Digital Marketing

The social media marketing strategies of Coca Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Starbucks have been compared and contrasted in this essay, based on the case study information that have been provided. The implementation of the Ladder of engagement theory and other theoretical frameworks like Standardisation versus Globalisation have been done to make a close-ended analysis of the objective as well as outcomes of the social media marketing and branding strategies that have been implemented by the companies.

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2Digital Marketing
Introduction
The social media marketing strategies of Coca Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew and
Starbucks have been compared and contrasted in this essay, based on the case study
information that have been provided. Based on the outcome of this study, the most
appropriate model of international social media strategy have been identified. The
acquaintance of Coca Cola with social media marketing shows the essentiality of this form of
marketing in context brand awareness and product promotions. However, Coca Cola did not
plan to increase sales with the help of their social media marketing strategy. On the contrary,
they were emphasised at developing the brand perception, in a specifically directed way.
However, the social media campaigns of Mountain Dew and Starbucks were more promptly
directed at fostering a higher products sales parity. The implementation of the Ladder of
engagement theory and other Theoretical frameworks like Standardisation versus
Globalisation have been done in this essay to make a close ended analysis of the objective as
well as outcomes of the social media marketing and branding strategies that have been
implemented by the companies.
Coca Cola could have faced a public relation faux when the public fan page of Coca
Cola was getting immense attention and the viewership of content on the page had reached
1.2 million. The organisation was not aware of the activities going on over the fan page. The
real issue in this context is that a minor PR faux could have been transformed in to brand
crippling viral crisis. Anybody could have shared negative information regarding the product
or the brand over the fan page. The overall budget for the installation and effective running of
the happiness machine campaign was higher than industry standard (Tuten and Solomon
2017). The average spending on social media campaigns by big brands are $4000 to $7000
per month. On the contrary, Coca Cola had spent $50000 for a 2 day campaign. In case if the
company had decided to launch the campaign on a sustained basis and dragged the campaign

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with the happiness machine for a longer period, the promotional cost would have
accumulated to $5 million also.
However, the company took adequate risk in developing sustainable relationship with
customers by allowing them to share their experiences without censoring. Different people
have different perception about big brands. Since, Coca Cola had been new to social media
marketing, at that time, their “less about us, more about them” campaign could have affected
them negatively, if negative social message were conveyed regarding the campaign (Ashley
and Tuten 2015).
In contrast to Coca Cola’s social media strategy, the project “Refresh Everything” by
Pepsi had been launched in a different perspective. The company took a great risks in
investing $20 million over the “Refresh Everything” project without computing the impact on
real sales that this campaign could have. The campaign had been launched in alignment to the
Ladder of Engagement model. The ultimate goal of the campaign was to transform the
viewers from observers to be engaged. As per Sajid (2016), the model also suggests that this
is the primary objective of the Ladder of engagement also. At the end of the project their
brand awareness reached the peak, but they could not associated the public with their product.
Coca Cola had created real impression among the public with their Happiness Machine. After
winning gifts from the machine, the people developed a feel good sentiment, which was
missing in case of “Refresh Everything” campaign of Pepsi. In order to put extra effort to
attract the millennial generation, and reduce their promotional cost by dropping their “Super
Bowl” promotional campaign, the company saved about $1.5 million on the face. However,
the company lost 5.2% of their annual sales in US which had a long term impact.
As Felix, Rauschnabel and Hinsch (2017) suggests, the same mistake that was
apprehended for Coca Cola, was actually committed by Pepsi. By means of changing

