The Coca-Cola Company
5 December 2012
Professor Lucia Cotroneo
Tommaso Mastroianni
BMGT 364
University of Maryland University College

There are many global corporations that market and sell their products all over the world but very few companies are globalized like The Coca-Cola Company. The Coca-Cola Company is the envy of all companies that seek the globalization of their products and brands. Coke can be found in almost every country in the world and is bottled in over 200 countries, essentially people can find Coke products and brands anywhere in the world ("How many countries sell Coca€‘Cola? and is there anywhere in the world that doesn't sell it?," n.d.). All of this success did not happen over night, the globalization of such a large number of brands and the high level customer loyalty has taken decades to develop and even though The Coca-Cola Company is renowned for its quality their road to success has not been an easy one. This report will explore the beginnings of the Coca-Cola Company and explain the vision of its early CEO along with their management styles. Since the company is extremely old and has much history, there is not enough space in this paper to go in depth on all aspects of the company. This being said I will focus on a few major problems that the company’s executives have been faced with. The report will analyze three major problems that the company was face with, the first is the ethical issues of threatening union leaders in the South American country of Columbia and the second is pollution issues in India. The third is the challenges the company faces in Europe. In both of these case studies the managements strategy will be analyzed by determining the effectiveness and how it was executed. After every case study there will be an analyses of how the decision of the executives and their leadership style affected the company. Finally the report will close with three types of analyses of the company (SWOT, Porter, BCG) from today’s perspective of the company.

Early Beginnings

Atlanta pharmacists, Dr. John Pemberton, created the product of Coca-Cola while the name was created by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson. In the first few days Pemberton only sold around 9 glasses of Coke per day in is pharmacy today Coca-Cola sells around 1.5 billion servings of beverages per day. (Ament, n.d.) Even though Dr. Pemberton created the world famous beverage he sold the formula and idea to Asa Candler for a grand total of $2,300 in 1891. Asa Candler would create The Coca-Cola Company a year later and start distributing Coca-Cola throughout the United States. He is considered The Coca-Cola Compnay’s first CEO (Ament, n.d.). The Coca-Cola Company is world renowned for its soft drinks but in the business word it is known as one of the top marketing companies. Marketing has always been Coke’s strong point; Candler was considered a huge marketing guru of his time. In order to grow the Company quickly Candler used marketing to increase the sales of his product. By providing pharmacies (the only place Coke was sold at the time) the first barrel of Coke for free and giving customers coupons for Coke he quickly established a large customer base in Atlanta. He marketed his product vigorously by giving pharmacies scales, logos, signs and other produced stamped with the Coca-Cola logo on it in order to increase awareness of his product to possible customers (Gunderson, 2009). In 1899 Candler sold the bottling rights of Coca-Cola to Franklin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead (Ament, n.d.). In doing so he allowed the brand a new way to grow making the product now portable and dethatched from only being a fountain drink. This gave Coke much more flexibility and the option of exporting the soft drink. By the late 1910’s Coca-Cola was being sold in England, France, Germany, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Philippines, Jamaica, Canada, Mexico and Cuba ("The Coca-Cola Company," n.d.). By expanding