Authenticity In The Coca Cola Company

In an age where consumers can easily learn the truths about products and services through the web, millennials today seek to support firms with a stronger sense of corporate authenticity. As consumers become more skeptical of marketing gimmicks, large established brands like The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) now face greater pressure to be true to their marketed personas (Economist article). Despite leading the carbonated beverage industry in USA, an increasingly health conscious consumer market has lead to the continual decline in carbonated drinks consumption, causing TCCC to face increasing competition to attract more consumers to their carbonated drinks. In order to re-ignite engagement with the public and build up brand loyalty, TCCC emphasizes

Therefore, this essay aims to determine how authenticity in TCCC’s corporate persona impacted its sales of Coke. Given that corporate credibility is generally agreed to have positive effects on consumer attitudes toward the advertisement, attitudes toward the brand, and purchase intentions, (Newell, 1993; Lafferty and Goldsmith,1999), this article investigates how TCCC built an authentic corporate persona and improved Coke sales in 2014 through its effective marketing strategies for Coke that year. In the first part of this essay, the marketing campaigns of TCCC in 2014 are analysed to show how TCCC strengthened its corporate authenticity that year. In the latter part of the essay, social media and sales figures of Coke in 2014 are analysed to show how enhancing corporate authenticity in TCCC improved consumption of

Cause-related marketing is the incorporation of philanthropic activities into marketing efforts (Varadarajan and Menon,1988) to increase recognition of the cause (Thamaraiselvan, 200) while CSM is aims to persuade consumers to perform desired prosocial behavior (Bloom et al. 1997; Kotler and Lee 2005a, b). The campaign saw TCCC producing a series of marketing efforts, such as a “One World, One Game” documentary-style short film that featured TCCC the stories of four football teams from across the world among various other activities. Beyond the World Cup, TCCC also launched the “Share a Coke” campaign in USA in 2014, where the company’s logo on its Coke bottles were replaced with common names of individuals. The underlying message of both campaigns were similar - to connect and unite people through sports and Coke. Together, these marketing campaigns bolstered TCCC’s corporate authenticity and renewed the public’s interest in