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perception about the brand in the minds of the people, they left behind the scope of real
product promotions.
The campaign DEWmocracy 2 campaign was a significant hit from the perspective of
the social media presence of the brand. After the campaign, many people started to feel that
they had a say in the direction of the brand. The DEWmocracy 2 can be taken as the best
example of the implementation of the Ladder of Engagement model. The campaign had
followed a step wise framework for fostering the engagement of the users. In this context, the
first step was to get their fans to say why they felt attached to the Mountain Dew People and
why they would be the best choice to help the company develop a new flavour. The second
step in this regard was to select the best three flavours and divide the testers in to “Flavour
Nations “each responsible for the launch and marketing of the respective flavour. In the third
stage, the company develop a new strategy to form small product teams for managing whole
process for the product promotions including naming, packaging, label graphic setting and
setting the advertising plan. Like Pepsi they had not taken other issues and topics to indulge
the audience. Rather, they allowed the social media users to engage with the brand over
designing the new product for the company (Armstrong et al. 2015). There was no big risk
associated with the budgetary and promotional cost of the project. Rather, the company saved
cost by letting the small product teams to manage the whole process of branding, label
graphics and the advertising plan. However, Godey et al (2016), provides that the company
took a big risk by leaving their promotions in to the hands of the amateurs.
The Starbucks campaign was launched with great success. However, the organisation
had undertaken great business risks by undertaking the campaign. They did not consider the
fact that the ideas could be replicated by other leading coffee chains. Since the ideas were in
vogue and people could connect with them, any other organisation could have taken

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advantage of the ideas. There were no significant budget risks associated with the project,
although.
As evident in the case studies of the various companies, provided in the article, social
media have a significant role to play in digital marketing of today’s marketing domain. The
social media campaigns have been launched by Coca Cola, Pepsi or Starbucks with an eye on
the specific community of customers. As Chang, Yu and Lu (2015), observes, the marketers
can create better impact on the target specific audience. Identifying this opportunity, the
identified organisation have indulged in visual content based social media marketing for
promoting their products. However, Kotler and Armstrong (2015), identifies that content
based social media marketing have been implemented by many of the modern day
organisations. As identified by Zhu and Chen (2015), the Facebook based social media
campaigns helped the organisation to gain massive attention from the audience. The
popularity of the fan page gave an exposure to such an extent that never have been achieved
by the organisation across so many geographic or demographic domains. The campaign of
Pepsi had generated over 140 million tweet and tweet replies. This shows that social media
content have more potential that nay other source of promotion. This is why the organisations
of the modern day have channels of social media promotions parallely with the traditional
mode of promotions. However, it requires specific mention that among all the 1.5 billion
individual social media campaigns that were available over the social media regarding brands
and their messages to the public, the visual content gathered better attention of the people. In
this context, Dahl (2018), opines that people in general are visual beings who have the
capacity to perceive the content of visuals 60000 times better than the plain text of the social
media advertisements and campaigns. This is why, it have been observed in the campaigns
that the ones which were related to the specific products that the company had been trying to
promote, had gathered immense popularity and the campaigns have accounted for an increase

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in the rate of sales growth for the company. It has been established specifically in the
campaign of the Mountain Dew where the customers were engaged in deciding the best
market product for the company. The flavour that they would have selected, would have gone
in the market, the visual appeal of the campaign were enhanced by the marketing and
promoting ideas that were being promoted by the fans. The individual ideas received
criticism and counter criticism that fostered the popularity growth of the specific campaign. I
has been established by Hyder (2016) that, the people respond 40% more in context to the
online campaigns that have visual content compared to those that have only text messages
from the end if the company.
In the initial part of the social media campaign, Coca Cola had very less control over
the activities of their Facebook fan page. The spams and obscene content that was being
posted over the Facebook fan page could have created negative brand image. In case of Pepsi,
the company had internal control over the project. However, the projected outcome of the
project was different from what they had intended. This implies that the organisation did not
go in the right direction in context to the project. Mountain Dew had a great success in their
project. However, their project was also not under their absolute control. The company left
the whole marketing process starting from selecting the flavour to naming the advertising
campaign to the communicating with the fans, all was left over to the operators of the fan
page (Hudson et al. 2016). The organisation ensured the engagement of the social media
followers with this promotional campaign. However, the outcome of the campaign was not
under the control of the organisation.
Starbucks could not ensure the total control of the campaign also. This is because of
the fact that the ideas that were generated by the fans related to the operations of the
organisation, could have been imitated by any other coffee roasting and retailing
organisation.

