Marketing Strategies for Coca-Cola's New Energy Drink

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Marketing Essentials
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Table of Content
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Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Activity 1....................................................................................................................................3
Key roles and responsibilities of the marketing functions.........................................................3
Market research..........................................................................................................................3
Finance.......................................................................................................................................4
Product development..................................................................................................................4
Communication..........................................................................................................................4
Distribution, planning, promotion, and selling..........................................................................5
Responsibilities of the marketing functions in relation with the organizational context...........5
Roles and responsibilities of marketing in marketing environment...........................................6
Marketing information systems..................................................................................................7
Monitoring the marketing environment.....................................................................................7
Marketing research and development........................................................................................7
Dealing with competition...........................................................................................................8
Logistics management................................................................................................................8
Effective management of the supply channels...........................................................................8
Interrelationships between the marketing and other organizational functions...........................9
Critical analysis of key elements of the marketing functions and their relationship with other
organizational; functions..........................................................................................................10
Price..........................................................................................................................................10
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Promotion.................................................................................................................................10
Place.........................................................................................................................................11
Product.....................................................................................................................................11
Conclusion................................................................................................................................11
Activity 2..................................................................................................................................12
Introduction..............................................................................................................................12
Comparative study on application of marketing mix in the selected organizations................13
Introduction to marketing mix.................................................................................................13
Evaluation of the marketing strategies applied by the organizations.......................................20
Marketing strategies.................................................................................................................20
Evaluation of marketing strategies of Coca-Cola in achieving business objectives................25
Evaluation of the marketing strategies of Cadbury..................................................................26
Evaluation of the marketing strategy of UNICEF....................................................................26
Marketing plan for a new product............................................................................................26
Conclusion................................................................................................................................28
Reference List..........................................................................................................................29
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Introduction
This report is written to understand how an efficient marketing process can be carried
out in an organization along with the collaboration of the efficient marketing activities with
the business functions of the organization. For giving a marketing guidance to an
organization, the great multinational corporation called Coca-Cola Company is chosen. Coca-
cola is a multinational corporation which offers the high quality beverages to its customers.
The coca cola drink occupies the form of carbonated soft drinks. The report is written to
recommend the marketing activities for the great industry which will lead to the sudden boom
of the industry. The report lays emphasis on the marketing functions and their applications in
achieving the organizational goals in the wider context. The marketing functions of a
business involve the marketing research, right mixture of the marketing elements, product
development, and finally the product launch. The marketing activities of the Coca-cola
company highly involves the usage of the bottled products with the less percentage of carbon
mixed with the soft drinks. The Coca-Cola Company maintains an effective delivery service
and the customers fell highly satisfied with the canned and the plastic mix bottles offered by
the Coca-Cola Company. Even though the organization has achieved a high name and fame
among the common people, there occurred a great degradation in the popularity of the
carbonated soft drinks due to the heavy competition posed by the Pepsi organization.
Therefore the company has decided to launch a new product to overcome this competition
and this whole report involves the new marketing insights making the whole organization to
participate in it. The organization has decided to launch its first energy drink in Europe which
has more percentage of Coca-Cola taste.
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Activity 1
Key roles and responsibilities of the marketing functions
Marketing functions defined as those functional units of marketing which helps to
achieve the goals of the business (Wilton, 2016). The marketing functions involve the various
responsibilities of the business which yields in the growth of the company. The marketing
functions include the following responsibilities:
a) Market research.
b) Finance.
c) Product development.
d) Communication.
e) Distribution, planning, promotion, and selling
Market research
Market research is a process of finding the customers who are suitable with the
market and identifying the customer needs and preferences. Before the start of any business,
it’s necessary for an organization to pick out the target customers and to understand their
tastes. In the case of the Coca-Cola Company, the organization has decided to launch a new
energetic drink in Europe. It was seen that the drink is composed of more percentage of coca-
cola taste and the company has targeted over the Europe customers. As the company has
decided to launch the new product in Europe, initially it is the responsibility of the
organization to look on to the suitable customers in Europe whose tastier tongues will be
satisfied with the new energetic drink (Weinstein and Pohlman, 2015).
