Coca Cola Marketing Mix

With its high reputation and strong brand image, Coca-Cola Company changed its original name Coke with New Coke in 1985, and, the company also aims to give their customers better taste (Datta, 1996). Generally speaking, although the company focus on whole population in the world, young generation is the target marketed of the company and they also want to show their products with full of youth and energy to their customers. Pendergrast(1993) states that Coca-Cola are cool and real, and , differentiate Coke from its competitors while Plummer (1995) argues "pepsi being young, exciting and hip and Dr pepper being nonconforming, unique and fun". (cited in Jennifer, 1997). Coca-Cola Company had to carefully consider releasing a diet product line due to fears of weakening the brand. Part of the decision process relied on the invention of aspartame, which is regarded as a superior sweetener to saccharine with less side effects (Patrick and Thomas, 1992). Coca-Cola has been using its marketing mix to prove their success business.

Market segments help the company to improve their products and services, knowing what their customers need and innovate new sectors. They markets the products selling into different or more than one market (e.g. Diet coke) (Patrick and Thomas, 1992). To know what their customers need, Coca-Cola uses the consumer segmentation criteria and market into different groups: behavioural, psychographic and profile.

Coca-Cola creates value to its customers and with good performance to convince people to buy their products. The company heavily invested lots of money to advertise the products from one country to another. According to its official website (2009), Coca-Cola Company says that it is proud to be the longest continuous corporate partner of the Olympic Games. It is obviously that the company has a long partnership with the Olympic Games since 1928 (The Coca-Cola Company, 2009). The reputation is getting stronger and stronger now. There are