Coca-Cola Ad Campaign

Executive Summary

The three major issues in this advertising campaign for Coca-Cola Classic are to increase the number of people who drink Coca-Cola Classic, make our advertising more creative, and to ultimately beat our competitors.

Our target market can be explained in just one word, everyone. Since Coca-Cola Classic had been around for many years everyone has heard of it. It does not matter what age, race, religion or what kind of financial status you have. The main thing that we need to do, is to take back all of the people that our competitors have taken away from us over the years. Though we do have great customer loyalty we want to increase the numbers. What's wrong with being the ultimate best? Nothing and that is exactly what we are going to accomplish with this campaign.

For our advertising I want to make several different advertisements using all of the media that is available. I want to have fun and exciting advertisements for our youngest audience, with lots of colors and maybe even a popular child cartoon character like Sponge Bob Square Pants for example. For our young adults I want to have advertisements that promote drinking Coca-Cola Classic instead of alcohol. I want to show a television commercial showing kids having a party and instead of drinking beer or liquor they are drinking Coca-Cola Classic, and still having a good time.

Now, for our older audience I want to back them back to how we use advertise. Since they have been with us and watched our company grow for so many years I want our advertising to them to be more sentimental and recreate some of the advertisements that we use to use. Seeing things that you remember from the past, like a great Coca-Cola Classic advertisement, brings a good and warm feeling to a lot of individuals. I would also like to send out notices for direct mail to everyone just reminding them how good Coca-Cola Classic is and encourage them to rush out and go get one.

Situation Analysis

John Stith Pemberton (1831-1888) the inventor of Coca-Cola was a druggist. At the age of fifty he decided that he wanted to become part of scientific history, and he wanted to make a fortune. He wanted to invent the perfect medicine and develop a drink so that he could mix both of them.

He had learned about the coca plant and how the natives of Peru and Bolivia had chewed this plant for more than two thousand years. The coca plant was said to be a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, an aid to digestion and a life extender. With all of these great things that the coca leaf did he decided that this would be his medicine that he wanted to intertwine this into his drink.

In 1885 John Stith Pemberton invented a coca wine and he called it, "Pemberton's French Wine Coca". He wanted to beat out a man named Vin Mariani who was his competitor so he also added the kola nut. He advertised this wine as an "intellectual beverage" and "invigorator of the brain". He also advertised this drink to be a nerve tonic and claimed that it would help people to overcome morphine addiction. Pemberton had a morphine addiction himself that no one knew about.

Pemberton did not have a lot of money after doing this so his close friend and bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, invested a lot of money to help out his friend in being able to continue working on creating his dream to make a new beverage.

Since alcoholic beverages were not selling very much at the time he decided to try another drink invention. He took the coca leaf and the kola nut and used essential oils instead of wine. His mixture did not taste like he wanted it to though because he thought that it was too bitter. So he had the idea to add sugar instead. He spent many hours in his basement working to perfect his beverage in a three legged brass kettle. They found that his drink tasted very similar to a drink in Atlanta, Venable. So he continued to spend many more hours experimenting with the drink and adding more things into the mixture such as caffeine, caramel, vanilla, lemon and kassia.

The mix had always been mixed with regular water, and with that it still tasted good. But, when Pemberton and Willis were making another batch Willis accidentally added soda water instead of regular water to the mixture. What a great mistake. When this happened it gave their drink a great new taste, which tasted different from the one in Atlanta, Venable. After sending samples to Jacob's pharmacy, which they were sold for five cents a glass in town he found that people absolutely loved his drink and wanted more of it.

Pemberton decided to advertise his soda-fountain beverage as being, "delicious, exhilarating, refreshing and invigorating." Right before the beverage was going to be launched he was visited by two business men that wanted to interest him in a color printing device. They instead ended up becoming partners with Pemberton in the "Pemberton Chemical Company".

John Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, suggested Coca-Cola for the name of the beverage since those were the two main ingredients used in the beverage. They agreed and since Robinson was also a man with great penmanship he was the first one to script "Coca Cola" in cursive flowing letters, which obviously is still the famous logo used for Coca-Cola today.

After this Robinson made many great marketing suggestions to the Pemberton for the company. He later told Pemberton about the importance of advertising to his beverage. He told he that once the drink was ready to be sold that he should hand out some type of coupon allowing consumers to have a Coca-Cola drink for free. Robinson knew that if he did this then he could sell more of the beverage, since he knew that people were skeptical about paying money to try a new beverage.

They started developing signs to promote Coca-Cola. They started to paint on oil-cloth banners and streetcar signs with the new logo on it. After they did this the new soda-fountain beverage started to sell very well.

John Pemberton started to grow very ill though because of cancer, but he wanted to keep his company alive so he pushed to get better and back to work, which he did. But then again in 1887 he became ill once again. He started to sell of parts to his company mostly to Willis Venable and George Lowndes. Robinson did not know that he was selling off parts of the company and he wanted his share back. Venable and Lowndes ended up not being able to afford to buy the company and they began to question if it would even be successful.

They sold their portion of Coca-Cola to Woolfolk Walker and his younger sister Margaret Dozier. Dozier owned two-ninths and Walker owned four-ninths of the formula. Robinson contacted a lawyer to help him get some