The Coca-Cola Company is the leading producer of soft drinks globally with its outlets spread across continents. However, the company faces much competition from other producers of soft drinks such as Pepsi hence it operates in a very competitive environment. Therefore, the company is committed to developing strategies to enable the company to thrive within the markets characterized by changing trends and forces. The mission of Coca-Cola Company is to refresh the world, inspire moments of optimism and happiness and create value and make a significant difference.
The vision of the company entails the description of the dimensions that the corporation focuses on in the process of achieving sustainable and quality growth. Some of the concepts of the vision framework involve the people who are customers, the portfolio of different beverage brands, partners, planet, profit maximization and efficient production. According to the SWOT analysis of the Coca-Cola Company, the strengths of the company include brand equity, company valuation, strong global presence, largest market share, customer loyalty and efficient distribution networks. The weaknesses include competition from Pepsi, minimal product diversification, lack of health beverages and water management problems. On the other hand, the opportunities of Coca-Cola include diversification into health beverages, increasing markets in developing nations, and supply chain improvements (Hill, Jones & Schilling, 2014). The threats include indirect competitors such as Starbucks and Costa Coffee and the threat of lack of enough water sources.
The Coca-Cola Company has developed both local and global strategies that target different markets around the world. Most of the company’s strategies focus on the marketing strategy that seeks to gain more market share. The local policies adopted by the Coca-Cola Company entail the formation of strategic partnerships with the local vendors to serve as the leading distributors of its products in the retail markets (Kapferer, 2012). On the other hand, the global strategies of the company entail partnership with bottler organizations across the world, which prepare the beverages from the unique mix, composed using a secret formula that is the Company’s trade secret.
Step Two
The structure of Coca-Cola Company is not complicated. However, it is very comprehensive since it brings together numerous outlets around the world. The structure of the company is designed in a manner, which ensures that all the operations in various divisions around the world are standardized to guarantee the collective efficiency of all the divisions. The Coca-Cola Company has a very comprehensive and inclusive culture that is clearly defined by the seven core values that are leadership, passion, integrity, collaboration, diversity, quality and accountability. The company’s culture focuses on refreshing the world in mind, body and spirit while inspiring people through the creation of value for their money and making a significant difference (Hill, Jones & Schilling, 2014).
The Coca-Cola Company focuses on two main assets that are the people and the brand. The people refer to the employees as well as the customers while the labels refer to the various types of beverages, which are sold in its markets around the world. The company has a worldwide team of people with diverse cultures, talents, skills and ideas that help in driving Coca Cola ahead and making it outstanding in the market. Through the long-term experience in the international markets, the company has developed the ability to understand, embrace and operate in a multicultural world both in the market and the workplace (Kapferer, 2012). The workplace diversity strategy ensures that programs are developed to attract, retain and develop diverse talents while in the market place the company has developed strategies that provide a variety of brands to suit the various needs of the customers.
Step Three
Coca-Cola Company has a comprehensive structure, which is composed of any separate international divisions around the world. The company has the head offices in the United States of America where all the operations of the business originate. However, the employees working for the separate international division structure operate separately from those at the head office. This means that the organization chart of Coca-Cola is decentralized in that the other units in other continents work in isolation without receiving direct orders from the head office. However, all the divisions are integrated into that their strategic plans are designed to help achieve the overall objectives of the company (Metzger, 2014). Moreover, Coca-Cola consolidates all its financial reports from all the divisions of the world and prepares consolidated financial statements.
The Coca-Cola Company has five main continental divisions around the world, which include Eurasia & Africa Group, Europe Group, Latin America Group, North America Group and the Pacific Group. Each of the continental divisions has a vice president who is responsible for the control of all the sub-divisions based on the various countries within the continent. This organizational structure is very efficient for Coca-Cola considering its large size, which makes the operations more complex.
The overall systems of the company are very simple because it comprises of the President of Coca Cola, and four vice presidents in charge of corporate staff, manufacturing, marketing, and finance departments (Kapferer, 2012). Despite the complex operations of the company around the world, the domestic services are very similar to the international operations regardless of the country. This shows that the activities of the enterprise are standardized in the same way to sale the same brands of beverages across all its markets.
The strategic control systems adopted by Coca-Cola Company are geared towards attaining efficient budgeting and variance analysis systems. The company has huge budgets for all its divisions around the world and the strategic control systems are meant to ensure that the financial targets are attained. The strategic control systems are responsible for analyzing any variance between the actual and forecasted budget then deal with the causes of such variations. On the other hand, the primary resource concerns by Coca-Cola have been very rampant considering the expansion of the company operations to new markets where the people’s culture is quite different from the company’s culture (Hill, Jones & Schilling, 2014). However, the cultural concerns have been completely addressed through the implementation of the Coca-Cola Company strategy that has ensured that all the cultures of the employees and the customers are fully integrated into the Coca-Cola systems.
