Marketing Segmentation Strategy For Coca Cola Company

(a) Identify a product that a household consumer would use.
(b) Develop a target market profile of the characteristics of the 20% that will make up 80% of the sales.
(c) Estimate how many people in Abbotsford fit the target market profile. The following website has Abbotsford’s population characteristics:

1.1 - Identify the type(s) of need this product satisfies.

1.2 - Demographic Characteristics
1.3 - Psychographic Characteristics
1.4 - Behavioral Characteristics
1.5- Geographic Distribution (where in Abbotsford the target market is most likely to live)
1.6 - Estimated Size of Market (number of consumers)

When it comes to non-alcoholic beverages, Coca Cola Company has been the largest marketer, manufacturer and distributor all over the world. In the case of soft drinks, there is huge competition in the market, thus the company has to strive to prove its uniqueness in order to stand out in the market. In this article, there will be a detailed analysis of the target for marketing strategy and various marketing segments for the company (Hair, Wolfinbarger, Money, Samouel & Page, 2015). The company has a tremendous history and a great marketing mix strategy. In this article, there will be discussion over various marketing strategy of the coca cola company which it has to adopt in order to survive the competition in the market and emerge as a winner. Various other characteristics like demographic characteristics, Psychographic Characteristics, Behavioral Characteristics, Geographic Distribution and the estimated size of the market will be included.

The main product of  the company is a carbonated  soft drink popularly known as Coca-Cola. The main ingredients that are used in Coca-Cola are carbonated water, acidity regulator, sugar, natural color, caffeine, and added flavours. It is sold in different packaging including Cans, RGB, and PET. The price of the  product starts with  bucks for 200 ml bottle and increase as per the size and packaging of the bottles and Cans.

Coca-Cola targets all type of people irrespective of their age, sex, religion and other basis of differentiation. The company mainly focuses to the fast food industry and have partnership with some of the global international food brands like Dominos, to cover the maximumnumber of customers.

The company has a high reputation and also a very good brand image, in the year 1985, the company has changed its name from coke to new coke. The prime focus of the company is to provide its customers with a better taste. Although the company has the entire world as its target but its main focus is the younger generation (Baker & Saren, 2016). Thus the main market target of the company is the younger generation. Thus the company always showcases its product as full of energy and mainly targeted for the youth. There are various competitors of coke in the market such as Pepsi and Plummer. Due to such high competition, the company had to release a new series that is diet coke because there were risks of weakening of brand due to the presence of competitors. For this decision to prove effective it had to rely on the invention of aspartame, which is a very high quality sweeter with lesser side effects. Coca cola has an effective marketing strategy to prove itself as a successful business entity.

Target Market

Marketing segmentation has proven to be very effective when it comes to improve the quality of product and services. It helps in gaining knowledge about what are the needs of the customers and what new innovations are needed to be done in this sector (Wright, Wright & Kooli, 2016). The company has been selling its product in more than more than one market. It always aims to reach in different markets all over the world. For any business, it becomes very important to know what are the needs and demands of the customers, and for this the company has to rely on the marketing mix strategy. The marketing segmentation has divided the company into various categories such as demographic, psychographic and various other criterions to target the desired audience.

In the case of demographic segmentation, the segmentation is done on the basis of age, family life cycle, occupation, race, religion, education, generation, nationality ad social class. In order to distinguish various costumer groups, demographic variables becomes very important for the coca cola group as the market is segmented often on this basis (Aghazadeh, 2015). The main reason for this is that most of the customers prefer if the rate of usage is associated with the demographic variables. In fact it is also more feasible for the company as they can easily access the demographic variables (Babin & Zikmund, 2015). Various surveys can be easily conducted for the demographic segmentation of the coca cola company. It can also lead to more ease in identifying the marketing strategy and market targets for the company. This is further divided into two parts which are as follows:

Age and life- with various age cycles, the consumer has different wants. The wants and abilities of the customers generally change with age (Mariotti & Glackin, 2015). The variables of age and life can be proven as very tricky sometimes as according to them the needs and wants of the customers also changes. Thus these should be carefully considered while formulating any new policy. As it has been earlier mentioned that the main target of the company is youth thus in that phase there has to be continuous need to add refreshment and energize the product to cope up with the market and the daily activities. The highest populated age group in Aabbotsford Canada is between 15 to 64 years which shows the higher number of youth over there which is 1,580,440 people (12.statcan 2018).

