Coca-Cola’s Global Strategy and System

Coca-Cola’s Global Strategy
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Coca-Cola’s Global Strategy
Introduction
It is no doubt that Coca-Cola is one of the renowned brands globally. The company's success is evident from its sales worldwide, which has continued to improve after every year. For instance, today, Coca-Cola products account for close to 2 billion of the 61 billion servings of non-alcoholics per day. With such success, it is evident that the company has put a lot of work behind the scenes and discovered an effective and efficient strategy that suits it. This paper shall analyze Coca-Cola's branding and marketing strategy that has enabled it to realize its success in the global market. The document shall also examine some of the company's challenges over time and how it has managed to sort them out.
The Coca-Cola System
The Coca-Cola company stands out as one of the companies around the globe with a unique distribution system. The company operates with both manufactures and over 255 bottlers who are distributed around the world. Its manufacturing plants produce two sets of products whose returns are recorded under the concentrate and finished products (Bedford, 2020). The 255 bottling partners, on the other hand, receives the company's beverage concentrates from manufactures and uses that to make the finished products. With this system, Coca-Cola has managed to reduce its production cost by large as it does not incur the charge of exporting its finished products to distributors. Through a partnership with its bottling entities, the company develops local marketing strategies suiting markets within which different bottlers are located. Thus, the company-bottlers block in Coca-Cola provides a flexible platform for bottlers to deploy an effective system that is most appropriate to their markets.
To ensure its bottling partners' sustainability, the Coca-Cola company has established the Bottling Investments Group (BIG) within its structure. BIG's main objective is to provide the continuity of Coca-Cola bottling companies by supporting struggling bottlers. When the Coca-Cola bottling company gets into a financial crisis, whereby it fails to sustain itself financially, BIG comes in to help the bottling partner until such a time that it starts to make a profit again. After overcoming the financial crisis, BIG then seeks to find a better bottling partner that then takes over the resurrected bottling entity's operation. This strategy has proven to be an effective one for the Coca-Cola company as it helps eradicate the distribution gaps that are likely to be experienced as a result of closing any of its bottling entities. In its long term plans, Coca-Cola plans to eradicate BIG as it looks forward to establishing an environment where all its bottling companies will operate in profits.
Market Mix
Rising global demand for Coca-Cola products has forced the company to adapt its products and marketing strategies to suit different markets. For instance, Coca-Cola invented some recycled plastic mugs re-used up to 70 times by its customers in places where poverty levels are high. This way, the commodity's pricing is lowered as customers only pay for the beverage and not the packaging. On distribution aspects, Coca-Cola has inve...