Coca Cola's Social Media Marketing Strategy To Become A Global Brand (2024)

About Coca-Cola

The Coca-Cola company is an american multinational beverage corporation and manufacturer, retailer and marketeer of non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups, head-quartered in Atlanta, Georgia. co*ke being their top selling and flagship product, the coca cola company is a home to 20 billion dollar brands , including four of the top five soft drinks: coca cola, sprite, fanta, diet co*ke. Other top brands include Minute Maid, Powerade and vitamin water. Other than this the company owns, licenses and markets more than 500 beverage brands. Coca cola company with the worlds largest beverage distribution system , reaches consumers in more than 200 countries.(In 2010 coca cola had become the first brand to top£1 billion in actual UK grocery sales).

Mission And Objective

MISSION

• To refresh the world
• To inspire moments of happiness and optimism through their brands and actions
• To create value and make a difference

OBJECTIVES

The coca cola company wants to be globally known as a company that conducts its business responsibly and ethically and to accelerate sustainable growth to operate in tomorrow’s world.

How Coca-Cola Used Social Media

Coca-Cola has done well digitally also, their social media marketing campaigns and ad campaigns have played great role for e.g their share a co*ke campaign was a great hit , Coca-Cola also had a couple of Facebook apps like ‘when will happiness strike’, and another called ‘aah giver’.

FACEBOOK

Coca-Cola is an internationally renowned brand and its Facebook page has attracted 93 million fans which is not a surprise considering how big and popular the brand is. but if you analyze its Facebook page you’ll see that there are not many regular day-to-day updates as compared to other brands such as red bull that push out updates daily. Coca-Cola goes more than a week without posting anything. Coca-Cola doesn’t have its own stores so its social media marketing strategy isn’t focused on driving people to its shops or to an e-commerce platform, instead its all about maintaining brand image and raising awareness of its ad campaigns compared to other brands the level of engagement is very low, it generally attracts a few thousand likes and around couple of 100 comments. Coca-Cola also has fan pages for its other products like Coca-Cola Zero, diet co*ke. Diet co*ke has around 2.5 million fans and Coca-Cola Zero has around 6.8 million fans despite the fact that it is updated very rarely.

TWITTER

Coca Cola’s main twitter feed has 3.11 million followers and has tweeted 143 thousand times which makes it a very active brand amongst others. It also has dedicated pages for various products and sub brands including diet co*ke, co*ke zero, etc. The social team at the company rarely post any straightforward marketing messages and instead primarily use twitter to respond to @mentions. It responds to a lot of complaints, requests, compliment, etc. But not all mentions are answered many of the mentions go unanswered but this is a nice strategy rather than pushing out marketing messages. Compared to their main Coca-Cola page their diet co*ke page adopts a different approach and is mainly used for tweeting marketing messages,asking questions, etc. Coca Cola’s twitter handle is the most happening and interesting of all specially if you compare it with its Facebook page which rarely pushes out posts but still it has got around 93 million fans. Twitter has more of customer engagement.

‘SHARE A co*kE’ CAMPAIGN

Coca Cola’s ‘share a co*ke’ campaign was a super hit and made a huge impression on the social media. Share a co*ke was an innovative campaign where the company swapped the iconic logo with names. It was a hit campaign that lead to increase in their sales and also became a big hit on social networks.

• Over a thousand names on the bottle
• 998 million impressions on twitter
• More then 230,000 tweets from more than 110,000 fans using the#share a co*ke hashtag
• More than 150 million personalized bottles were sold
• 17,000 virtual name bottles shared online across Europe

Geographical Reach

Coca cola as we know is one of the largest beverage company and exports their products in more than 200 countries and this account for 55% of its sales (i.e outside US). Coca cola’s important international markets are Asia, Latin America, Europe that accounts for 33% of revenue, combined. According to the 2007 annual report , Coca Cola sales distributed as follows:

• 43% in the US
• 37% in Mexico, India, Brazil, Japan and People’s Republic Of China
• 20% spread throughout the world

Acquisitions

The Coca-Cola company has a long list and history of acquisitions. The first company Coca-Cola acquired was Minute Maid in 1960. In 1982 Coca-Cola purchased Columbia Pictures for $692 million. It sold the movie studio to Sony for $3 billion. Acquired the Indian cola brand Thumbs Up in 1993. Then the Coca-Cola company acquired the Odwalla brand in 2001 for an estimated $181 million dollars. In 2007 it acquired Fuze Beverage for an estimated $250 million dollars.

Learnings

The success of the Coca-Cola company revolves around five main factors:

• Coca-Cola is one of the most popular, trusted and the biggest brand all over the world (a unique and recognized brand)
• Coca-Cola consistently offers product of highest quality to the consumers(quality)
• Coca-Cola uses and delivers innovative and creative marketing programmes worldwide for e.g social media marketing campaigns and ad campaigns(marketing)
• Coca-Cola is globally available and their products are bottled and distributed in more than 200 countries(Global availability)
• They have been providing their consumers worldwide continually with new products for e.g diet co*ke, coca cola zero, etc.

Image Credits:Coca-Cola