Introduction
Coca-Cola has risen to be the biggest soft drink company globally, with more than 500 beverages in over 200 countries. Daily, an average of 1.9 billion Coca-Cola products are consumed around the world. Coca-Cola implements different strategies to promote its growth and global dominance of the beverage market. In such a large operation, technology plays a significant role in growth, customer satisfaction, and keeping the company afloat. The advancement in technology in the 21st century has provided a dynamic shift in Coca-Cola’s strategies to move forward. Coca-Cola has embraced emerging technologies in product development, advertisement, delivery, and process efficiency.
Impact of Technology on Coca-Cola
Product Development
In 2010, Coca-Cola launched freestyle dispensers; these enable consumers to add their flavors of choice to Coca-Cola drinks. These dispensers use the concept of machine learning to collect data on the consumer’s choices and preferences which is then used in market research (Vyas et al., 2019). An example of this strategy’s effectiveness is the launching of Cherry Sprite; this new flavor was inspired by the data collected from the dispensers. The dispensers have also ensured customer satisfaction as the customers get to customize their drinks to their tastes. The product development process has been made effective through the use of artificial intelligence.
Target Advertising
Artificial intelligence and data analysis play a significant role in the advertising of Coca-Cola products. Data analysis enables the company to identify where its primary market lies and where to source its materials according to climate and crop yields. Artificial intelligence enables the company to record its brand’s mentions on the web. The image-recognition technology of AI also plays a significant role as it enables identifying the company’s products uploaded on the internet and hence enables posting relevant ads to the consumers.
Coca-Cola made use of social media to promote its brand through the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign. In the campaign, the consumers were encouraged to find a bottle of Coca-Cola with their name, and after sharing it with friends, they could share an image on social media with the hashtag #ShareaCoke (Einstein, 2016). The campaign was successful as very many consumers took up the campaign. Through this campaign, Coca-Cola was able to take advantage of social media to undertake the marketing of its products.
Digitalization of Delivery
Like most other products, companies have always focused on delivery from their factories to the market. However, with the advent of delivery through the internet or phone call, most businesses can deliver their goods directly to consumers. Coca-Cola has digitalized distribution by launching online product delivery sites such as the MyCoke Platform. This platform enables consumers and retailers to make orders online and have them delivered to specified locations. Consumers who are loyal users of the app can also win various prizes, which encourages them to continue purchasing Coca-Cola products. This measure ensures products are readily available to clients, hence encouraging sales.
Increasing Process Efficiency
Technology has developed to the level that processes that would usually take a lot of time can be undertaken at a high-efficiency level. Coca-Cola has implemented the concept of augmented reality (AR) in some of its bottling companies worldwide for efficient maintenance and repair of machines (Scholz & Smith, 2016). AR involves overlaying computer graphics using intelligent glasses or headsets on top of the real-world entity that the user is looking at. This technology enables the technicians to diagnose and fix machines’ technical issues, including those located in remote areas that cannot be easily accessed. Through this, the company has been able to advance its processes, making them efficient.
Business intelligence
Business intelligence consists of the collection, storage, and analysis of data generated from business operations to provide a general view of the given company’s state. From the data collected and analyzed, a company can improve its business operations. Considering the scale of Coca-Cola, the company can generate a substantial amount of data. The data at Coca-Cola is generated from different departments, including sourcing, production, distribution, sales, and feedback from the consumers. To deal with the high amounts of data generated from its operations, Coca-Cola has embraced the use of big data (Calof, Richards & Santilli, 2017).
The big data collected from the different operations are transformed into meaningful information in the context of different business operations. Information includes the best performing products and those that are struggling.
Business intelligence involves processing information from different sources and finding the link between them. An example of business intelligence important to Coca-Cola includes the number of sales per region and the growth in sales of a particular product, and the triggers of such changes (Vyas et al., 2019).
Big data allows the company to process statistics collected from different sources to provide information to make strategic and informed business decisions. From the information generated by big data, the company can find trends and patterns, which results in the generation of business intelligence (Stoicescu, 2016). From the business intelligence accumulated over long periods, Coca-Cola has gained a lot of experience and expertise at various levels. As a result, the company has accumulated knowledge of different markets worldwide, and it can make strategic and informed decisions that give it a competitive advantage.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the integration of technology in Coca-Cola’s operations has given the company a substantial competitive advantage globally. Technology has helped the company in product development, advertising, digitization of delivery, and increasing operational efficiency. The company generates data from various sources and can use big data to process the information to create knowledge of different markets’ dynamics. Therefore, the use of technology is essential in enabling Coca-Cola to make strategic decisions that give it a competitive advantage.
References
Calof, J., Richards, G., & Santilli, P. (2017). Integration of business intelligence with corporate strategic management. Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business, 7(3). Web.
Einstein, M. (2016). Black ops advertising: Native ads, content marketing, and the covert world of the digital sell. OR Books.
Scholz, J., & Smith, A. N. (2016). Augmented reality: Designing immersive experiences that maximize consumer engagement. Business Horizons, 59(2), 149-161. Web.
Stoicescu, C. (2016). Big Data, the perfect instrument to study today’s consumer behavior. Database Systems Journal, 6(3), 28-42. Web.
Vyas, S., Jain, S. S., Choudhary, I., & Chaudhary, A. (2019). Study on use of ai and big data for commercial system. In 2019 Amity International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AICAI) (pp. 737-739). IEEE. Web.