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One of the most emphatic ways in which proper response can be gathered by the
organisation from their social media promotional activities is remaining active as well as
consistent in their comments as well as messages. The Coca Cola campaign failed to
communicate to the audience in the first place, since they were themselves not aware of the
proceedings of their fan page. However, later when Sorg and Jedrejewski were given the
rights to conduct the operations successfully, the rate of customer engagement became much
higher (Wang and Kim 2017).
The same had happened with the case of Starbucks also. They had no control over the
responses of the customers over their web portal. As an outcome, the organisation could have
faced issues like negative brand awareness also. Nevertheless, the control over the
promotional events or the course of occurrences of the event do not only ensures the success
of the organisation and a profitable hike of sales. It has been observed that in the case of
Pepsi, the organisation had absolute control over the campaigns and they were also directing
the campaign in the way they liked. On the contrary, Starbucks had almost no primary control
over the campaign that they were running (Lamberton and Stephen 2016). They had given the
customers the right to give any sort of suggestions that the organisation could have used to
develop their products. Hence, it can be easily implied that any of the customers could have
highlighted some negative aspects of the products and/or services of Starbucks. However, in
spite of that, it is evident in the case study that the Starbucks’ campaign had been the most
successful among the social media campaigns of the organisations highlighted in the case
study. However, Starbucks was attempting to bring in standardisation of the products by
analysing the consumer preferences by means of this campaign. The achi
evement of brand equity have been a part of their globalisation strategy. However, by means
of product differentiation through standardisation, Starbucks have been attempting to bring in
product differentiation.

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There are ample benefits of announcing the financial deals like the discount offers and
free offers as well as the promotional offers over the social media campaigns. The biggest
advantage of this mode of promotion is the highest rate of word of mouth publicity that is
achieved through social media promotions. Traditional media advertisements are able to
impact the viewer who watches the advertisements only. However, in the online medium,
people who like the offers and/or the promotional contents can easily communicate the same
by simply sharing the promotional content over their personal online spaces, whereby the
content would be also visible to people in the friends’ list of the respective viewer. This in
turn increases the brand awareness of the organisation.
Another big advantage of sharing the promotional message and financial offers over
social media campaigns is high improvement in the search engine rankings. As these
promotional content are able to gather high public attention, the viewers also share the same
content over social media. This allows the content and the source of the message to be
communicated over a large online space. As an outcome of this, the search engine rankings
are highly impacted. Again, Dwivedi, Kapoor and Chen (2015) refers that the high quality
content like the blogs, info-graphics, business information as well as case studies are greatly
and speculatively observed by the audience. As an account of that the brand loyalty can also
be comprehensively understood by the marketers of the concerned company.
Conclusion
There are several beneficial strategies that are being used by the marketers of the
transnational companies as a part of their global marketing communications strategy. The
first strategy that is readily used by the marketers is to use strategy over the tools. Most of the
reputed marketers feel that tools of social media marketing are still in their initial
development phases. Using the technologically disruptive tools of social media are beneficial

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for attracting the younger generation. However, it is always essential to judge the value of the
campaign and the impact that it can cause for the sales and promotions of the organisation. In
case of the social media campaign of Pepsi, the organisation was only concerned for
enhancing their brand awareness. Their aim was set at globalisation of the brand name,
ignoring the product standardisation that had not yet been achieved. They perceived that by
means of this, the company could be able to achieve a revolutionary changes in the sales
pattern. However, in the end, it had been observed that the product sales did not enhance at
all, after the campaign, in spite of enhancement of the brand loyalty. However, in contrast it
can be cited that in case of the social media campaign of Mountain Dew, the organisation had
developed a proper strategy, the primary aim of which was to engage the customers with the
product. In the end it was perceived that the product popularity was immensely fostered. The
marketers also need to highly forward looking. In case if the companies are simply associated
with the creation of brand value and brand perception, then it is recommendable that they
should not be expecting upliftment of the real sales figures as an impact of the
implementation of the campaign. This was evident in the social media campaign of Coca
Cola, who were simply obsessed with the enhancement of the brand perception. On the
contrary, it can also be perceived that the social media campaign is mostly launched with an
eye on the generation of the product sales and promotions of the brand sales.

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