Melinda Gates has been to many developing countries where people have no electricity, no running water, nearly nothing. In surprise, they do have Coca-cola which can be found every where even the remotest places . Melinda spent times study Coca-cola and pointed out three things which make Coca-cola successful. First, they take real time data and immediately feed it back into product so that they can identify the problem in time. Second, they tap into local entrepreneurial talent to reach remote places and neighbors. Third, they do incrediable marketing which associated their products with an ideal life.

I don’t know about the data advantage which Coca-cola has, but I do agree with the other two opinions. In China, there are a lot of villiges which don’t have high way and hard to enter. People who live in the village can also buy the Coca-cola in the corner stores in the village. Instead of selling their product into big supermarkets as they usually do in cities, they use a resell model which allowed them to bulid many small selling spots all over the remote places. Besides, Coca-cola also take a very local approach. They design the out looking based on the local popularity trend. For example, they designed the Coca-cola cans with Chinese Fuwa during the Beijing Olympics 2008, and they also lanched Coca-cola which in the bottles with different network catchwords. These products do attract many people to buy and even collect them. In my opinion, taking a local approach is one of  the secreats of success for many global companies. Take Mcdonal’s as an example, they use different menus in different contries base on local people’s eating habits, and flavour preferences. This marketing strategy works well. Me and many of my Chinese friends tried Mcdonal’s in both Canada and China, and nealy 80% of us prefered the food in China’s Mcdonal’s. In the word, if the Mcdonal’s apply the same menu in China, it would not be as successful as today with more than 2000 stores in China since it entered 20 years ago.

Here is the link of Melinda Gates’ speech http://www.ted.com/talks/melinda_french_gates_what_nonprofits_can_learn_from_coca_cola.html