Step Four
The Coca-Cola mission statement is designed to concur with the company strategies by ensuring that the shareholders wealth is maximized to the fullest. The strategic business objective of the company is to expand its operations to increase the production volume, improve the cash flows and the saves volume for the soft drinks. On the other hand, the company mission is to refresh the entire world, inspire moments of happiness and create value and make a difference for the customers. The strategies of the enterprise, therefore, fit the mission statement of Coca-Cola because the policies are designed to meet the primary objectives outlined in the mission (Rothaermel, 2015). The marketing strategies adopted by Coca Cola focus on attaining new markets for its products as well as creating an outstanding customer experience through the various brands of goods offered. Therefore, the company's strategy precisely fit the company’s mission statement thus resulting to the remarkable nature of the business in all its markets.
The organizational components of the enterprise also act as a perfect complement to the business’s strategy. The numerous divisions of the enterprise operating in different continents are all bound by similar strategies that are formulated at the head office. This ensures that the company implements uniform or closely related policies that are geared towards achieving common objective (Collier, 2014). Therefore, the organizational components of the enterprise are very crucial to the implementation of the company strategy since each market need to be analyzed separately to establish the most suitable strategy for implementation in a particular market.
Step Five
The incorporation of ethics into the organization’s strategic plan is crucial for the success of the organization as a whole. Therefore, ethics should be part of the company’s mission statement, the long-term strategic plan and the codes of conduct. The effective integration of the business ethics into the business strategy acts as the cornerstone of the organizational culture. The primary business ethics that have been adopted by the Coca-Cola Company include, having the right organizational structure, making the employee development part of strategy through ethics training among the employees then articulating values as the key components of its entire strategy (Rothaermel, 2015).
The company has developed the right organizational structure that is responsible for the development of the entire organization. The company operations are controlled at the head office by the President of Coca Cola and four other Vice Presidents in charge of finance, marketing, manufacturing and corporate staff. However, Vice Presidents who coordinate with the executive management at the head office head the other separate divisions in charge of Coca-Cola operations in different continents. The company is also concerned about building a strong employee culture, which matches with the organization culture (Collier, 2014). The company’s main focus is the people and the brands whereby the people include the employees and customers. Finally, the company values are well articulated in the company’s strategy. The values are real; they reflect on the actual behavior within the organization and more specifically the company leaders.
Step Six
As the CEO of Coca-Cola Company, the main change that I would incorporate into the company strategy is the change of marketing strategy to adopt a one-brand strategy. This will be the best response to the changing lifestyles of people who tend to be very specific about what they want and very sensitive about their health. The one brand strategy could involve the advertising of the full range of the colas, which are Diet Coke, Coca-Cola Zero and the Coca-Cola Life with all the features and the benefit of each variant clearly stated in the Coca-Cola can or bottle. This will provide a wide range of varieties for the customers to choose from hence attracting more customers (Foster, 2014). This decision will guarantee total success of the company’s strategy by making the products outstanding in the market.
Step Seven
Coca-Cola Company is still the leading producer of soft drinks around the world with very notable brands that are similar in all its markets. For the company to remain at the top, I would recommend to the Board of Directors and the CEO of Coca-Cola Company to invest intensively in product research and development. This will enable the company to embrace continuous innovation that will ensure that the goods availed to the market specifically meet the customer demands. Amid the rising changes in the people’s lifestyles, consumers have become more sensitive about consuming healthy food and drinks. Therefore, the company should focus on the people’s lifestyles in each market to ensure that they design products, which meet the particular expectation of the markets (Foster, 2014). I would also reaffirm the one brand strategy because it portrays consistent in product development within the company. This will win the customers confidence as they will perceive the one brand strategy as an indicator that the corporation has perfect expertise in the production of the beverages.
Conclusion
References
Collier, K. A. (2014). A Case Study on Corporate Peace: The Coca-Cola Company: Coke Studio Pakistan. Business, Peace and Sustainable Development, 2014(2), 75-94.
Foster, R. J. (2014). Corporations as Partners:“Connected Capitalism” and The Coca‐Cola Company. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 37(2), 246-258.
Hill, C., Jones, G., & Schilling, M. (2014). Strategic management: theory: an integrated approach. Cengage Learning.
Kapferer, J. N. (2012). The new strategic brand management: Advanced insights and strategic thinking. Kogan page publishers.
Metzger, K. (2014). The Import of Culture? The Coca-Cola Company in America and Australia.
Rothaermel, F. T. (2015). Strategic management. McGraw-Hill.
