Coca-Cola has built a strong presence across digital and social platforms using its flagship brands to encourage online engagement and community actions. In addition to its digital strategy, the company has improved its supply chain and boosted its brand awareness.
The company has made the strategic decision to leverage e-commerce to ensure brand availability in an era of interrupted supply chains. Coca-Cola’s digital strategy has also boosted its sales recently, pulling the company up from a relatively low point four years ago and to greater success.
Coca-Cola makes use of seven digital centres in different parts of the world to focus on the following areas: Business Intelligence, data analytics, digital insights, digital marketing, and better customer experience.
These tally with the operational transformation approach, which is concerned with ‘How to make the company better from the inside?’. The answer is by using data and technology to accelerate and remove processes and to remove the barriers that exist.
The digital-led approach also includes Coca-Cola’s online ordering and delivery process. Recently these were fraught with security concerns and restricted usage due to quarantines at that time. To combat this, the company launched the myCoke mobile application, enabling online orders delivered directly to consumers.
Other digital strategies deployed include the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, technologies that enable Coca-Cola to analyse data to understand the consumer behaviour from their buying patterns and their response to offers and campaigns.
The soft drink Coca-Cola has been identified as the ‘strongest brand’ in the U.S., with a brand strength of 93.3 (out of 100). This is based on an analysis conducted by the organisation TradingPlatforms.com. The company operates a Brand Strength Index (BSI).
As to how the score ranking is reached, TradingPlatforms.com uses a bespoke ‘Brand Loyalty and Recommendation Forecast’, drawing upon data reflecting consumer perceptions, preferences, and intentions – both online and offline.
TradingPlatforms’ financial expert Edith Reads is quoted as saying: “Coca-Cola’s brand strength is undeniable. Largely due to the prominence of its core drink in the consumer’s mind, as well as more recent innovations such as new flavors and lower sugar variants.”
As part of expanding its array of products, Coca-Cola is to launch a new ‘Zero Sugar Zero Caffeine’ drink, a take on the Coca-Cola Zero Sugar taste.
