Coca-Cola UK Marketing Analysis: A Comprehensive Report

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BUSINESS MARKETING ESSENTIALS
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Executive summary
This research is associated with research question of analysis of the role of marketing
for an organization. For the conduction of this report, this Coca-cola UK has been taken
into consideration. The entire study is divided into three categories. The first category is
characterized by identification of marketing essentials and development of relationship
with other functional units. The second is associated with conduction of a comparative
interpretation of the 7Ps of marketing mix of Coca-cola UK with Nestle UK. The third
segment however is associated with development coupled with analysis of marketing
plan for the ‘zero sugar’ product variant of Coca-Cola. For execution of evaluation, the
aspects of sales analysis, market-share analysis, efficiency ratios and cost-profitability
analysis has been taken into consideration.
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Table of Contents
Introduction...................................................................................................................... 4
LO1: Explain the role of marketing and how it interrelates with other functional units of
an organization.................................................................................................................5
LO2: Compare ways in which organisations use elements of the marketing mix (7Ps) to
achieve overall business objectives...............................................................................11
LO3 Develop and evaluate a basic marketing plan........................................................15
Conclusion..................................................................................................................... 20
Reference List................................................................................................................ 21
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Introduction
Developing business for any organization is associated with the degree and the
effectiveness of marketing of the products as well as the services associated by the
organizations. Marketing is defined as the process of sharing information about the
products and services to a targeted audience with the use of multiple tools and
processes. Marketing essentials could be defined as the tools used by an organization
to carry out the marketing process. These tools could base on the approach undertaken
for marketing as well as the multiple technological tools used for sharing of information
in a dramatized manner. The aim associated with this study lies in analysis of the role of
marketing in the development of an organization. The scope however lies in the
identification and development of an effective and efficient marketing plan for marketing
the particular product or service of the chosen organization.
For the conduction of this study, Coca cola UK has been considered. The UK unit is a
sister body of the Coca Cola company headquartered in the US. The organization has
been active for over 133 years and is one of the leading beverage producing and selling
organization in UK as well as global market.
Additionally, for a comparative analysis based on the 7Ps of marketing mix, Nestle will
be taken into consideration. The organization essentially markets itself as a food
processing organization with operational experience of over 153 years. The product
base includes baby food, confectionaries, solidified deserts and other sweet products.
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LO1: Explain the role of marketing and how it interrelates with other
functional units of an organization
Introduction
Marketing enables the identification of the potential market and the sales volume
required to sustain a successful business venture (Kaufmann, 2014). The aim of this
segment includes analysis for the role of marketing and relationship with other verticals
of an organization.
P1 Explain how the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing function relate
to the wider organizational context.
Marketing represents the work in the organisation that aims towards the transactions of
the goods, promotions, advertisings, and sales.
The marketing sector demands regular modifications, planning of strategies, and control
(Jussila et al., 2015). The marketing concept is followed in Coca Cola to meet the
demands of the customer and make important decisions in their long run. There are four
concepts:
The product: Should ensure high quality to ensure customer satisfaction
The sales: Must target at selling maximum amount of goods
The marketing: Must aim at gaining higher profits with positive production rate
Societal marketing: Should identify the trends in customer and serve perfect products
Different factors affecting marketing:
Political: Government laws and reforms should be followed before pricing and sales of
the product
Economic: Helps the organisation to price their products according to the demographic
economic conditions (Kaurav, 2015)
Competitive: Rivalry among companies in the industry plays a major part in the
organization’s functioning
Social: Provides idea about the quality of products that the organisation should
manufacture
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Figure 1: The various factors affecting the marketing
(Source: Radojevic, 2015)
Structure of marketing in Coca Cola:
Vice President: Acts as a connection between the company owners and the marketing
sector and are responsible for developing the strategies and improving marketing
quality.
Marketing Manager: Main responsibility is to successfully carry out the planned
strategies.
Market researchers: Researches and analyses the trends in customers and statistics
of the rival companies (Karnani, 2014)
Public relation employees: Carry out the non-paid techniques in the promotions of the
products
Designers: Responsible for the management and improvement of the brand image
Marketing processes of Coca Cola is related to the proper analysis of the market
factors, the customer demands, and the future trends and developing required plans to
tackle these challenges. Marketing mix is used for implementation of these plans. An
effective marketing mix helps in productive strategic marketing. The marketing mix can
be implemented for long run production with the help of strategic planning.
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B2B marketing role in Coca Cola: The B2B marketing is the trade between two or
more marketing organisations. The sole target is to satisfy the needs of raw materials of
the company. The practiced policies are formalized and lengthy, where the decisions
taken are by a large group of members (Habibi, 2015). The purchased product quantity
is huge and the quality are directed to satisfy specific requirements. However, in case of
failure of product supply, the company faces a tough task.
