Category Archives: Marketing

Coke Zero is a diet soda which contains no sugar or calories, and it was advertised to be “a taste of life as it should be”compared  to regular Coca-Cola. This makes Coke Zero popular among people who are concerned about their weight.

But is the sugar-free and calorie-free Coke Zero really as healthy as the image it showed when it was launched to provide a healthier soda for people?

Please watch this video:

Aspartame – Sweet Misery, A Poisoned World

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-n-gA0wvi84#!)

Aspartame, also known as NutraSweet, is a sugar substitute found in Coke Zero. However, research reveals that aspartame accounts for over 75 percent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious including seizures and death.

See article: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/06/aspartame-most-dangerous-substance-added-to-food.aspx

(http://quitehealthy.com/nutrition-facts/coke/SD1181.html)

As we can notice, although Coke Zero does not contain any sugar or fat which brands it as much “healthier”, it actually provides almost no nutritional benefits.  It does not contain any protein, vitamin C, vitamin A, fiber, calcium or iron. It is a dangerous action for many young people nowadays to substitute Coke Zero for milk and water.

Coca Cola is doing a great job in marketing Coke Zero as  a diet soda which shows great concerns about customers’ health. But is it really helping consumers to improve healthy life, or is it just a gimmick for Coca Cola to attract a new segment and increase its market share to achieve a higher profit? This is a marketing ethics issue we should consider about. As a matter of fact, there are worldwide campaigns to “Stop Killer Coke”. To be a wise consumer, we may want to think about the fancy commercials before we trust them.

Tesco chose the busy working people who are train riders as the target market to open their virtual store in subway station  in South Korea, the value of convenience is conveyed to customers. However, with E-commerce, the combination of IT, mobile and product distribution brings both advantages and challenges to Tesco.

Advantages

• The brand awareness of Tesco has expended due to the location of virtual shelves, the subway station, where hundreds of thousands of people are walking through every day. What Tesco is selling and What is new are easily captured by customers, more words of mouth are spread from people to people.Tesco would pop out to be the first choice in people’s mind when they do grocery shopping.
• As “Tesco is committed to conducting business in an ethically and socially responsible manner”,  the e-commerce business model allows Tesco to increases sales without building up more stores. A better social image is built because Tesco takes environment and scarce social resources into consideration in a country like South Korea of  a total area of 99,392 square kilometers with a population of 50 million.

Challenges

Virtual store opens in Korea   (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKoW-ouQlY&feature=related)

• According to the video,  the delivery fee of a purchase of  1000  won is 4000 won. The high delivery fee is a great challenge for Tesco to increase sales as well as maximize profit.

• The inventory management and the delivery schedule are difficult to be handled and communicate timely. How to allocate the resources in time is a challenge for Tesco in order to satisfy customers’ needs and expectations.

One possible solution is to collect the data from customers and track their behavior, for example, the scanning of goods through the smartphones is one of the sources to collect the primary data. Data mining can uncover the patterns of consumers so that Tesco knows what customers value, what to get in stock up-to-the-moment and how to optimize the routine of delivery to reduce cost and increase profit.

Demi brought up an interesting fact that Tesco Homeplus in South Korea opened the world’s first virtual store in the subway, customers can do online grocery shopping using their smartphones.

With a company core objective of “creating value for customers to earn their lifetime loyalty”, the idea that Tesco set up a virtual store in the subway in South Korea is innovating. Tesco considers the segments geographically and behaviorally.

• Lifestyle: South Korean fast-pace style. As Demi mentioned, South Korea is the second most hardworking country in the world,  many Koreans with long-working hours desire for a convenience and quick way to do their grocery shopping.

• Technology: increasing mobile popularity. Cellphone service providers reported that the number of smartphone subscribers had passed 10 million in South Korea, up from just a few hundred thousand in October 2009. With the widely use of smart phone, the grocery shoppers could scan the QR codes easily using the Homeplus App.

• Culture: acceptance of technology. As Kwon Ki-Duk, at the Samsung Economic Research Institute in Seoul, pointed out “Koreans are really interested in converging and cramming many different functions into a single gadget, and mixing technologies, in order to find novel ways to complete ordinary tasks.” A virtual store fits the Korean culture that Koreans are accepting of the technology usage.

Based on the research results, Tesco targets the busy South Korean working class as their market. Tesco’s virtual store meets Korean customer’s needs by providing online grocery shopping to optimize their time of waiting for the subway and delivering customer’s goods efficiently.