Coca-Cola tagged posts

November 18, 2018,  Guru in a Bottle  No comments

My 16-year-old daughter Zara loves Instagram. So does her 11-year old sister, Aviva.

I hope they don’t mind me sharing that with you! And probably millions of others like them all over the world are aimlessly scrolling through Instagram rather than doing their homework on a wet Wednesday evening when they need a break from studying or are simply bored of checking out vlogs on YouTube – another favourite pastime rather than watching TV (which they don’t).

What’s interesting is the way that, post after post, about fashion, make-up, music, games, staying healthy and what to say to boys tends to have the same captions.

With young children and teenagers, social media is pa...

September 12, 2014,  Brand marketing, News  No comments

Unilever is the smartest advertiser on the planet according to research carried out by global marketing intelligence agency WARC.

The top five global advertisers on the WARC advertiser rankings:

The advertiser scores are derived from the brand owners’ performance in effectiveness and strategy in the previous 12 months.

However, the world’s leading individual brand is Coca-Cola, according to the rankings for individual brands:

In compiling the individual brand league table, WARC tracked more than 1700 winners in 75 different competitions...

September 10, 2014,  Brand marketing, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Marketing practice, News  No comments

In a spectacular volte-face, Coca-Cola has embraced the voluntary front of pack ‘traffic light’ system that alerts British consumers to the calorific value of the product in order for them to make informed choices about what they are ingesting and help move them towards having a more balanced diet and healthier lifestyle.

What’s disappointing is that the beverage giant didn’t have the foresight to embrace this opportunity last year when the voluntary labelling scheme was first introduced by the Government.

By missing this opportunity, Coca-Cola made it look like it had something to hide and this also reflected negatively on its reputation.

The result of this stance wa...

July 6, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, House of Illustration, Marketing practice, Sponsorship News  No comments

This isn’t a one-way street of course. There’s a lot that sports can learn from the arts – for example creating unique experiences that reach desired audience and customer segments in a precise way that’s memorable and doesn’t suffer from ‘sponsorship clutter’ that often afflicts much bigger property types such as a premier league football club.

However, the arts sector needs to become much more commercially savvy in helping itself achieve anything like the success achieved by sports rights owners over the last 40 years that has generated billions in support of sports and entertainment that relies on sponsorship income for its existence.

Earlier this week, UK ar...

May 20, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, News, Sponsorship News  No comments

April 24, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, Innovation, Marketing practice, News  No comments

Over the last decade, marketers of branded fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) on both sides of the Atlantic have struggled to withstand the onslaught on their market share from challenger and own-label brands.

The result of increased competition – largely fuelled by globalisation – is that some marketers have been forced to radically re-think their retail and marketing strategies in order to stay ahead of the game. So it may surprise you to learn that packaging innovation has become the ‘go-to’ marketing strategy for these FMCG marketers in order to preserve and boost profitability.

US-based MeadWestvaco Corporation (MWV), a global leader in packaging and packaging solut...

March 15, 2014,  Guru in a Bottle, Marketing practice, Public Relations practice, Thought Leadership  No comments

At the end of last year, a new book by Steve Earl and Stephen Waddington hit the shelves and caused a bit of a stir. Brand Vandals was a polemic about the dangers facing any organisation as it struggles to manage its reputation in the face of determined vandals out to destroy it on social media.

“Media has become a two-way weapon. Nobody can control it. It’s anarchy.”

Assuming you didn’t suffer nervous shock or call the emergency services after reading the first chapter, the book goes on to describe a world where luckless PR managers are fighting an ever losing battle against brand vandalism...

February 21, 2014,  Essential Law for Marketers, Events, Guru in a Bottle, Legal update, Marketing practice, News, Sponsorship News  No comments

So the question on most marketers’ lips at the half-way stage of the Sochi Winter Olympic Games 2014 is who’s winning brand gold and who’s coming last in the multi-million dollar sponsorship stakes?

Well, this picture sums up the problem, doesn’t it?

An Olympic Official at Sochi with duct tape sticking it over the Apple logo of the laptop belonging to Associated Press director of international video Mark Davies. As if this pretty innocuous indirect view of an Apple logo on this laptop justifies this type of treatment?

Well, it’s bonkers really but then you need to understand the reasoning behind this extreme form Olympic brand protection.

Non-Olympic partners such as ...

February 15, 2014,  Consumer behaviour, Guru in a Bottle, High Impact Marketing that Gets Results, The Art of Influencing and Selling  No comments

Amazon built a gigantic global business on the back of choice and delivering products when the customer wants it.

As I mention in my previous blog, Amazon has taken this a step further and is planning to box and deliver products that it expects customers in a specific area will want based on previous orders, product searches, wish lists, shopping cart contents, returns and other online shopping practices it gleans from its customers’ shopping patterns, even before they’ve clicked ‘buy.’

However, some researchers are predicting a backlash to these and other strategies that are all designed to get us to spend more.

The main contentious point of consumer-ology, a term coin...

August 8, 2013,  Guru in a Bottle, News  No comments

AK: What marketing trends have you seen on both sides of the Atlantic?

JB: If you’d asked me this question 25 years ago when I was working in the UK in the pharmaceutical industry, I would’ve said there was a distinct cultural approach to how we marketed products in the US versus the UK.

Fast forward 25 years and it’s amazing to see the cultural divide has basically evaporated which I would attribute to globalisation of the economy and I don’t think you can avoid the impact of the internet has had on markets and competition.

I think it’s interesting to note that the changes in marketing we’ve witnessed over the last five years have trumped the changes that have taken...