Coca-Cola's ubiquity strategy of ensuring its brand is visible everywhere has been highly successful, even though blind taste tests show people generally prefer the taste of Pepsi. Studies show advertising seen after consuming a product can influence later evaluations of that product. When reformulated to taste more like Pepsi, "New Coke" was poorly received, showing people prefer the brand they know. Similarly, tests of reformatted Stella Artois found people liked the old recipe more when in the familiar bottle. Coca-Cola's pervasive presence means it is constantly exposed subconsciously, aiding the brand through emotional rather than rational assessments.

1. V Jha

2.  How can marketers begin to understand
latent needs and consumer behaviours of
which customers themselves are not
aware?

3.  How can marketers begin to understand latent
needs and consumer behaviours of which
customers themselves are not aware?
 Have you ever asked yourself why Coca Cola is
the biggest and most successful soft drink in the
world? Probably not, unless you are unlucky
enough to work on the business of one of its
competitors. Well, ask yourself now.

4.  The unique taste of Coke is one of the greatest
pleasures we recall from our childhood, and often one
of the nicest rewards we can give ourselves even
today. But here’s a thing. If you put the two leading
brands of cola — Coke and Pepsi — side by side in
identical glasses, and ask people to taste them, which
do you think they choose? The answer, as anyone
who has seen the Pepsi challenge ads of the 1980s
will know, is Pepsi. Pepsi Cola’s flavor is
preferred by most people in blind
taste testing, and that’s a fact.

5.  This was what sparked one of the greatest marketing
catastrophes of all time: New Coke. Coke’s marketing
manager in the 1980s, Serge Zyman, decided that since
Pepsi’s flavor was preferred by most
people he would relaunch Coke with a
flavor that was similar to Pepsi, and call it
New Coke. Except Coke drinkers didn’t
like that one bit. They clamored for Coke to bring
back the original, and eventually that’s what happened.
Yes, folks, people actually wanted to have back the
product they liked less!

6.  Now to anyone like me who has studied marketing
for 40 years this behavior isn’t actually that much
of a surprise. By way of a brief diversion let me tell
you about a research study conducted by
Katherine Braun in 1999. Braun created samples
of orange juice of varying quality by taking good
quality juice and adding contaminants. She then
gave the range of juices to people to taste,
claiming it was a trial for a new brand.

7.  Following a distraction task, half the subjects were
then exposed to advertising for the brand. It was
found that the advertising confounded the
subject’s ability to accurately judge the
quality of the juice, leading to substandard
product being highly rated. She concluded that
“advertising received after a direct product experience
altered consumers’ recollection of both objective
sensory and affective components of that experience”
(Braun 1999: 332).

8.  If you think that’s a one-off, consider the story of
Stella Artois, the UK’s most successful beer
brand. In 1990 the brand owners, Interbrew,
planned to introduce a major TV campaign to
replace the highly successful print ads that had
been running.

9.  Before they did this they had to overcome a serious
problem pretty similar to the one that Coke thought it
had: Stella Artois was very bitter, and when
tasted blind (that is, without any packaging)
many people didn’t like its taste compared
with other beers

10. So a number of preferred recipes were
developed and tested. But what they
found was that although the new
recipes were preferred by four out of
five people, once they were put into
the Stella Bottle the old recipe was
preferred by four out of five people. In
other word, Stella drinkers preferred to
drink a product they actually didn’t like
much (Heath 1993).

11.  So let’s get back to Coke and ask ourselves the
question that all this invites: if Coke’s taste isn’t
actually the best there is, how come it sells more
than Pepsi and all the other brands of Cola put
together. What is it that makes it so successful?

12.  Many people will answer that it is the advertising
that is the key to Coke’s success. But aside from
the ad that apparently gave us our modern
interpretation of Santa Claus, and the famous “I’d
like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony”
campaign of 1971, how many famous Coke ads
can you remember? I’ll bet the answer is not
many, because aside from the famous Diet Coke
campaign, I’d say there haven’t really been any.

13.  The thing about Coke is that they don’t care that
much about media advertising. Oh, they spend
loads of money on it, because they have loads of
money to spend, but deep inside the marketing
department in Coca Cola Headquarters in Atlanta
they know perfectly well that advertising isn’t what
makes them the success they are. They are much
more concerned with another very different idea:
ubiquity.

14.  Ubiquity is about being everywhere. It is said that the
Coca Cola marketing objective is that you
shouldn’t be able to walk more than
100 yards in any city in the world
without seeing either a Coke can or a
Coke bottle or the Coke name or the
Coke logo. And why is ubiquity so important?
Because the more you see something, the more you
assume people must be buying it, the more popular
you assume it must be, and the more you feel you can
rely on it being good.

15.  But the insidious thing about this “ubiquity”
strategy is that after a time none of us really
notices Coke any more. It’s just there. It’s part of
the wallpaper of our modern world. We take it for
granted. All of which means that practically every
exposure we have to Coke as we go about our
busy lives is an exposure to our subconscious.
And our subconscious has no moral
judgment capability, because that function
is taken care of by our conscious mind.

16.  in the area of major branded goods in
mature markets the use of SOFT sell
is often the only way to use
advertising to distinguish your brand
from others. Why? Firstly because most
reputable brands satisfy needs in pretty much the
same way, so there is little if anything that can be
used to ‘hard sell’ a brand. Secondly, the more
you hard sell, the more people pay attention to
and counter-argue what you are trying to hard-sell
them. With soft-sell, the low levels of attention
paid mean advertising often doesn’t get counter-
argued at all.

17.  We all buy using both rational and emotional
criteria, and in most cases, although we don’t
realise it, it is the emotional criteria that exert
the greatest influence. Amongst emotional
influences it is certainly the case that word-of-
mouth is highly effective. Attributes, for the reason
above, often count for little, as does persuasive
advertising. And, curiously, product experience often
counts for little either, as it is rare that you can judge
a product on one or two uses. So the top two
influences in my opinion are word-of-mouth and
emotionally seductive advertising.

18.  The thing is that this bombardment with messages
— often rather irrelevant messages — from every
direction just tends to annoy people after a while.
Subtle advertising (not necessarily
persuasive advertising) can be watched
or heard over and over again without
causing irritation, so over time it can
condition you to feel really well-disposed
towards a brand.

19.  Now there are two exceptions to this. One is in
immature markets where products are changing
rapidly and often have genuine performance
differences. The other is in countries or areas where
the population is not very used to seeing or hearing
advertising and so all advertising gets paid a lot of
attention. India may well have areas that correspond
to these anomalies. But over time most markets
become mature, and most people become used to
and very uninterested in and cynical about advertising.
That is when ‘subconscious seduction’ really comes to
the fore.

20.  Reference :
 Mind over matter Business Standard.
 Last mile : distri strategy for polio vaccine in rural
areas, alliance with coke
 Coke phone with coke caps, saudi arabia