Introduction


Marketing is the process by which a product or service originates and is then priced, promoted, and distributed to consumers. In large corporations the principal marketing functions precede the manufacture of a product. They involve market research and product development, design, and testing. Marketing concentrates primarily on the buyers, or consumers. After determining the customers’ needs and desires, marketers develop strategies that are designed to educate customers about a product’s most important features, persuade them to buy it, and then to enhance their satisfaction with the purchase. Where marketing once stopped with the sale, today businesses believe that it is more profitable to sell to existing customers than to new ones. As a result, marketing now also involves finding ways to turn one-time purchasers into lifelong customers. Marketing includes planning, organizing, directing, and controlling the decision-making regarding product lines, pricing, promotion, and servicing. In most of these areas marketing has overall authority; in others, as in product-line development, its function is primarily advisory.


 


In addition, the marketing department of a business firm is responsible for the physical distribution of the products, determining the channels of distribution that will be used, and supervising the profitable flow of goods from the factory or warehouse (1967). Marketing is about satisfying customer wants and needs and in the course of doing so facilitating the achievement of an organization’s objectives. By paying attention to customer wants and needs, organizations are more likely to achieve their objectives in the marketplace. Of course, organizations have to compete with each other and so also have to satisfy customers’ wants and needs at least as well as their competitors. Fortunately, organizations can do this in different ways (2000).


 


Marketing Management is the process of planning, organizing, implementing, and controlling marketing activities in order to facilitate and expedite exchanges efficiently and efficiently. Planning involves assessment of opportunities and resources at hand, development of marketing objectives and of a specific marketing strategy; and the development of plans for implementation and control. Organizing involves making an internal structure for the marketing unit. Implementing involves making sure that there is an effective communication within the marketing unit and marketing activities are well coordinated so that exchanges can occur. Controlling involves establishing performance standards, evaluating actual performance by comparing performances with standards already set, and reducing the difference between desired and actual performance ( 2002).


 


To assist marketing management in getting a handle on the changing times and the changes affecting their core products and services, there is a need for market research information gathered internally as well as information gained from market research forms. Market research information should assist marketing management in anticipating what customers want before they are aware of their needs for products and services. As such, market research information over time can be assessed in terms of what has and is happening and what probably will happen to customers’ needs for goods and services tomorrow. This broad-based approach to market research will give corporate management some insight into knowledge about the company’s core products and services and where the company should be heading (1999).  The paper will discuss about a background of Coca Cola. The paper will also discuss about brand positioning, brand name and selection, brand sponsorship and brand development. Through the different information acquired a conclusion shall be made.


 


Coca Cola


The coca cola company is a beverage company and the world leader in soft drink sales. Coca-Cola produces and distributes several brands in the United States and internationally. The company also produces and markets many fruit juices and other non-soda beverages. The Coca-Cola Company is based in Atlanta, Georgia. Coca-Cola’s soft drinks include its flagship product Coca-Cola which is popularly known as Coke, Diet Coke, Tab, Sprite, Fanta, Fresca, Mello Yello, and Barq’s root beer. The company’s non-soda beverages include Minute Maid fruit juices, PowerAde sports drinks, and Nestea iced tea drinks ( 1993).  In 1986 The Coca-Cola Company consolidated all of its non-franchised U.S. bottling operations as Coca-Cola Enterprises, Inc. The new company began acquiring independent bottling companies, a venture that grew into the world’s largest bottler of soft drinks by 1988. While Coca-Cola Enterprises distributes over half of all Coca-Cola products in the United States, small franchise businesses continue to bottle, can, and distribute the company’s drinks worldwide. In 1987 the Coca-Cola Company was listed in the prestigious Dow Jones Industrial Averages index of stock market performance. Its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products occupied nine of the top ten spots in the U.S. soft drink market. Worldwide, Coca-Cola ranked first in soft drink sales, and the company earned almost 80 percent of its profits from international sales (1993).


