Opinion Paper About Case: Introducing New Coke

Opinion Paper

Case 1: Introducing New Coke

The case at hand shows the volatile development and behavior of Coca-Cola throughout its history. Due to a harsh and constant rat-race with its main competitor Pepsi-Cola the previously established superiority of Coca-Cola progressively faltered.

Hereby it might be worth mentioning three phases of Coca-Cola’s deployment: In the first phase, Coca Cola hold the highest market share and established a strong relationship to its customers through investments and high efforts during World War II. In the second phase, Coca-Cola relied on its brand awareness within the markets and focused more on product diversification rather than the relation to consumers. This explicitly means that Coca-Cola tried to expand and diversify its product lines around its main product Coke, which inherently led to a disregard of this product. In my opinion, this was the first major point while considering the question what went wrong with Coca-Cola, since it gave Pepsi-Cola the chance to adapt to the market and improve their awareness in the consumers’ heads. The effect of this development was a market share drop of Coca-Cola and an increase of Pepsi-Cola which, in my eyes, led to another important mistake of Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola did not respond in an adequate way of advertising but, instead, started thinking about altering their constant and sacred Coke that has been successfully established for more than 60 years. Instead of focusing on the young generation and attracting them to drink Coke, like Pepsi-Cola did, Coca-Cola tried to change their whole customer segment, running the risk of losing the older ones’ strong emotional relationship to Coke. Even though Coca-Cola did some research on the tastes and preferences of consumers the real motive for change was the response on Pepsi-Cola’s advertising and increasing market shares. Coca-Cola tested