The Coca-Cola Company has been experiencing both product sales and consumer consumption declines globally for its sugar-based soft drinks. These declines have been occurring consistently since the year 2000 in both the US and many critical global markets. Much of the decline is due to changes in consumer lifestyle, the rise of competitive alternative soft drinks, the entry of other types of non-sugar drinks into the global marketplace, as well as a continued focus on rising obesity rates and general health concerns.
Coca-Cola is at a crossroads concerning what they need to do to keep their products and brands fresh, as well as address the apprehensions of the marketplace and the changing lifestyles of global consumers. This is not a simple problem; it will require a combined and integrated effort across product development, marketing, and distribution supply-chain networks within the Coca-Cola organization, if they are to be successful.
This real case study is being addressed currently in the global arena with an actual business challenge and set of marketing research requirements. You will have an opportunity to address a real business issue and provide tangible recommended solutions based on desk research, industry assessments, proposed product development strategies, and/or brand approaches, just as Coca-Cola and its research agency partners are currently doing.
We have selected a business problem with a distinct research objective that must be addressed by Coca-Cola for the organization to continue to be successful on a global basis. You will devise a strategy and propose a research approach (e.g., research design) to fully identify what the problem is, conduct summary desk research, and compare the problem across five global markets based on your understanding of the cultures and national conditions within those markets—the five markets are Canada, Colombia, Sweden, Romania, and Malaysia.
You are to assemble an inclusive set of knowledge, data, articles, and reports detailing the issue affecting the product and the Coca-Cola brand with respect to sales, health issues, brand positioning, product reputation, and the targeting of a new strategy for Coca-Cola within these markets.
Your key learning is to consult with Coca-Cola to reinvigorate their brand and products on a global scale.
What methods or approaches will you use for your marketing research design and how confident should the client be in the results. Please keep in mind culture, the targeted regional/global markets, and both a Coca-Cola global, as well as regional/market strategies.
For instance exploratory design you can use it for all 5 markets, but we need to get used to 2 biggest things – we can take the subject as is about sugary drinks, health consciousness, do a little research of each market and tell what is the status of sugar drinks in each of these markets why do I need to research this and 2 other aspects – first, how do I handle culture in these markets, For example – In Canada the infrastructure we can use in an online survey if we do quantitative or in-person focus groups, about half of the population does not speak English as the main language, cover English, cover French. Think about the culture and infrastructure when we plot this out for each market. Ex – for Romania talk about what cultures they have, what kind of activities can I do such as an online board, an in-person focus group. Some markets are different such as Malaysia because the issue is that there are 3 major cultures.
We have a problem, we are looking at it cross multiple countries, so we need to look at the problem and decide if we can do focus group across all, or a survey in one. Cover all 5 markets
