COCA COLA COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Coca Cola Competitive Advantage

Coca Cola Competitive Advantage

Introduction

The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) is the world's largest beverage company and the largest manufacturer, distributor and marketer of non-alcoholic carbonated beverages. Best known for its flagship Coca-Cola soft drink, the company offers nearly 400 brands in over 200 countries or territories and claims to serve 1.6 billion servings each day. TCCC owns four of the top five soft drink brands - Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite. Among its other brands are Barq's, Minute Maid, Powerade and Dasani. In North America, TCCC sells Groupe Danone's Evian. TCCC also sells Crush, Dr Pepper and Schweppes outside Australia, Europe and North America. The company has a long-established rivalry with PepsiCo.

Discussion

Despite the stagnant US market for soft drinks, TCCC has recorded strong growth over the past five years; the company has grown faster than the global industry. TCCC's success has been attributed to its brand strength, continual investment in its brands and successful strategic acquisitions. The company also benefits from its entrenched position in the industry. While its rival, PepsiCo, now has sufficient brand recognition to challenge this, TCCC has a long history, which contributes to its present position in the market (McLuhan, 2007: 10-27).

Leadership

Coke FEMSA is the biggest bottler of Coca-Cola beverages in America in terms of total sales volume in 2006; hence the firm is also the world's second largest Coca-Cola bottler.

Management Expertise

Coca-Cola FEMSA also offers world class management training to executives' to enhance the capabilities and exchange experiences (Foster, 2008: 78-81).

Innovative partnership

Coca-Cola FEMSA together with Coke works to cultivate advanced business models and to maximize sales revenue.

Joint-venture

Coca-Cola FEMSA together with Coke agreed to takeover Jugos del Valle, the biggest juice manufacturing company in Brazil and Mexico this will considerably increase their presence in Latin (Fishwick, 2000: 24-39).

Customer Relationships

Coca-Cola FEMSA is excellent in its customer relationships. The company's Focus is to tailor its extensive portfolio of beverages and packages according to the consumer requirements.

Strong brand portfolio

The company offers a good portfolio of beverages to its customers and keeps on adding new promising beverage categories to capture larger market share in different segments of

Market

In order to get closer to its customers and satisfy their changing needs, Coke has opened many one-stop shops for its consumers in Brazil by offering a complete range of beverages - like sparkling drinks, packaged water, juices, and beer.

Dedicated organizational, production processes

Coke's has a dedicated team members involved in processes related to organization and production and they are very prompt in handling any kind of competitive, socio political and economic, changes in environments (Miller, 2008: 67-9).

Inventive business solutions

Coke continuously tries to increase its manufacturing and distribution capacity to maximize operating efficiency.

Flexible Structure

Coke has a strong structure to take care of all the challenges related to cost cuttings across the industry and to maximize profit with strong branding and promotion.

Domestic and International Markets Analysis

International trade in soft drinks and bottled water is low because the products are of low value in comparison to ...