Competition Faced by Coca Cola

Gender- the coca cola company also needs to give prior focus to the gender issue also which holds very much importance for the company. It is natural that man and women have different behavioral orientations and thus they have different attitudes (Burns, Bush & Sinha, 2014). In this manner their needs also differ from one another. Thus the socialization practices are important to be considered in these cases. Thus the company tries to target both the genders and they offer a wide variety of drinks to serve this purpose. Hence it has a wide market sufficient for both genders and there is also diversification in the products. Number of male and female in the youth generation is almost similar and the highest which is a great thing for the marketing.

In this type of segmentation various users are divided on the basis of their lifestyle, personality or values. Different groups are formed on this basis. It is possible that people who in a same demographic group, they can have different psychographic group (Tanner & Raymond, 2015). Thus the coca cola company has tried to put its best so that products are made in such a manner that they are suitable according to varying personalities of people and their lifestyles.

Lifestyle- it is found according to surveys that people generally tend to have more lifestyles than it is often suggested. There are variations in people according to their interests, attitudes, activities, and all these factors have a direct influence on the goods and services they are consuming. The coca Cola Company has always tried to manufacture those products which are suitable in today’s busy modern life where there is shortage of time; the so called mobile generation. Most of the population is employed which is 1,911,860 in total and live a great lifestyle which is a great point for the company (12.statcan 2018).

Personality- it is very important for the coca cola company to use the variables of personality in order to identify its target audience. The company provides product with the brand personality that are suitable for the personality of the target audience.

In this type of segmentation, the buyers or the customers are segmented on the basis of their knowledge, their various kinds of attitude, use or response towards various kinds of products. It is also the trait of good marketers that they lay great emphasis on the behavioral variables (Pride and Ferrell, 2015). These variables consist of occasions, benefits, user status, user rate, loyalty status, the readiness state of the buyers. It is considered that attitude is one of the initial points for the construction of market segments.

Marketing Segmentation Strategy

Occasions- The various consumers of coca cola can be differentiated on the basis of the occasion. It varies that when the need, when they are going to purchase the product, when they will use the product, all these factors matters a lot. Segmentation of products on the basis of occasion can help the companies to expand their business to a great extent.

Benefits- it is used as a kind of promotion strategy that for the sake of promotion the coca cola company mentions the prize of the product on the top of the package.

In geographic segmentation, the basic thing to do is that the market is divided into various parts and it gets demanded various segments on the basis of geography into regions, cities, or neighborhood (Kotler, 2015). There is vast network of Coca-Cola spread worldwide which aids in the product distribution. There are larger customers in the urban rather than rural. Most of the population in abbtsford prefers the urban lifestyle and literate as well (12.statcan 2018).

In the year 2014, the net market worth of such beverages was expected to be 340 billion. In the same year, the coca cola company held the total revenue of 45%. The carbonated soft drinks have proven to be a very smart sector when it comes to beverages. There has been many ups and down in the recent years (Baker, 2014). According to statistics it is estimated that the same trend will continue to prevail for the next seven years.Increasing young population in developing countries coupled with increasing disposable income among consumers is expected to drive the overall market growth. Increasing processed food and beverages demand coupled with rising population in BRICS countries is expected to benefit the market. Young age group in abbotsford is increasing and prefers drinks like coca cola which is a huge point for the industry (12.statcan 2018).

Conclusion:

On the basis of above study it can be concluded that Coca-Cola has a strong market segmentation which enables it to reach a larger number of customers and attract them accordingly. The main basis of such segmentation have been discussed along with the product description of company, product and target market.

References:

12.statcan, (2018) Census profile, 2016 census, [Online]. Retrieved from: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=5909052&Geo2=PR&Code2=59&Data=Count&SearchText=Abbotsford&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&TABID=1&B1=All.

Aghazadeh, H. (2015). Strategic marketing management: Achieving superior business performance through intelligent marketing strategy. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 207, 125-134.

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Burns, A. C., Bush, R. F., & Sinha, N. (2014) Marketing research (Vol. 7). Harlow: Pearson.

Hair Jr, J. F., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A. H., Samouel, P., & Page, M. J. (2015) Essentials of business research methods. New York: Routledge.

Kotler, P. (2015) Framework for marketing management. Pearson Education India.

Mariotti, S., & Glackin, C. (2015) Entrepreneurship & small business management. Pearson.

Pride, W. and Ferrell, O.C. (2015) Marketing 2016. Boston, MA: United States: Cengage Learning.

Tanner, J., & Raymond, M. (2015) Principles of marketing. University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing.

Wright, L. T., Wright, R., & Kooli, K. (2016) Business marketing concepts and cases. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 31(8), 1017-1018.