The World's Largest Leading Beverage Company: Coca-Cola

1. Company Background/ product introduction (10 marks)

The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s biggest leading beverage company. The company own license and market more than 500 non-alcoholic beverage brands, primarily sparkling beverages and also a variety of still beverages such as waters, enhanced waters, juices and juice drinks, ready-to-drink teas and coffees, and energy and sports drinks. They own and market four of the world’s top five non-alcoholic sparkling beverage brands: Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite. Finished beverage products bearing their trademarks, sold in the United States since 1886, are now sold in more than 200 countries. They make their branded beverage products accessible to consumers throughout the world through

Company’s profit also reaches its peak. Marketing objective is to maximize profit while defending and maintaining market share. In order to not let the sales and profit goes down, company does a lot of things such as advertising and promoting their product. Other than that, company may also modify and diversify their product to attract new customers. By doing these company is able to maintain and increase their market. Companies who are successful at this stage will be in the maturity stage for a long time and be able to earn profit. There won’t be a lot of new competitors coming in anymore, but instead those few who are left are the stable competitors. For example, stable competitors for Fanta are PEPSI, Revive, Oasis and Mirinda. When a product reaches maturity, the major costs of production and product development has all been paid by the manufacturer. The costs of sales and distribution are low because a mature product has established an effective distribution method. Therefore, products at the maturity stage usually can make large profits. Company can use their income gained from products in the maturity stage to produce new

It may be difficult for company to make money at first, because most consumers are afraid to try out new products. Therefore, company has to make their new product attractive at the early introduction stage, for example introducing and advertising. Sales might be slow at first, but profit will slowly increase from negative to positive. Once there’s more people are familiar with the product, sales and profit will increase rapidly. There will also be new competitions in the market, so company are forced to do promotions so that people won’t change to buy other brands. At the maturity stage, product’s sales and profit reach the highest and may start going down. This is when company will keep doing more advertisement and promotions to defend market share. Company may even modify product to find new market so that they can stay in the maturity stage for a longer time. There will be less but stable competitors in the market. When a product goes into decline stage, sales and profit decrease. Company have to make decision to either stop producing, reduce the price or maintain as it