Innovation and Collaboration at Coca Cola: It’s the Real Thing

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1. Problems and Opportunities

When it comes to Coca Cola, you think of a worldwide name that is recognizable in any location. According to the article Coca Cola is the largest manufacturer, and distributor and marketer of non alcoholic beverages, concentrates, and syrups of the world. Coca Cola maintains more than 450 brands that briefly include Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Minute Maid and Dasani water.  

Coca Cola is very innovative when it comes to working with social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life. Another way Coca Cola is being innovative according to the article with the soft drink machine. According to the article it states Coca-Cola has been aware for some time that consumers wanted more variety from its soft drink dispensers. So it began development of a new dispenser called the Freestyle that would enable consumers to create their own mixes of soft drink flavors. But when it conducted consumer research on its Facebook page, the company was shocked at how much variety they really wanted. Not 20 to 30 flavors, but more like 100! The message was clear: Consumers wanted to mix their own drinks.

Now you are wondering how Coca Cola is communicating and remaining as cohesive as possible with their international employees?  Well according to the article it states that employees can schedule LiveMeeting Web conferences using Microsoft Outlook or engage in a chat session using Office Communicator’s instant message tool and turn it into a phone call. With this technology it shows each employee of Coca Cola to remain cohesive with branding, marketing, and distributing problems no matter the location.  When it comes distributing their bottles, Coke only owns a controlling stake in a fraction of the total number of bottles its uses for its products, it can be a challenge to get all of the approximately 300 bottling companies. Coca Cola deals with onto the same platform for the purpose of sharing information.  These are the problems and opportunities that the company Coca Cola has.

1. Situation analysis

        With all this innovation that Coca Cola provides, it deeply affects different aspects of many different situations which include technology, consumer behavior, economy, social competition and demographics. The way it affects technology with the use of social networks, it will be able to find out what the consumer really likes and to determine their demographics. Also, with the use of social networks, it can advertise to their target market in an effective and efficient manner.  According to the article attached it states that Coca Cola creating new ways to reach consumers, including marketing in new environments like social networking site Facebook, virtual world Second Life, as well as via messaging on cell phones and other technologies. The way the company is communicating to the consumer will affect how companies advertise to their fellow consumers.  Also, Coca Cola affects technology by communicating with other international Coca Cola employees. The ways Coca Cola can communicate is LiveMeeting Web conferences using Microsoft Outlook or engage in a chat session using Office Communicator’s instant message tool and turn it into a phone call. When it comes to consumer behavior, Coca Cola use of the social networks can determine what the consumer are new favorite drink and keep up what is popular. Also, with the soft drink machine it can determine what is consumer’s favorite drink or favorite combination.  When it comes to economy, Coca Cola affects economy with the innovation of the soft drink machine; this can affect the how much this machine will cost and having all these drinks available to the consumer which can affect the restaurant pricing. Coca Cola has effected competition by with the soda machine by offering more of the Coca Cola products at one time compared to Pepsi.  Coca Cola has effected social with the social networks and getting the new products out there such as the this new soft drink machine.