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Finance
The finance marketing function in the organization is responsible in keeping an eye
over the entire financial transactions and the operations happening in the business
environment. A finance manager is responsible to maintain the financial reports, overlook
them, and to make effective financial decisions. The finance manger is also responsible to
look on to the financial resources spent for the company and the amount of resources that can
be saved to meet the future needs. The Coca-Cola Company should plan on the investment
they should make for the preparation and the packaging of the energetic drinks. Proper
investment plan should be made on the production of the entire energetic soft drink which
begins from the buying of the raw materials, product development to the whole delivery of
the products to the European customers (Weerawardena et al. 2015).
Product development
Product development comprises the key responsibility of the marketing function
where the business operations are entirely linked with the developing of the product. At this
stage, it is the responsibility of the management team of the Coca-Cola Company to look for
the employees who could work under the product development phase. In this phase, the
employees of Coca-cola will work under sections like product manufacture, product quality
control, product packaging and so on (Watrobski, Jankowski and Ziemba, 2016). Therefore
the efficient employees should be recruited to work under these departments in order to yield
the final product to the company.
Communication
The sales representatives who work in the Coca-Cola Company are responsible to
communicate effectively with the suppliers and the customers of Coca-cola in order to
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enhance the supply of the energetic drinks. Therefore the management tram of the
organization should employ people who pursue the best communication skills to attractively
present the newly launched product before the common people.
Distribution, planning, promotion, and selling
These are the main responsibilities of the marketing functions of the Coca-Cola
Company which highly involves in the selling and the delivery of the products to the
customers via the supply chain networks. In this phase, the promotion of the new Coca-Cola
energetic drink is also done by popularizing the benefits of having this health drink in the
person’s life through the social media platforms and advertisement. The advertising technique
highly influences the promotional activities where the common people get to know about the
valuable ingredients uses in the preparation of the drink and how they yield strength to the
individuals along with stabilizing the metabolic activities in a person’s body. The
promotional activities not only help in popularizing the product, but also help in enhancing
the overall sales of the organization.
Responsibilities of the marketing functions in relation with the organizational context
One can say that the responsibilities of the marketing functions highly focus on
achieving the goals of the organization and yields in the growth of the company. While
performing the responsibilities of the marketing functions, it is seen that the whole
organization is involved in it and every employee is supposed to do these responsibilities to
attain the common goal. While performing the marketing functional responsibilities, all the
functional departments of the organization starting from the production, manufacture,
management, finance, and administration correlates their activities. Hence one can say that
the marketing functions of Coca-Cola Company are highly related with the organization in
achieving the business objectives (Wagner and Eggert, 2016).
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Roles and responsibilities of marketing in marketing environment
The marketing plays a major role in every business since marketing operations are
highly related with the sales and the profits of the organization. The good and the bad
marketing activities determine whether an organization is building a success path or
degrading its levels of success (Tzokas et al. 2015). The roles and the responsibilities of
marketing in the marketing environment include:
a) Developing marketing strategies and plans.
b) Marketing information systems
c) Monitoring the marketing environment.
d) Marketing research and development.
e) Market segmentation.
f) Dealing with competition.
g) Logistic management.
h) Effective management of the supply channels.
i) Managing integrated marketing communications.
The first and foremost activity of any marketing activity is to develop the marketing
strategies and plans. It is the responsibility of the marketing manager to design the marketing
plans which are suitable to the marketing environment and helps in achieving the goals of the
organization. The marketing plans are highly focused on the proper investment of the
resources, planning of the activities within the allotted budget, identification of the risks
involved, and finally picking out the targeted customers. In the case of the Coca-Cola
Company, the marketing manager should make proper marketing plans in making the
energetic drink to reach the maximum number of customers in Europe (Storey, 2016).
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Marketing information systems
A marketing information system is management information system which helps the
managers in making effective marketing decisions. In marketing information systems, the
marketing information are gathered and properly analyzed and finally handed over to the
managers to take effective marketing decisions.
Monitoring the marketing environment
It is the responsibility of the marketing manager to monitor the marketing
environment and to maintain the marketing business operations happening within the
organization. The marketing manager will carry the monitoring work by checking the
marketing operations carried out by each functional unit under the marketing department
which includes product development, product quality control, and finally the product
manufacture. In the monitoring work of marketing, the marketing manager has to look into
each and every work movement of the employee. The monitoring process involves checking
of the marketing operations, rectifying the faults if any, and finally adopting the improvement
steps (Smith and Wong, 2016).