B2C marketing role in Coca Cola: This is responsible for selling of products to the
customers and satisfying them based on their needs. The focus is on psychological
benefits. The customers buy the goods depending on their need and impulse
(Karjaluoto, 2015). The quantity of the products that are bought is less. The products
are designed according to the trends of the region and in case of failed delivery, the
customer faces less agitation. In addition, the prices are generally fixed.
P2 Explain how the key roles and responsibilities of the marketing relate to the
wider organizational context.
The marketing functions relates to the other sectors of Coca Cola to ensure healthy
relationship with the customers and operate efficient business functions. These
functions are finance, research and development, production, and purchasing
Finance: It monitors marketing department costs and asks for expenditure justification
to prevent meaningless use of resources. It prepares three categories of financial
statements and asks marketers to provide precise information for reliable statements.
Marketing feature seeks flexibility to make it possible to apply loan conditions as a
negotiation (Gitman, 2015). The financial team of the Coca Cola allots the budget for
the different activities of the company like branding, packaging, and advertisements.
The marketing sector needs help from the finance department to successfully execute
any strategy. After this, they ensure that the allotted budgets are properly allocated.
Marketing is also responsible for identifying the trends and demands of the customer
and delivering suitable products. This directly affects the sales and cash flow of the
company.
Purchase: This department deals with the raw materials and their suppliers. The
marketing and purchasing department needs to work in collaboration to ensure
cooperative, strengthened, flexible and long-term relationship with the suppliers
(Srinivasan et al., 2016). The marketing department ensures that the qualities of the
products are maintained to achieve a separate identification in the market. Both these
functions collaboratively fix the pricing of the materials, quantities of the materials
required and the stocks for management.
Research and development: The main focus of this function is to develop new
products. Innovation is a very influential in this industry, which can be understood form
the changing trends in the customer and competitors. Therefore, the marketing
department of the Coca Cola solely identifies the new trends and supports the Research
& Development department with the production of new products with better functions
(Chan, 2014). The research of the R&D is based on the data provided by the marketing
department. After the production of new product, the marketing function helps the R&D
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by implementing the product in real world customer trends and determines the product’s
effectiveness.
Production: This function is highly interlinked with the marketing function of the Coca
Cola. It helps the marketing in operation and management production with minimum
changes in the initial production. The information developed by the professionals in the
marketing function determine the amount of production to be done by the production
managers, so that the company does not face shortage of the raw materials. With the
help of the production, marketing achieves various customizations in the product
ranges. The marketers in the different areas define the customer trends in soft drinks
and beverages (Hill, 2017). This analysis is forwarded to the production to ensure that
they fullfil the requirements on time. They fix the price of their products by establishing a
comparison of the product price of the rival companies. The sole target is provide high
quality products to customer at a suitable price.
M1 Analyze the roles and responsibilities of marketing in the context of the
marketing environment.
The marketing department of any organization executes a dual role for the overall
business operation. The two responsibilities include collection of data for conduction of
long-term analysis for multiple product range and creating a platform for the conduction
of sales in short and long end (Kim et al., 2016). For an organization like Coca-cola, the
mentioned responsibilities would be additionally associated with identification of the
potential areas of sales for its flagship products. For example, for the conduction of
sales of the COCA-COLA ZERO SUGAR, the organization resorted to the selling of the
same in its new age aluminum cans (Cocacola.co.uk, 2019). The reason for the same
would be catering to the young generation while retaining the traditional look for
presentation. However, the major limitation of such responsibilities includes possibility of
data breach, as most of such marketing campaigns are associated with collection of
contact information and preferential information of customers (Martin and Murphy,
2017).
In the marketing environment, roles vary for multiple business segments like the B2C or
the B2B business segment. In the B2C segment, the roles the organization is mostly
concerned with the selling of flagship products based on the market demand of the
organization (Iankova et al., 2018). The positive aspect of this role includes the effective
use of the data collected through multiple surveys and social media marketing of
multiple products. However, this role has no limitation as the organization has been
growing steadily over the years. In the B2B segment, the role of marketing department
includes identification of the multiple organizations with whom it could strike deals like
agency, bottle refill, analytics and others. This would help any organization to reduce
liability and as well as operational cost in the long end.
M2 Analyze the significance of interrelationships between marketing and other
functional units of an organization
Over the years, marketing has essentially become a business function. Functional units
associated with organizations apart from marketing include human resource,
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operations, production, finance and others. Hence, the significance of interrelationship
includes the following:
 A direct relationship exists between marketing and production units. The directly
proportional relationship includes the volume of production based on the report of
the marketing department (Rostami, 2015). The significance of this relationship
lies in the effective meeting of required production volumes during holiday
season in UK. This is because; the marketing department based on the
successfulness of their campaigns would provide the quantum of volume in
demand.
