Do You Think Coca-Cola Is Driven by a Production, Selling or Marketing Philosophy? Why?

1.Do you think Coca-Cola is driven by a production, selling or marketing philosophy? Why?

i. In my opinion, before 1995 under the top management Reberto Goizueta , Donald Keough and Dough Ivester, Coca-cola is driven by selling orientation. Their purpose of marketing is to sell more carbonated coke soda to more people, more often for more money to make more profit. Under legendary CEO Roberto C. Goizueta Coke stock soared 3,500 percent over 16 year, with little real threat from competitors.

Their aim at that time is to sell what they make rather than make what the market wants. It was thought that brand awareness of Coke was so strong that the product could sell itself. The syrups concentrate on distribution through as many bottlers as possible to find right customers for their product. They believed more coke consumed, the more money would flow into the Coca-Cola Company, which produced the concentrate. More money meant greater profits, which would lift the stock price, making all the people who had invested in it or the stakeholder happier and achieve the company objectives.

For example, in 1994 Dough Ivester President of Coca-Cola Company doing a market research by hired a camera crew to survey the market places in Rome. The research aims is to get information whether the coca cola widely sell in the market. He was frustrated because of the negatives result. He urged all distributions channel or bottlers to make sure Coca-Cola sell widely in the market includes the potential stores such as convenience stores, out on the street in barrels packed with ice, vending machines, school hallways, the basements and pantries of peoples houses , restaurants, ball parks, movie theaters, hotels, cruise ships, gas station and all the other places where people spend their time. The mainly marketing objective at that times was selling.

ii. After 1995 total cola market has been shrinking and this downward trend is expected to continue. Then Coca-cola shift to marketing philosophy, not to find the right customers for their product, but the right product for the customer and still maintain to produce cola syrup concentrate and other new drinking and food product.

Its objective is to satisfy customer wants and need than those offered by competitor and distinguish between their product. Coke marketing efforts on new products such as clear colas, iced teas, fruit drinks, sport drink and mid-calorie cola that use less artificial sweetener than the diet colas is one of marketing philosophy at fulfilling the customers need and wants.

They start doing research on customer needs and wants to defined target market especially youth, which is a new involvement for buying their product. Then the new product such as energy drink, sport drink and fruit drink had been lunch. The strategy is to satisfy customers requirement than those offered by the competitor.

Coke also try to achieve organization objective in marketing orientation by maintaining higher market share and optimizing stakeholder share price for higher profit in stock exchange. All this can be done by Coke Company when top management integrated the organization activities through bottlers whose their major distributor