Critical Analysis: Social Media Strategies of Soft Drink Brands C11DK

This case study examines the social media marketing strategies of four major soft drink companies: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Starbucks. It analyzes campaigns like Coca-Cola's "Happiness Machine," Pepsi's "Refresh Everything," Mountain Dew's "DEWmocracy," and Starbucks' customer-driven promotions. The essay compares the effectiveness of these strategies in attracting customers and staying ahead of competitors, focusing on the use of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The analysis highlights Coca-Cola's focus on customer happiness and sports sponsorships, Pepsi's collaboration with other brands, Mountain Dew's customer engagement in product development, and Starbucks' integration of customer feedback into marketing. The study aims to determine which brand has implemented the most successful international social media marketing strategies.

Running Head: SOFT DRINKS IN THE GLOBAL SOCIAL MEDIA SPACE
Soft Drinks in the Global Social Media Space
Name Of The Student
Name Of The University
Author Note

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Introduction:
Social media has become an almost essential part of the people’s lives in the modern
age. Without the social media, it would not be possible for individuals to get the information
which is most important for them or connect with their near and dear ones on Facebook.
Many internationally well-known organizations are also using social media as part of their
marketing strategies to attract more customers and to make sure that they stay ahead of their
competitors in the marketplace. This helps the companies to make sure that both the
customers get ro know about the type of products and services they sells as well as to try their
products and prefer their products in comparison to their competitors. Many soft drinks
companies such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Starbucks have also been
implementing these strategies to attract more customers in the marketplace. They do so by
forming various marketing strategies through the social media so that they can gain followers
would would be loyal to the company as well as its products.
Thesis Statement:
The purpose of this essay is to find out which of the four soft drinks companies among Coca
Cola, Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Starbucks apply the most appropriate international social
media marketing strategies to gain customers and stay ahead of the competitors in the
marketplace. It will also make sure to discuss about the type of campaigns that have been
followed by each of the companies.
Discussion:
According to Zheng (2016), social media is one of the most important phenomena in
the modern age. It is through the use of social media that various companies post their
advertisements and other information regarding the sales of their products and services. In the
recent times, soft drinks companies use their social media sites to advertise about their

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products so that people in their own countries as well as in the world get to know about the
products and can try to see if they like the products or not. In fact Soft drink companies like
Coca Cola have been extensively using the social media services to promote for their
products and services in various countries. Various other soft drinks companies like
Mountain Dew, PepsiCo and Starbucks also follow this strategy to establish their
advertisements in various countries of the countries. These companies mainly use marketing
channels like Facebook (800 million global users) and Twitter (200 million global users) to
promote their soft drinks and beverages in the countries of the world. Apart from these two
marketing channels, they also seem to use LinkedIn which is mainly a B2B sector social
network marketing channel with a worldwide follower of around 120 million users.
It has been found in a research that among all three social media channels, Facebook
is the one that is mostly used as a marketing channel by various companies with a total
revenue of $3.7 million at the end of 2011.
The Coca Cola Company on Facebook
Coca Cola Company is said to be one of the largest soft drink and Beverages
Company in the world. It is said that in 2011, the company has sold and served around 1.7
billion non-alcoholic soft drinks and beverages per day. According to Goodman (2017), Coca
Cola’s presence on Facebook was started by an accident when two friends in 2008 had started
the idea of creating a Coke brand page on Facebook. Among the other pagers created by
other fans, the ones created by Dusty Sorg and Michael Jederzejewski was the most viewed
with a followership of 1.2 within three months of posting the brand page on Facebook. In the
recent times, Coca Cola has been creating a lot of marketing strategies by promoting their
brand on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites so that the customer can get to know
about the products and services and try them themselves to understand whether they like the
products or not. Coke had designed a virtual marketing campaign called “The Happiness

