Company's Use of Information Sources

Unit 2 Assignment 1: Company's Use of Information Sources

Ashley Severt

MBA 6012

Integrated Global Marketing

The current business environment provides a plethora of information resources that are essential for companies to develop to understand and reach their customers. In this assignment, I will provide an overview of how The Coca-Cola Company uses these information resources to build their marketing decision support systems and customer relationship management (CRM) environment.

The Coca-Cola company is typically recognized as the world's best known drink supplier as they are established in over 200 countries with over 3500 different products available (The Coca-Cola Company, 2013). With that being said, one could question how the company became so successful. The answer: In recent years, anyway, the company has had a strong focus on market research and customer relationships. The Coca-Cola Company follows its own modified version of the marketing research process. The process they use comes in five stages that include:

1. Identify opportunity

2. Explore solution

3. Measure suitability/effectiveness

4. Test market

5. Track market performance

When developing new products, the company follows each of these steps. When it comes to identifying opportunity, the company will ask itself if there is a need for the product, does it fit in a new or existing product category and who is the target market for the product. The method they use for this stage is typically desk research from within the company. Next is exploring solutions. The company uses focus groups and in-depth interviews to decide if there should be a new product, a product extension, new packaging, or a new design. Once this research is conducted, the company can then move on to measuring suitability and effectiveness. Through more interviews, the company can evaluate the relative appeal of alternative solutions in terms of meeting consumer requirements. If the idea is effective, the company will then move to test marketing. During this stage, the company can roll out a new product to a smaller segment of their market and see how the product goes over. If it is a success they can roll it out to other areas and then track the progress, if it is not effective they will review and change to become effective. (The Times 100 - Business Case Studies, 2013).

When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM), I think it is easy to see that The Coca-Cola Company is on top versus their competition. If you look at the top five trends form 2011-2013 as presented by Marshall and Johnston in the 2011 Update to Marketing Management, the company is obviously following suit. The first trend is knowing that branding is more important than ever. Coca-Cola spends a lot of time building their brand, expanding their brand and adding value to their brand through their community involvement. The second trend is adding value to the company. Customers are looking for better reasons to buy products, other than the fact that it was on sale, because of the economic hardships that have been faced since the Great Recession. Coca-Cola has transitioned to trying to add emotions to their advertising to get customers to feel an emotional tie to the company. The main emotion they target is happiness because that seems to be the emotion most are looking toward achieving.

The third trend is the rise