 An inverse relationship exists between the human resource department and the
marketing department. For an organization like Coca cola, the significance of this
relationship lies in the gradual reduction of human interference. This would be
because of the poor requirement of human interference in the event that the
marketing department provides adequate data for production and filling up of the
bottles and cans. In the event that extensive human interference is provided to
the production floor, it is possible that the net production volume decrease in the
long end (Jones, 2019).
Conclusion
The analysis of the role associated with marketing and the inter relationship with other
units lead to the conclusion of the dynamicity of the relationship with the marketing
department. This is because, multiple units showed multiple nature of relationship.
However, the significance of the same includes an overall positive impact on the
operations and the finances of the organization.
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LO2: Compare ways in which organizations use elements of the
marketing mix (7Ps) to achieve overall business objectives
Introduction
Further in the report, the procedures in which various organisations implement
marketing mix techniques to the business plans to achieve business objectives are
discussed. In addition, the evaluations of different methods applied by a company to
achieve the business objectives are provided.
P3 Compare the ways in which different organisations apply the marketing mix to
the marketing planning process to achieve business objectives
Elements Coca Cola Nestle
Products The products of the
company are mainly soft
drinks, juices, tea/coffee,
mineral water, and other
energy drinks
The company manufactures
mainly milk products and
chocolates.
Price The product price depends
on the season. The
summer season is
favourable for the company,
therefore they reduce their
prices in the winter.
Normally, the prices of the
300 ml glass bottles are
reduced.
Price varies in different
types of the products.
Nescafe and magi are the
higher priced products. The
prices are mainly done
according to the quantities.
Place Coca Cola practices two
type of selling, direct and
indirect. Direct refers to
delivery of the products to
the shops by their own
vehicles and indirect refers
to their agreement with
wholesalers to sell products
all over the world.
Nestle follows FMCG
strategy of product
distribution. In addition,
discounts and tactics are
applied to ensure healthy
trading.
Promotion The promotion is done by
purchasing shelves in
departmental stores,
advertisements in sales
Nestle boasts of successful
advertisement campaigns.
Strategies like ATL
marketing and TVCs are
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stores, sponsorships with
other organisations, help of
UTC schemes, and
agreements with the local
shopkeepers.
used. The strong marketing
has lead to a high brand
recall value of the
company.
People Motivates the company’s
employees with the help of
financial ( bonuses,
rewards) and non-financial
incentives (internal
promotions)
The recruitment of
individuals have been high
of the company. Practices
efficient training of the
employees and different
campaigns are done to
enhance their marketing.
Physical Evidence The company have their
own website and profound
logo. The products are sold
over 200 countries.
The company has ensured
proper setting of coffee
corners and with company
logo of Nescafe in the
vending machines. In
addition, there are several
outlets all over the world.
Process The company provides
infrastructures like vizi
storage cooler, refigerators,
display racks, and free
bottles and shells. The
stores of Coca Cola are
located in almost all areas
The company have used
better technology for
production over the time.
There has been efficient
use of the vending
machines.
Table 1: Marketing Mix of Nestle and Coca cola
(Source: Created by the learner)
M3 Evaluate different tactics applied by organisations to demonstrate how
business objectives can be achieved
Market segmentation: This is division of the market according to the volume and
capacity of the buyers. Since, Coca Cola is operating over 200 countries; this technique
has been highly beneficial for the company (Dolnicar, 2014). For success in business,
the company focuses on volume of sales more than the profits. The products are sold at
economical rates. In developed countries, the company sold premium packages like
glass and bottles to originate more profit.
Brand establishment and Customer relationship: Coca cola have always focused on
the branding of their products, which lead to increase in their sales (Huang et al., 2014).
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Coca Cola have invested over $ 250 million for improvement of their brand image. The
advertisements focused on creating an impact upon the people. Investments were also
made to improve the category of the products.
Increasing financial efficiency: The main objective of Coca Cola is to increase the
company’s productivity and receive the maximum returns from their investments. Coca
cola uses techniques like zero-based-work to achieve flexibility in work. The
organisation aims at using the similar process for productivity and makes continuous
savings, and treats it as a regular process (Asongu, 2017).
Increasing process efficiency: To achieve success the company needs to reduce the
process time without degrading the quality of the products. Coca Cola took measurable
steps to shape their business processes and identified their redundant spots. It
connected the regional units directly to the heads of the company. This improved the
environment of the company and the relationship of the employees (Matilainen, 2014).
Focusing core competencies and business models: Coca Cola has ensured a large
variety of products. The company boasts over 500 products under its name and this
helps the company to achieve a large amount of revenue and increases the profit
margin. The primary aim is improvement of the bottling partners by efficient
performance and production. This techniques lead to a successful value for retail.
Conclusion
The above report discusses about the marketing mix techniques performed in Nestle
and Coca Cola to achieve specific business objectives. The different tactics to achieve
these business objectives have also been discussed.
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