Coca Cola Marketing Strategy Essay

Coca-Cola was founded 125 years ago and has dominated the non-alcoholic beverage industry for a significant amount of time. It currently leads the industry in market share at around 40% and 1.9 billion servings are consumed each day around the world (Business Insider). The company is mainly known for their carbonated soft drinks, but they own around 500 brands of soft drinks, juices, bottled waters, sports drinks, and other types of drinks. Coca-Cola has a total of 17 brands that have individual revenues of over $1 billion including: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Powerade, Dasani, Fanta, and Minute Maid (Market Realist). Coca-Cola is served in over 200 countries across the world and can be enjoyed by all types of people; however, they are targeting
One could categorize Coca-Cola as a CPG company. Technically it could be thrown into that bucket, but in reality, Coca-Cola is not competing with companies like General Mills, Procter & Gamble, or Reckitt Benckiser. Coca-Cola sells perishable drinks, not reusable or disposable products. Coca-Cola is almost a medicine. As a matter of fact, the company’s original marketing strategies revolved around the ability of the drink to cure headaches. Its primary competitors are PepsiCo, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, and less obvious, Starbucks and Nestle. As Coca-Cola partners with Dunkin Donuts on a new joint venture offering bottled coffee products, they enter into a niche product market where Nestle and Starbucks are their primary competitors (WSJ). Thus, if one was to classify Coca-Cola as something other than non-alcoholic beverages, then they could classify them as a bottling company. We chose to stick with the beverage industry because it requires more expertise to understand the chemistry and manufacturing involved with advantages in the unfamiliar bottling industry than it does to understand how brand equity drives competitive