Marketing & Communications in a Digital World - Elements of Marketing Mix and Research Requirements

This report discusses the elements of marketing mix and research requirements in the digital world of marketing and communications. It analyzes Coca Cola's marketing strategies and research plan, including primary and secondary research methods. The report also provides recommendations for the company to focus on health concerns and use natural ingredients.

Marketing & Communications
in a Digital World

Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................................2
Elements of marketing mix...........................................................................................................3
Research requirements..................................................................................................................4
Types of primary research methods.....................................................................................................5
Types of secondary sources...................................................................................................................5
Research Plan.................................................................................................................................5
Recommendations..................................................................................................................................7

Introduction
Marketing and communication in digital world are referred to as promoting the products or
services with the help of digital media tools. It is become easy to communicate with the people
or target customers in digital world using social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
and many more. Marketing and communications sector is impacted by the digital
revolution(Lahtinen, Dietrich and Rundle-Thiele, 2020). The organisations are planning their
marketing strategies by adopting new technological advancement in digital era. Here the
marketing mix helps the companies to better understand their customers needs. It is basically a
set of practices which helps in planning, development and execution of effective marketing
strategies. In context to the Coca-Cola, it is carbonated soft drink manufacturer. It was first
invented by John Stith Pemberton in Georgia, US in the late 19th century. Later on, the Coca-
Cola rights sold to Asa Griggs Candler. The first bottle of Coca-Cola introduced in 1886. This
report will examine the elements of marketing mix and research requirements which includes the
primary and secondary marketing research methods. Later on, the report will analyse the detailed
research plan by identifying the strengths and weaknesses with the help of Gantt Chart.
Elements of marketing mix
The Coca Cola company is one of the leading brands in soft drink and beverages. It is known for
the strong brand image and popularity. The company uses integrated marketing communication
mix in order to create positive image(Kim and Kim, 2018). There are two ways of marketing mix
used by the company during first launch, first one is to create positive image of brand and second
one is to deliver the message out about beverages. The target market of the company is both
families and individuals. The elements of marketing mix include seven Ps of marketing
communications as Product, Place, Price, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence. It is
explained further in detail as below:
 Product: The company has large number of product portfolio as 400+ sparkling and it
offers about 3900 beverages choices. There are nearly 21 billion dollar brands in the
portfolio. It includes Coca Cola, Fanta, Coca Cola life, Minute maid, Simply orange,
Sprite, Diet Coke, Fresca, Coca Cola Zero and many more known brands.

 Place: The company uses extensive kind of beverage distribution system in which the
Coca Cola products are being sold in over 200+ countries. The company has six
operating regions across Pacific, North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America and
Eurasia. The company sells nearly 2 billion servings every day. The company work
closely with restaurents, stores and movie theatres to sell Coca Cola product to its
customers.
 Price: The Pepsi is the main competitor of the company in beverage segment. The
company sets its pricing strategy by considering the brand loyalty. Large buyers of Coca
Cola products charged with low price as compare to buyer of single product. This pricing
strategy of company was good approach.
 Promotion: As the competition in the market is heavily increased in soda industry. The
company needs to pay high on marketing the product in order to drive sales. The
company is adopted various medium of marketing like print media, direct
marketing(Stead and Hastings, 2018). The company needs to focus on internet marketing.
 People: The Coca Cola company is one of the large employers. In the year of 2019, the
number of Coca Cola employees increased to 86,200. The company focuses on human
resources management strategically which enables job satisfaction and employee
empowerment. The company also introduced reward & recognition system to work
employee efficiently.
 Process: The company has large distribution network which is positive aspect of the
company. The final product of the company produced by the bottling partners worldwide.
The final product operation includes company owned bottling and distributions.
 Physical evidence: The company’s physical operations are wide spread across globally.
It includes availability of manufacturing plants, headquarters and region offices globally.
The company’s logo is present on advertisements and packaging material.
Research requirements
Market research is one of the significant elements in case of product development. It helps to
identify the target market to introduce the product. In the year of 1985, the company replaced its
original soft drink to Coke. For that company conducted more than 200K taste tests and nearly
four million dollars in new product development. Unfortunately, people did not accept the

change so that the company removed new Coke. Thus, it is necessary to do market research
before launching new product in the market. The company needs to do effective market research
by first identifying the opportunity to existing category or new category then needs to explore the
solution(Nunan, 2020). After that suitability can be measured using primary quantitative research
methods and then testing of market done. At last, the company requires to track the market
performance.
Types of primary research methods
The primary research defined as the type of research in which researcher directly participate in
data collection process. There are some types of primary research as following:
 Interview: It is a type of qualitative data collection. The company requires to involve in
gathering actual information by face to face interaction. It can help the company to better
understand the customers tastes and likes for the soft drinks.
 Surveys: The company requires to conduct surveys to know the customer needs wants.
For that the Coca Cola can conduct the surveys via online and offline as well. The online
medium is more effective to target the specific audience.
 Focus groups: Focus groups refers to collecting the data from small group. The
company can take the advantage of this method to get insights of niche market.
Types of secondary sources
Secondary research is a research method which includes research on existing data. Secondary
research is more effective than primary research as it uses existing summarized data.
 Internet: It is one of the easiest ways of collecting the secondary data. In case of Coca
Cola, competitors information and performance data collected with the internet.
 Public libraries: There are copies of various research conducted before. It is beneficial
for the company where information about government statics data and newsletters
extracted.
 Government agencies: The data for secondary research can be also be collected from
information published in government reports.

Research Plan
To make a market research plan it is required deep analysis information that is collected earlier
with the help of primary and secondary research methods(Konecka, 2018). As it is known that
Coca Cola is one of the successful brands in order to segment the market. There is research plan
is divided in five stages as following:
 To identify the opportunity: The first process in research plan is to identifying the
available opportunity. As we are relaunching the company’s product, first step to analyse
the product category such as existing product category or new product category. If the
company wants to launch new product for we will find out available competition and
market sentiments for that particular product.
 Exploring the solution: In the second stage of research plan, the data collected from
primary and secondary research methods such as surveys, public libraries, interviews and
focus groups are explored to find out the better marketing plan. The information that we
collected through primary research method used to take the specific decision such as
taste, flavour, change in logo, packaging etc.
 Measuring effectiveness: In this section we will measure the effectiveness of solutions
that are being explored in the second stage to check whether it will work or not. And then
the most effective solution is gone through for testing in the market. Poorly explored
solutions will not provide relevant results.
 Testing the market: This step involves testing the solution in the market to check the
results or effectiveness. For that purpose, a specific market is targeted, here we will target
the people of age group between 18 to 35 years for the better results.
 Tracking the market performance: After all this process or when the product
relaunched in the market, the company requires to track the performance such as whether
people liking the taste through feedback, product packaging, brand awareness and most
important sales growth.
For example: Testing of vanilla flavoured Coca Cola for UK.
 Testing the taste to analyse the right flavor formulation for UK customers.
 Taking surveys to find out packaging design.

 Test market to determine the potential growth for favorable products sales.

Recommendations
After this analysis I found that the company requires to focus on challenges faced due health
concerns. The company needs to use natural ingredients irrespective of harmful chemical without
changing the taste.