really emphasize on the People aspect from the 4 P’s, gaining the attention of mass market is no longer the final KPI, getting them into taking action and transect is the ultimate goal, the challenge is Millennials nowadays prefer not to be control by anyone even the government, and surprisingly Coca-Cola successfully have been doing this by converting impressions into expressions.

Even though impressions or getting awareness is still relevant but it is still only the surface of the funnel tunnel in the marketing 4.0, getting people to view is not enough to get them to want to buy. We need to get them to engage in expressions such as, likes, comments, shares, upload, download or order in their own network. We need to nurture to get their trust, and then bring them to take action or converting into sales.

Coca-Cola realizes that in the era of abundance of information, everyone is right in their own channel with their own community. Kotler said “we can’t control the message anymore, we just have to keep innovating”, this means as a company we can’t really control what people perceive about a product anymore, what we can do is to facilitate the community and making sure they get to fall in love with our brand with all our strengths and weaknesses so that they can be our advocate willingly. Coca-Cola’s Chief of Marketing Joe Tripodi said “accept that you don’t own your brands; your consumers do”.

Just like in the Marxist term ‘Every worker is a surplus’, Coca-Cola knows the power of communities, especially locally, by appealing towards the people concerns, politics and humanity locally, brands can circulate faster and create more expressions around the world. Instinctively people love brands that show support towards a community’s cause in life rather than just feeling exploited for company’s profit.

One of Coca-Cola’s marketing success lies on its emphasis on brand over product by making more human connection and remaining innovative with simple message that everyone can relate to, like ‘Enjoy’ or ‘Happiness’ while staying true to it through branded experiences locally.

Any company can actually replicate Coca-Cola’s way of branding but it’s not just a matter of the idea, it also needs a whole new approach on the management level, not many company actually will let their marketing department do real experiment just like Coca-Cola’s. It allocates 70% of their budget to do campaign strategies that work, 20% to innovate from what works, and 10% to do new experiment.

Doing expressions is great but it needs a measurable way to really see whether it drives sales or not, and this is where the reward program comes in picture, by driving customer to input coupon number online Coca-Cola can measure real sales made and also generate database.

Joe Tripodi also stated the power of giving value, and value doesn’t always mean free goodie bag or shirts, it can also be a sneak peek or experience into the everyday life inside the company or experiences like exploring other world having enjoyment together while making an impact, the main idea is to get communities to engage in a conversation and capturing the universal behavioral patterns to get a precision passion point to be use for the next aggregate contents over all medias. Always keep an open minded and open idea marketing campaign.