 


Branding


Branding reaches beyond immediate commercial objectives and touches the soul. Branding is not about getting a company’s prospect to choose them over the competition; it’s about getting their prospect to see them as the only solution. Large sums of money are invested each year in order to create and maintain the awareness of and the preference for a brand. Powerful brands command unwavering consumer loyalty and provide strong competitive advantage in the marketplace. The wealth of an organization is, to a not insignificant extent, judged by the strength of its brands whether it is in consumer or business-to-business markets, with brands that have either a high product or a high services component. The immediate association with a brand tends to be a product name. However, treating a brand only as a name misses the main point of branding. The brand is a complex symbol and can be applied to specific products, whole corporations or even countries. Brands vary in the marketplace according to the level of consumer awareness and loyalty ( 2002).


 


Strong brands can command consumer loyalty, which means that a sufficient number of consumers will demand these brands in preference to unbranded substitutes, even if the latter are offered with comparable quality and at lower prices. Such brands are said to have consumer franchise providing the companies who own them with competitive advantage and insulation over their competitors’ promotional strategies. A brand can deliver up to four levels of meaning. This includes Attributes. Wherein a powerful brand will be able to conjure certain product attributes in the minds of the consumer. Another level of meaning is Benefits. Wherein customers do not buy product attributes; they buy benefits. In order to have strong brands, companies have to translate attributes into functional and emotional benefit. Moreover a level of meaning is values. A brand also conveys something of the buyer’s values. The skill of the brand marketer would lie in matching the values of the targeted group of buyers with the brand benefits. Lastly a level of meaning is personality. Wherein a brand also projects a certain personality. This association is often used by motivation researchers when asking, if this brand were a person, what personality trait would it have? The consumers might visualize the brand as having a certain personality with which they might want to be associated (2002). The most lasting and sustainable meanings of the brand are its core values and personality. Some brands are largely unknown to most consumers except for those closely involved with them. Others enjoy a higher degree of consumer brand awareness, whereas brands which are consistently chosen over their competitors are said to have brand preference. The most powerful brands can command a high degree of brand loyalty. Such a brand has high brand equity (2002). Coca cola has one of the most well known brands of soft drink. When one hears about refreshments coke would come into mind. People would have no second guess on what soft drink to choose since they have full trust and need for the company’s product.


 


Brand Positioning


Never before have customers had so many brand choices. Ironically, the difference between competitive brands is often intangible. What does it take to break out of the pack with the brand and set it apart from the competition and, most importantly, place it first in the minds of customers? Creative advertising and package design are the most visible manifestations of each brand’s attempt to be seen as uniquely wonderful, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. Skillful brand positioning is the base. Properly communicated by effective advertising, as well as the entire marketing program, and fulfilled by the product or service itself, it is the right positioning that builds brand loyalty and delivers exceptional profits. The profit premium that a brand earns in excess of its commodity value is the expression of brand value in financial terms. At its simplest, the net present value of the difference between the brand’s future profit stream and that of an equivalent commodity’s is the prize marketers seek. It is this brand asset value that they are charged to develop and build or, at least, maintain. Brand stewardship are far from empty words. Brands are a business’s crown jewels, but unlike those in the tower of London, they are put to work, and put at risk, every day (2000).


 


Brand positioning is communicated through packaging and advertising and promotion, but the most important element is the product or service itself. In positioning the product to consumers, marketers, too, have a choice.  The first was differentiation, competing on the basis of value added to consumer’s quality, service, and differentiation so consumers would pay a premium to cover higher costs. The second was cost based, wherein offering products or services are at the lowest cost. Quality of product or service isn’t unimportant, but the focus is on costs (2000). Brand positioning generally requires in-depth understanding of the consumer’s decision-making process. Means-end theory through laddering provides a useful tool to fully explore the consumer’s psyche in terms of brand choice criteria. But laddering, like any tool, relies on the craftspeople who use it. (2001). Brand positioning is a process of emphasizing the brand’s distinctive and motivating attributes in the light of competition. Positioning refers both to the product segment the brand belongs to and how it differs specifically from other brands in the segment. Positioning is becoming the universal strategic preoccupation of entire organizations and the concern of top management ( 2000). Coca cola makes sure that in all advertising methods it uses; people will realize that the company’s product has distinct characteristics that add to the reasons why people buy its products.  Coca cola makes sure it has a unique product that will make clients purchase their products. This is done by adding a distinctive taste of their products.


