Introduction
Every Company always strive to ensure their brands are known maximally by their target audience. To achieve that vast awareness, every Company must always come up with a proper way to ensure the brand is adequately convincingly communicated to the target audience. Communicating a brand always consume more funds, as the Company have to go an extra mile to ensure the communicated message reaches all the target audience. Most companies use different channels and strategies to communicate their brands to their target audience. The grand strategies and channels used by most companies include social media, advertising in televisions, radios, newspapers and billboards and also through their websites (Luxton et al., 2015). In this paper, a plan will be created on how to analyze how the Coca Cola brand was communicated to the target audience. The paper first starts with a description of the Coca Cola brand, then an analysis of the channels and messages used by Coca Cola to reach its audience.
Description of the brand
Coca Cola is a multinational Corporation whose headquarter is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The Company mainly deals with beverages as its primary products. It is therefore clear that the Company manufactures and retail non-alcoholic beverages, syrups and concentrates. Coca Cola Corporation was published in 1866 by its founder John Pumberton. The main aim of the owner while forming the corporation was to come up with a medicine firm, but in the long run, came up with a beverage company which has turned up to be successful internationally. Since its formation, the Company have been performing well as a global leader in the manufacture of quality soft drinks. The Company has a global market share of 45%, showing that it is known well in the whole world. (Besonen, 2013).
Moreover, the Company’s success can be attributed to its successful marketing strategies as well as effective strategic management. For instance, Coca Cola has the best adverts which attract customers to buy their products. In 2004, the Company reported total revenue of $41.83 billion and a net income of $6.52 billion. The Company’s positive performance can also be attributed to its efforts in ensuring customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the Company has been engaged in several corporate social responsibilities. Overall, the company programs targeting customer satisfaction have resulted in branding recognition and loyalty (Reference for Business, 2019).
The message, Channel and the audience
Integrated Marketing Communication is a marketing strategy that is used by companies and small business to ensure that the Company’s messages and communication about their brand are consistent. The process of IMC is to identify and assess potential customers, creating advertising that is designed to attract and maintain consumers while maintaining a profit. According to (Luxton et al., 2015), IMC helps increase a brand’s financial performance by influencing the effectiveness of the communication campaign and the marketing base performance of the brand.
Coca-Cola uses IMC to communicate the Company’s brand to a target audience effectively. The Company’s strategy is built on the foundation of the 360-degree communication that allows the Company to meet the needs effectively and wants of their customers (Banerjee, 2009). The Company’s IMC plan is continually adapting to meet the demands of the market, consumers, economic and social demand, and market positioning. Coca Cola has taken the position to design messages and communication campaign that create rememberable moments that consumers can relate to. The Company’s mission is creating an atmosphere filled with fun, happiness, sharing, and make a difference.
Coca Cola Company mainly uses Integrated Marketing communication as a strategy to ensure consistency in spreading the messages and communication about their brand throughout the whole world. The IMC tools are tools used by companies to promote brands to a broader audience. For Coca Cola to implement IMC, the Company needs to have an understanding of how the Company’s product will benefit the consumer (Wilkin, 2015). The more beneficial the product is to the consumer, the more awareness Coca-Cola will create for the Company’s brand. The Company also need to understand that not all consumers will be interested in the Company’s product. It is crucial to understand why consumers will invest in the Company’s product. Attract a broad target audience. Coca-Cola needs to communicate the benefits of their products effectively.
To effectively communicate the benefits of the Coca-Cola brand, the Company tries as much as possible to integrate all modes of communication at the same time. Integrating these communication modes allows the Company to promote various products to consumers more effectively (Kitchen & Burgmann, 2015). The advertisement was done through advertising a new product or service on the Radio, television, in the newspaper, or billboards. Sales promotion allows companies to offer consumers discount, incentives, and memberships to loyal customers. Direct marketing allows companies to communicate directly with the consumer using various tools such as brochures, emails, promotional letters, and text messages. Personal selling is used by the organization when they have a sales representative sale directly to the client. Personal selling allows companies to create a long-lasting relationship with the consumer. Interactive/Internet marketing allows companies to reach consumers through various social media such as Facebook and Twitter (Dudovskiy, 2015).
Coca-Cola current IMC campaign for Coca-Cola Life in the whole world is to run a campaign ad with a message “Let Life Surprise You”. The Company’s target audience of young men and woman age 30 to 49 years old looking to be healthy. Coca-Cola International Campaign video showed consumers that the Company would travel anywhere in the world to ensure consumer everywhere had access to Coca-Cola life. The audience with a range of 30 to 49 years is the main target in the messages and communication of the Coca Cola brand. The range is targeted since they are the people who mostly use brand products and have access to most of the mentioned channels of communication. The Company, therefore, target this age range since most of their customers range there and therefore they must use messages and strategies which will be received positively by people in this age range.
Criteria to be used to evaluate how the brand has been communicated
There are several strategies which can be used to determine how a brand was communicated to its audience. The first strategy is to undertake a survey. The survey can either be conducted through the email, telephone or through a website. The survey is mostly conducted on the customers to gather their views on how they got to know about the brand. Survey as a criterion and also as an approach gives one an understanding of how people hear about the brand, and also shows the number of people who can remember the brand (Hakala et al., 2012). As a plan in this paper, a survey will, therefore, be created and be conducted through one of the surveying websites such as survey monkey. The main question in the survey will be how the people being surveyed got to know the brand.
A second criterion that will be used in this plan is to conduct a look out into the website of the Company and also to check its social media pages to identify if in any way they were used to communicate the brand. As it is well known, most of the companies in the whole world use social media platforms and their websites to communicate their brand to a wide range of audience. Coca Cola is one of the companies which uses this strategy, and it will be essential to check the Company’s social media pages to identify what they communicated to their audience while they were trying to market their brand (Godey et al., 2016).
The latter approach that will be used in this plan is to conduct a random interview. The interview will be conducted using a face-to-face strategy. Face to face interview will help in getting that brand-customer who are using the Coca Cola products or those who are retailing the products. Face to face strategy is also the best in this context as it helps get real time customers (Bendixen et al., 2004).
Conclusion
Coca Cola is an international company with a wide range of customer. It uses different strategies to communicate its brand to its target audience. The strategies include social media marketing, website marketing advertisements in Televisions, billboards and Radio. The plan created is efective and will help in the collection of enough data to determine how the brand was communicated.