First of all, I have to admit that Coca Cola has done a brilliant job by applying such a innovative marketing strategy. Not only does it capture the attention of most people who live in Singapore, but it also encourages other companies to be creative/innovative in marketing their products as well.

They have well applied marketing mix strategy: promote their products through an innovative way that makes people happy and thus successfully implement a customer-caring/engaging brand image to the public; place their products in university to target for their major customer segment, and via their social influence they can attract more people. To me, I think that promotion would be the only element of the 4P’s that you can utilize your creativity in there. Every company is concerned about profit, except for non-profit organizations; however, Coke does well in hiding their evil side and in showing their customer/society caring side to the public.

You may notice that when you watch a movie at a cinema, there is the Coca Cola commercial, where a polar bear holds a bottle of coke and sing with his/her friends joyfully on the ice. At the end of the commercial, they have a message to the public that encourages everyone to be environmentally friendly and that their company is striving to protect these polar bears from global warming in action. Not only could this commercial help Coke implement a society-caring brand image, but it may also increase their revenue from having more loyal customers.

Last but not least, I remember just the past few months, I walk on the busiest street in Hong Kong and see a team of dancers holding a Coke and dancing on the street. It’s pretty fun to watch it. Not surprisingly, in such a hot temperature where every pedestrian was feeling thirsty, they would very likely be attracted by these dancers and would like to buy a Coke afterwards.

Does marketing reveal the true value of a product? No.

               Marketing serves as a great tool to promote a product and to reveal its functional values to the customers. However, when a marketer designs a marketing strategy, they usually over-emphasize the positive but not the negative side of a product. As a result, many costumers often purchase a useless product or service that they don’t need.

               In fact, knowing how to market yourself is a very important strategy in a job interview. Recruiters usually ask questions related to the candidate’s personality and career goals, in which the quality of his answer would mainly depend on how he markets himself as an outgoing, active and detail-oriented person etc. Nevertheless, they often have a problem with hiring people because some candidates that they have hired had an unsatisfying working performance, something that they wouldn’t expect based on their outstanding interview performance. So, the question is, if marketing does not reveal the true value of a product, why would the recruiters want to ask questions that they know the answers from the candidates would not be true? I believe the underlying reason for this is that when a recruiter makes a hiring decision of a person under the condition of incomplete information about him, there would be a higher possibility that a person who is better at marketing himself would outperform others in terms of the actual performance. This belief might be unfair to people who know working but not talking; nevertheless, this is how a society functions which one may think is cruel. Therefore, to succeed in a job interview or work, one must be skillful in presenting their strengths and ideas prior to being efficient in work. Despite all these, the recruiter would also be concerned about the person’s technical skills and abilities such as programming knowledge and GPA when he is making a hiring decision.