 


Brand Name and Selection


A brand name is the concentration of aesthetic, visual and verbal styling of the commodity into one named character. The brand name goes with uniform styling and a company image. Companies want people to associate their brand name with the whole functional type as the product. For example, in Germany, United Fruit used a campaign that stated people should forget the word banana and remember Chiquita. Companies would like it if people forgot their generic words and only remembered brand names, as is already the case for names like Kleenex for paper handkerchiefs. Consumers forget pre-industrial technology, and use brand names. People do not remember how to make soap, or shoes. That is left to industry, and industry delivers under a brand name.


 


People are willing to pay more for a brand name they recognize with a reputation and advertising through national media than for a brand name that has no such reputation and media exposure, since a widely advertised brand name gives the idea that the product is respectable and reliable. People cannot see into the package, and so the picture substitutes for checking inside the package to see the quality of the product. They look at a brand-name can of peas and think of the green giant they saw on television who only picked the best peas to go into this very can. This makes them feel safe. They feel sure that inside this can will be good tasting peas ( 1996).  


 


The brand name has invested in it a national image, and its name and logo are copyrighted so that no one else may use it. The brand name becomes part of a company’s capital assets. It is not unusual for one company to spend much money to buy a brand name from another successful company. Brand names appropriate and privatize words that would otherwise be in common usage, and make them into someone’s exclusive property. The brand name and logo are a way of packaging a product with the values and reputation of the company that made it. The same brand name might appear on a whole series of different products all produced by the same company, so that when people intend to buy a product they look for a brand name they recognize (1996).  Associated with a brand name is the image. The brand-name image is the total impression, the look of the objects, services, and facilities of some enterprise.


 


The image for a company might include the logo, the type of lines carried, the decorations of facilities, the advertisements used, employee uniforms, or the general design of goods. Often advertisements are there for image ( 1996). Coca Cola made sure that the brand name chosen was easy to remember. They believed that the brand name can make or break the company. Coke as a brand name gave the company success in its industry. Coke was well known all over the world. When people wants to buy beverages. They would rather say coke than soft drink.


 


Brand Sponsorship


Sponsorship has been defined as advertising, as public relations, and as sales promotions. Indeed, certain types of sponsorship are closely related to public relations, because they mainly support the image of the company as a whole towards a variety of stakeholders. A company that sponsors a soccer team and invites suppliers, customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders to watch the game, has in fact integrated its sponsorship project into its PR effort. A brand of soft drinks that sponsors a concert, and uses this opportunity to sample its new brand of juice, has incorporated its sales promotion into its sponsorship efforts. But no doubt the nature and the objectives of marketing-related sponsorship are closer to advertising than to any other marketing communications instrument. The main objectives of sponsorship are similar to those of advertising, i.e. to build brand awareness for new and existing products in the short and the long run, to build and improve the brand or company image, and to reinforce brand familiarity and use (2004).


 


Although sponsorship, just like advertising, can be used to serve short-term goals, like product trial and market penetration, its main strength lies in the long-term support of brand awareness and brand image, and other Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) tools are needed to stimulate buying behavior in the short run ( 2004). However, compared to advertising, sponsorship has a number of distinct characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. Sponsorship can benefit from the strong association with an event, a good cause, or a television program. Therefore it is a potentially more powerful image builder than advertising, and it can effectively link the brand to a particular market segment. By showing a brand in a high involvement and experiential sponsored context instead of stressing the product characteristics and performance, the impact of the brand communication can be much stronger and much more convincing. The target audience is also exposed to the brand indirectly through a third party. This can lead to a greater believability of the brand and its claims ( 2004).


