Coca-Cola and its legacy
Just about who doesn’t know about Coca-Cola and their products? Nobody, especially in the more developed countries. Brands like Sprite, Diet Coke, Vitamin Water, and of course the Coca-Cola Classic, are owned by the Coca-Cola Company. With more over a hundred years of experience on the market, this giant is one hell of a piece of American market history. I would not over exaggerate if I said it’s probably one of the most successful marketing companies in the world. I mean their products are everywhere, and I mean literally everywhere. The famous red logo could have been seen all over South Africa in 2010, during World Cup, and early post World War Two years in America remind us that the marketers of this giant went as far as hiring famous artists to paint portraits with their logo on it. It only goes to show how this company “prepares” its product for sale before it’s actually sold.The most important lesson, however, to be learned from their history lies in 1980s when to battle their dropping sales, due to the big spikes for Pepsi, Coca-Cola producers tried changing their product. What resulted was a total disaster. The new recipe, which brought aboard a new flavor, was a total failure, only decreasing the sales even more. People all over United States complained about how bad the Coke tasted, and how they actually missed the old flavor. As one of the management officers tells us in the video, he had a woman call him in his office, crying on the phone, saying they took her Coca-Cola away. This finally opened the company’s eyes, and they decided to go back to the good old recipe, invented in the turn of nineteenth century, even though was actually no cocaine added again. That’s how the Coca-Cola Classic came to life, and to this day it still stays Coke’s best brand, that distinguishes it from other kinds of sodas.
What we can actually learn for this example of a successful, world-wide know giant is how they learned from their mistakes. Today, Coca-Cola spends millions of dollars on marketing research just so another failure like the one in the 80s never takes place. We can obviously see that their management and leadership, and overall design from success, is going forward with what they’re doing and is constantly trying to perfect itself. The right decision making, like the one to stay open in Africa during times of social unrest, only benefit it in the long run with profits.
Blazej, I completely agree with your argument, there is defiantly success in following the same model of marketing that Coca Cola uses. It is important that they continue in the same path that they are going in now. One thing I must say though is that I can see why the company decided to change the formula. One thing about entrepreneurship is that you must be willing to take risks and in turn learn from them. Coca Cola only changed their formula because of feedback that it received from its consumers. The title of this article is very clever and attracts the attention of readers. One problem though is the fact that it is kind of misleading. Although you did talk about Coca Cola’s use of Santa Clause as a marketing icon, you only did it briefly. One thing you might want to be weary of in the future is how you title your article, and there were some grammatical errors in the blog, but very few. The use of the youtube video in your article was a nice touch because it provided viewers with a visual knowledge of what you were talking about.
ReplyDelete