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Machine” aimed at the younger generation. This campaign is used to connect with the young
generation who would feel happy when drinking a bottle of Coke. According to Zheng
(2018), this campaign proved to be popular not only on Facebook but also on other social
media such as My Space, Twitter, Instagram, Orkut and other popular social media channels
as the campaign really connected with the younger generation of the times. Using this
campaign for promoting their soft drinks, it is said that Coca Cola has managed to sell large
amounts of their soft drinks and beverages in around 205 countries within a year. This
campaign named “Expedition 206” gained a large number of following on Facebook, Twitter
and other popular social media sites where the campaign gained a large number of followers
who liked the campaign. According to Zheng (2016), one of the important events that the
campaign took part in included FIFA World Cup Football 2010. The campaign gained a huge
popularity owing to the fact that Coca Cola toured around 206 countries in the world in just a
year which increased the sales of their soft drinks. In the recent times, Coca Cola is very
active in social media channels and their media campaigns can be widely found across
various social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and other
popular social media channels where they regularly promote their soft drinks campaign and
other beverages.
The Pepsi Refresh Campaign
Pepsi is a soft drink owned by the company PepsiCo has made their social media
presence largely as part of the company’s advertising campaign. According to Fulgoni
(2017), Pepsi started their social media campaigns by launch the “Refresh Everything”
campaign which enabled the company to start a new method of promoting their soft drinks
which were targeted at a more modern generation. The campaign proved to be popular in
2008 despite that the fact that Americans had economic problems that same year. According
to Goodman (2016), the company did not participate with their “Refresh” campaign in the

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2010 FIFA World Cup, instead the Managing Director of the company mentioned the fact
that instead of participating in World Cup Football in 2010, Pepsi wanted to launch a brand
new “Refresh” campaign. The Pepsi Refresh Project (PRP) was an initiative by Pepsi to sell
their soft drinks by various social media platforms. According to Zheng (2016), it has
resulted in gaining large number of followers in all social media platforms. Moreover, the
younger generation of consumers had always liked the refresh campaign of Pepsi which has
led to the increase in sales of the soft drink in various countries of the worlds. The brand has
cooperated with various other brands such as “Do Something”, “Global Giving” and
“GOOD” and together with these companies, PepsiCo has managed to become of the leading
brands in the world.
Democracy Campaign Of Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew has started their social media presence with the launch of their
campaign called “DEWmocracy”. This campaign made its debut by asking their fans and
social media followers to participate in a contest of deciding the next product of Mountain
Dew. According to Bragg (2017), this was said to be one of the most aggressive social media
campaigns of all time by Mountain Dew. By asking the fans to decide about the next product
that was going to be launched by Mountain Dew. According to Fulgoni (2016), the entries
that were selected were provided videos to decide about the type of flavours that would be
used to make their next products which was to be decided by the fans themselves. In the
second phase of the campaign, the company chose the top three flavours that were decided by
the fans and finally three new flavours named “Distortion”, “Typhoon” and “White Out”
were introduced which proved to be hugely popular among the followers of Mountain Dew.
Finally the company announced the winners of the contest via various social media platforms
which turned out to be hugely popular among the social media followers of the campaign.

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The campaign was widely considered to be hugely successful on various social media
platforms due to the participation of large number of followers on various social media sites.
Starbucks Campaign
In a manner similar to by which Mountain Dew had started their promotion of their
soft drinks through the use of social media, Starbucks, the coffee company also got inspired
by the method and decided to use the social media for their promotion of their soft drinks.
Starbucks started their soft drinks promotions by asking their followers to not only decide the
product’s and ingredient’s names but also wanted them to guess the name of the type of
promotions they wanted to get their coffee from. With this idea in mind, the company
launched its first social media campaign starbucks.com where it featured the tagline called
“Share, Vote, Discuss, See” and provided an online form for its followers to fill by which
they could officially be a part of the campaign. According to Zheng (2015), various ideas
were submitted by the followers during this time which ranged from getting free Wi-Fi to
“buy one get one free” and many other marketing strategies. Eventually Starbucks decided to
incorporate all these factors in starting their social media campaign to attract customers to try
their coffee by incorporating various strategies such as “ free pastry day” which brought
around 20,000 customers to the Starbucks stores back in 2010. During this period, the
number of tweets on Twitter and other social media platforms were buzzing with the
marketing strategies of Starbucks which resulted in the campaign being declared successful
by the brand. This allowed the company to participate along with other soft drinks companies
in the competition to find out which one of them is the best while utilizing their marketing
strategies to attract customers all over the world and to stay on top of each other in the
marketing business.

