Coca-Cola knows their marketing

Last week Coca-Cola gave a presentation at the event called:  ‘Social Shake-up’. Their presentation was about the marketing of Coca-Cola and how they do it. You might think this is more for marketing students than BIM students, but Coca-Cola puts a lot of effort in reaching people by social media, online ads and a lot of different ways. According to Forbes, Coca-Cola’s brand value was 50.2 billion dollars in October 2012, which made it the third most valuable brand in the world (Forbes.com, 2012) (socialmediatoday, 2013).

Coca-Cola’s presentation was about their marketing strategy and the Coca-Cola told that they follow one important rule: A brand is nothing without a meaning. This looks simple, but many brand do not execute this very well. Coca-Cola always made sure that the most important reason why people buy their products is because they like it. The product needs to have a meaning to be interesting for the customer to buy it (socialmediatoday, 2013).

The last decade changed a lot of thing with the introduction of social media and the rise of the internet. Coca-Cola needed to evolve their marketing strategy just like any other company to adjust to the new ways of interacting with the customers. Nowadays Coca-Cola wants every customer to become its fan on Facebook, follower on Twitter and that they leave positive reviews online about their products and marketing campaigns. This new approach shifted Coca-Cola’s meaning of the brand to happiness.  I think everybody has seen a commercial about this new meaning of the brand so this might not be new for you. But what Coca-Cola wants to do with this meaning might be surprising. They do not want to finish their story about happiness, they just want to make a stand and let you finish the story.  In this way they hope to get everybody involved and interacting with the brand and this is working. They are planning to do some great things on Twitter with the upcoming world cup. Instead of using the hashtag #WorldCup, they put an s after World so  it becomes #WorldsCup. In this way they want this tournament to be a happy place for the world to relax and enjoy life. This is just one of the many examples where Coca-Cola incorporates their happiness campaign into the digital world (socialmediatoday, 2013).

I also think it is amazing how a brand can become so big with just a simple meaning and almost saying nothing in their ads and commercials. Everybody just seems to love what Coca-Cola is doing and how they connect with the people. What do you think about their digital marketing strategy?

References:

Forbes.com (2012). The World’s most powerfull brands. October 2012 [Online] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/ [Accessed: 18 September 2013]

Socialmediatoday.com (2013) #SocialShakeUp: Coca-Cola Knows the Secret of Marketing. 17 September 2013 [Online] Available at: http://socialmediatoday.com/christiannag/1750011/socialshakeup-coca-cola-knows-secret-marketing [Accessed: 18 September 2013]

Advertisement