How Coke overtook Pepsi in Thailand: Jesus Ferreira

By Emily Tan on Oct 4, 2013
filed under Marketing, India

Coca-Cola’s IMC manager for Thailand arrived in mid-2011, when the Coca-Cola (24 pc) trailed Pepsi’s market share of 38 pc

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When Coca-Cola Thailand’s integrated marketing communications manager Jesus Ferreira first arrived mid-2011, he had a bit of a shock.

For the past 16 years, Ferreira had worked for Coke in Mexico and he was used to the flagship brand dominating the market. “Mexico was Coke’s first international market and has the world’s highest per-capita consumption,” explained Ferreira. “It also has around 90 per cent market share in the cola segment.”

In contrast, Coke’s market share in Thailand was only about 24 per cent, compared with Pepsi’s 38 per cent. In addition, the red cola’s marketing strategy in Thailand was very different from Mexico’s. To make thnigs worse, the locals immediately renamed Ferreira as “Fey”.
“Marketing in Mexico is very much in touch with the local culture and very emotional, and Thailand’s was largely promotional at the time, focusing on the drink as ‘energising refreshment’," Ferreira recalled. "Also, we were only second in a very competitive Cola market."
But things were about to change for Coke. In October 2011, the floods hit Thailand, and the brand, in partnership with its media agency, Initiative, launched ‘A million reasons to believe in Thailand’.
“The decision we made was, let’s focus much more on helping people, rather than just selling cola," Ferreira said. "We changed our advertising to promote donations to the Red Cross, donating all the media space we had. We maintained our support to the society for about three months, and then in January we launched a campaign that spoke of hope—of the clouds parting and the sun shining again, with reasons to believe in Thailand.”

LALIT SHARMA
PGDM-3rd sem.