Change management - A case study on Coca Cola Corporation
The company has faced a lot of external changes, for example in world war II, the company was able to manage its existing position at that time and also entered in many new markets and discovered new niches (Coca Cola company, 2006-2011). The company also provided free drinks to soldiers which were the part of its strategy to become a patriotic symbol for the people of the country. Also it boosted the sales, so the company achieved two objectives by carefully planning to respond to that external environmental change. The plants developed by the company in war era helped its expansion after the war.
Barton et al (2002) reported that Coca Cola Corporation adopted acquisition strategy in time of Asian financial crisis. The company acquired bottling, coffee and tea shop businesses in Korea and Malaysia. Beverage is a type of industry where tastes and preferences of the consumers change on continuous basis. Coca Cola Company also responded to such consumer changing behaviors in an effective way by developing new products like Diet Coke and Coca Cola Zero. The company also committed a marketing blender when a rival company launched a black beverage with comparatively sweet and smooth taste. The product was named as new Coke. But the sales gradually went down and company faced severe consumer critics and protests. The company managed this situation very commendably by restoring the old formula and naming the bottle as diet coke (Kotler and Armstrong, 2010). As people are becoming more health conscious and willing to invest on health based products, coca cola is developing juices and various energy drinks as well. This shows the company’s strategy to responding varying consumer tastes and expectations and changing itself according to it.
The coco cola company used theory of organization change presented by Kotler (1996) which elaborated the procedure to manage change on the people dimension of the organization. In addition to making operational and strategic changes, the company also changed its advertising strategy by targeting various groups of consumers like American consumers, African consumers, Middle and far eastern consumers and European consumers. The company altered the packaging of its coca cola brand and developed more product lines and broadened them globally (The Coca-Cola company case. n.d.).
The present condition of Coca cola Company worldwide is very good. The company is selling its beverages throughout the world successfully. But in some countries, coca cola stores are not as according to the company’s main marketing, inventory and efficiency theme. The company is planning to align its performance standards according to its own corporate culture and strategies with the help of a comprehensive change management plan. These changes will be implemented within the business operations and management of the company.
Employee engagement
The recent change management at coca cola is directed towards the intrinsic values and motivations of the employees and can be referred to as ’employee engagement’. The change management process, together with internal branding programs is expected to bring about ideal behaviors in employees, which would align the operations of coca cola worldwide, and bring about efficiency throughout coca cola across all its business segments.
Coca cola hopes to bring about a thoroughly integrated system of communications, and focus on creating brand relationships with their employees. This would enhance the operations of Coca cola, as an integrated approach would mean all employees believe in engaging fully in the values, and this would become an inherent part of the employees at a personal level. Coca-cola is actively seeking to incorporate the change into its company for “building capability in engagement, maintaining engagement momentum and ensuring that engagement is integrated into CCR’s people practices” (Samdahl,2011). For this purpose, employee engagement surveys are conducted twice every year for all the coca cola associates, which serve to highlight the areas where action is required, and further actions and implementations can henceforth be executed.
Coca-cola believes that their business results hinge on the dedication of their employees to operational excellence. The company truly recognizes the importance of the people to the business, and knows that to continue to bring about tremendous results it is bringing in, employees throughout the world should believe in the values intrinsically, and therefore the employee engagement is being focused on all the countries the company serves to align, thoroughly integrate and align the company so that operational efficiency can be achieved.
Which model do Coca apply to change? Analyze it and compare to the theory that you studied.
Do you suggest any other models, or any solutions for Coca?