Suggest How Effective Market Research Might Have Aided Coca-Cola in Its Marketing Efforts

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Suggest how effective market research might have aided Coca-Cola in its marketing efforts Coca-Cola was a drink that many Americans grew up with and almost all people were aware of the brand, due to their extensive advertising. Their prime aim was to make sure people in their everyday lives would see the Coca-Cola Company around somewhere, either on TV, posters, even on buses and other public transport. However even with all this popularity and recognition in America, they were surpassed by Pepsi. This happened as even though Pepsi advertised a huge amount, they couldn’t top Coca-Cola, so they decided they would have to take a different approach. This caused them to launch the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. They found they had the edge in taste over Coca-Cola, resulting in them becoming the top drinking company around 1980. Coca-Cola felt they had to act on this, so they tried to improve their taste by editing the original formula which had stood for 99 years. Once they thought they had a winner, they tested it on 200,000 people. This was a massive project and resulted showed 61% of people preferred the new taste of Coca-Cola then the old taste, and a bonus was that the majority preferred it to Pepsi too. So when they released the ‘New Coke’ they expected it to be a big hit. This was not the case as sales plummeted into free fall and they were receiving around 5,000 complaining calls from American public a day. Then and after 11 weeks they were forced to result back to the original Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola key focus when releasing a new formula is market research. The market they are targeting is so large; they aren’t able to get opinions of the potential and actual consumers. This means they base their research via sample of the consumer opinion. This would be quantitative research as it is in numerical data form. This is best for large samples as it is easier to depict a

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