Marketing research and development
This is the most important role in marketing and in this role, the marketers are
supposed to do a well versed research in order to implement a marketing plan. The marketing
research involves the identification of the target customers, setting up of the marketing
objectives, product development activities and finally monitoring over the supply chain
networks which offers the end to end delivery of the products (Shaw, 2016).
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Dealing with competition
Every organization faces competition with other industries. Competition helps the
marketing managers to come up with the new and innovative marketing ideas in order to beat
the competition put by the competitors. In this context, the Coca-Cola Company faces a huge
competition with the Pepsi beverage industry. In the earlier stages of the business, Coca-Cola
has got huge number of customers from US. But suddenly with the emergence of the Pepsi
beverages, the reputation of Coca-Cola went down and the company struggled to fulfill the
demands of the US people. Therefore, the organization has decided to improve the quality of
the carbonated soft drinks and had decided to launch new energetic health drink in Europe in
order to compete with the competition (Rossi, Lipsey and Henry, 2018).
Logistics management
Logistics management is defined as the part of the supply chain management which
involves the flow o goods from its point of origin to the point of consumption in order to
meet the requirements of the customers. The logistics management functional department of
the company also involves the import and the export activities. In this context, since Coca-
Cola is a multinational beverage corporation, it is subjected to supply its carbonated soft
drink products to its customers prevailing in other countries (Olson et al. 2018). Thus the
logistics management services of coca-cola should maintain and monitor the import and the
export activities done by the organization on daily basis in order to avoid the fraudulent
practices in the international trade.
Effective management of the supply channels
The effective management of the supply process is very essential in every business
and the effective supply chain networks are highly responsible in offering the end to end
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product delivery to the customers. The Coca-cola organization has to maintain its supply
chain networks in delivering the best products to the customers and ensuring the s[speedy
delivery of the soft drinks to the customers.
In every supply chain network, there exist a chain of the suppliers, administrators, and
the delivery persons who delivers the final product to the customers (Oinas-Kukkonen and
Harjumaa, 2018). The complexity of the supply chain process in every business should be
effectively maintained and the every supply unit should be controlled and monitored by the
administrative department of the Coca-Cola Company.
Interrelationships between the marketing and other organizational functions
One can sketch out a neat relationship between the organizational functions and the
marketing process. Every marketing activity involved in the business is highly related with
the organizational functions and the goals of the organization. The roles of the marketing
activity have direct relationship with the sales and the profitability of the business. The
enhancement of sales and the profits in business are highly dependent on the marketing
activities. If the marketing activities are highly good within the organizational environment,
then obviously, a maximum number of products can be reached among the consumers and
could increase the profit levels in the business (Moutinho and Vargas-Sanchez, 2018). The
marketing functions like product development and market segmeation help the marketing
mangers to look out the suitable customers for the market which would help in increasing the
sales of the company.
One of the major organizational functions is to satisfy the customers through offering
the high quality products. Therefore, the high quality products can be marketed among the
customers through sales presentation techniques.
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Critical analysis of key elements of the marketing functions and their relationship with
other organizational; functions
The key elements of any successful marketing involve the plans on price, promotion,
and the development of the product. Every marketing plan is comprised of 4p’s and they are
price, product, place, and promotion.
Price
Price is the most important key element which influences the rate of the selling of the
product. The price of the product is marked by the marketer and he sells them among the
desired customers. The customer satisfaction levels are highly dependent on the prices of the
product. If a customer feels that the price of the product is high with low quality, then the
satisfaction levels of the customers will be highly degraded. In a similar way, if the price of
the product is fixed which have an affordability to be bought by the customers, then the
satisfaction level of the customers will increase. The price of every product launched by the
organization is highly dependent on the cost spent for the raw materials, product
configuration, product development, and finally the product production (Long, 2018).
Promotion
Promotion is the most important key element in marketing where a specific product
can be reached among the customers through popularizing the benefits of the product through
the social media platforms like newspapers and television programs. Apart from this, the
promotional activities are possible only with the help of the sales representatives who could
promote the business of the products and increase its sales. The sales representatives of the
organization indulge in the sales activity by actively presenting the products among the
targeted customers.
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