 


Sponsorship is also capable of transcending national and cultural boundaries, for instance by using an internationally known and liked tennis player. Sponsorship is sometimes qualified as a cheap alternative to advertising. This can certainly be the case in terms of the cost of creation and exposure. On the other hand, sponsorship is never going to work if it is not supplemented with and reinforced by other marketing communications efforts. All sponsorship activity requires a marketing support budget that is at least three or four times as large before it can have an impact. Sponsorship is less flexible than advertising, because it is often less suited to show products, or give information about product characteristics and product usage. There are also some risks that are incurred. A sponsored athlete that behaves badly, or a theatre play that is not a success, may have a negative impact on the sponsor of the event. Some events are overly sponsored, and as a result of this sponsorship clutter and excessive commercialization, individual sponsorship may become less effective. Finally, the effectiveness of sponsorship is very difficult to evaluate (2004).


 


Sponsorship has been one means used by Western companies for putting their brand names in the public eye. When it first entered Asia, Cartier had an edge through sponsoring major cultural promotions. In Hong Kong, for example, it used highly prized concerts and ballet performances to get across the message of Cartier as an exclusive product, available only to the elite. Another group that found sponsorship a useful way to communicate was the tobacco companies. Following the prohibition of cigarette advertising on TV and radio, sponsorship, first of major sporting events and later of the arts and social foundations, became a major tool in promoting their brands. In Asia, where advertising regulations, tax conditions and other factors proved unfavorable, sponsorship became crucial in the long term image building of a brand, providing national media publicity, access to influential people and promoting a positive image. Therefore the US companies built their brands largely through sponsorship; a Marlboro Soccer League, a Marlboro Music Hour, a Kent Billiards contest and a Salem tennis tournament. Cross-border media such as the Internet and satellite TV opened up further opportunities. For example, Star TV, which by 2000 had 300 million viewers in Asia, aired 1,237 hours of tobacco sponsored commercials in a one-year period (2003).


 


Brand Development


From the perspective of brand name development, the  and the  are the paradigms. In fact, both dailies were the only two newspapers in Interbrand’s yearly ranking of the 100 overall most powerful brand names. Both dailies considerably intensified their internationalization strategy starting in 1992. By the end of the decade, their global battle was newsworthy for magazines and newspapers all over the world. If, in the past, both newspapers had become strong in some markets and paid less attention to others, now direct competition spreads to all the geographical areas of the planet. The  flings itself into the conquest of the European market, while the disembarks in the United States with an aggressive publishing and marketing proposal. In some places, like in the German market, the struggle leads the London newspaper to launch a German edition,  Deutschland, while the Wall Street daily reinforces its alliance with that market’s leader, .


 


They even find scopes for the two newspapers to collaborate, as in the case of the joint launching of a new economic daily, Vedomosti, in Moscow. Competing in most markets and collaborating in a few applying a competition strategy, increasingly common in this and other Business sectors, both the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times were brand names with a truly global information proposal in the 1990s. Their publishing companies developed the mentioned brand names, in response to the growing competition from the new media, parallel to the implementation of geographic expansion and corporate diversification strategies (2002). The different branding methods help companies in their bid to gain supremacy in their industry. Coca Cola uses some of these methods as it goes on day to day business transaction. These methods gave Coca Cola a bigger chance to prove that its products are different and it should be the products that people buy.


 


Conclusion


Branding is not about getting a company’s prospect to choose them over the competition; it’s about getting their prospect to see them as the only solution. Strong brands can command consumer loyalty, which means that a sufficient number of consumers will demand these brands in preference to unbranded substitutes, even if the latter are offered with comparable quality and at lower prices. Coca cola has one of the most well known brands of soft drink. When one hears about refreshments coke would come into mind. People would have no second guess on what soft drink to choose since they have full trust and need for the company’s product. Coca Cola uses some of these methods as it goes on day to day business transaction. These methods gave Coca Cola a bigger chance to prove that its products are different and it should be the products that people buy.


 



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