Coca-Cola's Marketing Challenge with Teens: Strategies and Solutions

Running head: ESSENTIALS OF MARKETING
Essentials of marketing
Name of student:
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Authors Note:
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ESSENTIALS OF MARKETING
1. What was the difficulty/challenge or problem Coca-Cola identified in
marketing to teens?
Coca Cola though is the most sought after and well known brands across the world and even
biggest in terms of advertising spending in world had enough experiences to reach their brand
communication to billions of people throughout the world. But it still faced difficulty in
establishing deeper connectivity with very significant segment i.e. teen consumers and Coca
Cola required a cost effective approach to reach particularly to teen ager segments for their
flagship Coke product. According to Aaker., Leslie and Rogier (2010) as teenagers are most
active over social media like for instance in US during 2009-10 nearly 73% teens were using
social network so Coca Cola assumed to use digital social media to build deeper emotional
connections with this significant consumer segment throughout the world. But the difficulty that
was encountered was though teens used social media but they did not shared media contents over
Facebook with their networks or friends as is done in traditional forms. It was found that
although teens found some digital content interesting but were hesitant to share or post these
over their Facebook page as they though their friends might disagree with their choices. So teens
did not preferred risking reputations if they found that their friends did not similarly like a video
or website that they found interesting though and as such avoided sharing digital contents and in
some cases teens were found suppressing their opinions for some contents until their friends too
validated these. So Coca Cola faced difficultly in connecting with teens in complexity of social
validation of contents. Also Coca Cola identified that teenagers did not looked for contents that
were shared through friends rather preferred posting on more popular friend network instead of
posting on their own social pages which made Coca Cola face challenges of social credibility to
reach to more teens based on their perceived behaviour of sharing and liking a digital content.
2. What happened? What strategies did Coca-Cola use to address the
issue?
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