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Comparison
As mentioned in the marketing strategies of the four soft drinks and beverages
company in the list given above, the essay will make a comparative study of which brand is
the best while utilizing social media strategies to stay ahead of others in their marketing
strategies to earn customers for their products. According to Roberto (2017), in case of the
comparison between Pepsi’s “Refresh Everything” campaign as well as Coca Cola’s “The
Happiness Machine” campaign, it was found that both the brands has extensively been using
their social medias to ,market their products but while Coca Cola focuses on getting the
customers happiness as they consume the soft drinks, Pepsi aims to refresh the entire
marketing strategies by gaining more customers worldwide who would be interested in
consuming their products than Coke. Coca Cola aims to attract customers by participating
and investing in various sports tournaments like FIFA World Cup Football and visit as many
countries as possible with their campaigns to attract the customer base, Pepsi on the other
hand., hopes to cooperate with various other well-known brands of the world to build a strong
customer base so that they can sell their products in any part of the world without facing any
real difficulties from other brands. Coca Cola, on the other hand wants to create awareness
about their products by visiting countries and providing sponsorships to sport tournaments
around the world.
Similarly, when comparisons are being made between Mountain Dew’s and
Starbuck’s marketing strategies, it is found that although both the companies have tried
almost same kind of marketing strategies for gaining customers around the world, they are a
bit different from each other in their approaches to the marketing strategies, it is found that
while Mountain Dew has been promoting their product with the campaign theme of
“DEWmocracy”, where it asks its followers to guess about the next products from the
company, Starbucks’s approach to gaining customers is different in a lot of ways. According

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to Bragg, Roberto, Harris, Brownell and Elbel (2018), Starbucks not only asks its followers to
guess the product names according to their own choice but they also provide free incentive
like “free pastry day” which would attract a large number of customers to the Starbucks
stores for their products. This proves that due to offering free products and incentives,
Starbucks are a lot more advanced than Mountain Dew in gaining a large number of
customers for their products and services. Similarly, Coca Cola also gains a large number of
customers and so does Pepsi. Mountain Dew although a little lesser in customer numbers
than the above three, still it must be said that they are a lot better in their marketing
campaigns in using social media and gaining customers all around the world.
Therefore, according to the information mentioned in the above paragraphs, it is to be
stated that Starbucks is the brand that to uses their social media marketing campaigns most in
order to attract customers all over the world for their products and services. Coca Cola comes
into the second place with their campaign of “The Happiness Machine” by visiting various
countries so that they could gain more customers all around the world and so that the younger
generation could stay interested in their products and consume them more. Pepsi comes at a
third place in their efforts to attract a huge number of customers with their refresh campaigns
and by cooperating with various other international soft drinks brands so that they could gain
a large number of customer base in the countries of the world. Finally, Mountain Dew comes
at the fourth place in their social media marketing strategies to gain customers for their soft
drinks products and services. Although all four of these are major international brands in the
world, yet their sales and profits differ from each other based on the marketing strategies that
are being followed by each of these countries. The brands which has the largest number of
customers as a result of its social marketing strategies will be the leader among the soft drinks
brands. The more these companies follows the policies of marketing through the social
media in their efforts to attract more customers, the better they will be able to attract more

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customers to survive in the marketplace. Each of these companies must be focused in their
marketing strategies to gain as many of customers as each one of them can. Only then the
companies can enter into a healthy competition with each other so that they will be able to
survive in the marketplace and earn a large number of profits in the markets along with
gaining an increasing a large number of customers who will buy the soft drinks products from
these companies that would contribute to their success in the marketplace.
According to Goodman (2017), each of these brands needs to follow different kinds of
marketing strategies to make sure that they are not copying each other as this might lead to
problems among the various companies. If they follow different marketing strategies from
one another, they will be able to learn various other ways to attract customers through social
media rather than the already known ones. These would be useful to the companies as they
can engage in healthy competition with each other which could be crucial to the success of
each of these companies. The more customers they could gain in the marketplace, the more
profits they will be able to earn from one another. Even the customers will be more interested
in trying the products of those soft drinks companies that has more profits in the marketplace
and is ahead of competitors in the same field. Therefore, the companies must make sure that
they follow the appropriate marketing strategies to attract the customers as much as they can
which will be profitable for them.
Conclusion:
Thus, the above research identifies that Starbucks applies the most appropriate
international social media marketing strategies to make sure that they gain the most number
of customers for their coffees through providing the customers with free incentive products
and engaging the customers in various interesting marketing strategies. Coca Cola and the
rest of the beverages mentioned about in this essay occupies the remaining spaces. However,

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each of these companies has the potential to beat Starbucks in the future owing to the fact that
they each huge numbers of social media followers and large numbers of customers in
international markets. If these companies would put more focus on their marketing strategies,
they can gain even more number of customers than Starbucks which would bring them to the
top position in the marketplace for their customers. Thus, they can easily become the new
market leaders within a short period of time and can beat Starbucks easily.
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