Coca-Cola, Joanna’s Story

Case Study Order Description Coca-Cola, Joanna’s Story Joanna was responsible for introducing best practice new product development and marketing processes into the operations of Coca-Cola GB. The Issue: As market leader, it is often difficult to come up with new ideas for marketing campaigns or creating new products. This runs the risk of allowing competitors to nibble away at market share, often in the most profitable segments. This challenge is made more difficult when competing with good organizations where turnover of staff is low. What You Know: Coca-Cola is the world’s leading soft drinks manufacturer. While all parts of its supply chain are important, the focus is on protecting the formula (or concentrate) and the core Coke brand. The marketing teams in each region are responsible for positioning and maintaining the Coca-Cola brand as the premier soft drinks supplier. To counter the issue stated above, Joanna made a small but significant change to the well-established marketing management process. She asked each of the brand managers to state explicitly how each new product or marketing idea reflected “breakthrough” thinking. It was now not enough to repeat a campaign that was done the previous year. We often think that major improvements in performance require significant effort, budget and organizational change. This tiny change in one critical area of an established process affected every program, and it met with no resistance to change from the numerous marketing experts across the business. Deliverables: Explore Joanna’s decision to depart from the marketing (in general) and Coca-Cola (in specific) status quo. What are the potential conflicts that might arise from doing so, both internally and externally to the company? Why is the choice to make a simple but powerful change important here? What are the implications of a more complicated change? How was the KISS principle embraced by Joanna and Coca-Cola? Specific Case Study Guidelines: The paper must follow current APA edition formatting with a cover page and reference page. The paper is to be written in 12-point font, and should be double-spaced. The paper should be approximately 3 pages in length. APA mandates the use of Times New Roman font, but since this project is being created and delivered online, you may use Calibri, Arial, or Verdana as an alternate font.