Consumer behaviour can be broken down in order to understand the factors which effect and influence the consumers’ decision to purchase either Pepsi, Coca-Cola or Lucozade.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs allows us to understand what it is that motivates a consumer to make a purchase. Maslow believed that people are motivated to achieve a certain need and once it has been achieved they aim to achieve a level higher and so on until they have total fulfilment (McLeod, 2007.) There are five stages within the model with Physiological needs such as food and water sitting at the bottom and self-actualisation as the final stage.
Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Lucozade all fulfil the consumers physiological need of hydrations (water). This in its self may be enough of a motivation for the consumer to purchase the product. A common scene in all three brands advertisements is the moments of satisfaction when clenching the need for a refreshing drink and really emphasizes the refreshing feature of their product as this is essentially why a consumer would purchase it.
Marketers can use this model to specifically target consumers, they can predict buying trends and place their product on the level they think will achieve the most sales (Johnson, 2011). Coca-Cola have effectively done this. They used to produce advertisements which portrayed the band as a luxury product to the consumer to entice them to purchase. However due to a consumer spending decline in 2010 (Jackson, Strauss, Bernard, Pearson, 2019), Coca-Cola reinvented their strategy. The brand started creating ads which portrayed an image of togetherness, giving the consumer the idea that a Coca-Cola product will fulfil the belongingness and love needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy. The consumer is made to believe that by purchasing a crate of Coca-Cola and inviting people to share it they will feel happiness and belonging. Below you can see two different advertisement following this strategy, they were produced 9 years apart. (Coca-Cola YouTube, 2019).
Consumers motivations for purchasing a product are different from individual to individual.
Firstly, all three brands soft drink products require low involvement purchase decisions for the consumer. As low cost items that are frequently made purchases, as opposed to a car which you would only purchase a handful of times in a lifetime, this is a low risk and low importance purchase decision (Lumen, 2019).
Here you can see that stages in which the consumer goes through for a low involvement decision and a high involvement decision.
These Low and High purchase decisions are effected by multiple internal and external factors. External influences include social class, culture and values and Internal influences comprise of personal perception, personality, emotion and attitudes. For soft drink companies they must be aware of these external and internal influences when creating a marketing campaign as these influences shape how the consumer will react to the advertisement (Nexusnotes, 2019). A prime example of this would be the Pepsi advertisement in 2017 which was based around the prominent campaign black lives matter. This is covering the external issue of the consumers’ culture and values and the internal issues of emotions and attitudes. Pepsi didn’t consider the implications of these internal and external influences, therefore the consumers didn’t react well to the campaign and the brand received a reputational backlash.
Consumers are becoming increasingly aware and attached to brands. Companies can try and control what their brand means to the public but ultimately this is down to the consumer to form their own decision and opinion of the brand (Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, Hogg, 2016). Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Lucozade are all established brands, this works in their favor as the consumer is more likely to repurchase a recognizable brand and become a loyal customer (Fournier, Yao, 1997).
Consumers can form different types of relationships with brands. These relationships fall under self-concept attachment, nostalgic attachment, interdependence and love (Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, Hogg, 2016). A brand relationship which can occur is Lucozades nostalgic attachment. Lucozade used to be used as a treatment when children weren’t feeling well. Therefor consumers may purchase it now as the brand and the flavor brings back memories of when they were younger and looked after by their parents.
The consumers’ perception of the brand effects their decision on a purchase. In some cases, the brand is actually more important to the consumer than the physical quality of the product. With Pepsi and Coca-Cola, the battle of the brands seems more prominent than identifying the better quality product. Pepsi addressed these perceptions with a campaign in the late 1970s (Yglesias, 2013). The brand performed a blind taste test with consumers to see which product they prefer they called this the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. The answers were overwhelmingly in preference of Pepsi when the branding wasn’t attached to the product.
A study in 2018 looked into what they call the ‘Pepsi Paradox’ (Doorn, Miloyan, 2018). They performed a taste test similar to that of Pepsis taste challenge. They then preformed a series of test that were semi-blind. They had two cups of Coca-Cola with one labeled Coca-Cola and the other unlabeled and then had two cups of Pepsi with one labeled Pepsi and the other unlabeled. In the test where both were Coca-Cola with only one labeled as so, the consumer preferred the product in the labeled cup over the unlabeled product which they were unaware was the same product (Doorn, Miloyan, 2018). This shows the power of brand loyalty and perception and the importance of a brand to the consumer. The consumer puts their trust in the brand.
After the ‘Pepsi Challenge’ campaign Pepsis market share increased and by 1983 Pepsi had begun to outsell Coca-Cola in the supermarkets (Mikkelson, 2011). Before the taste test was initiated, Coca-Cola had strong brand image and the consumers were loyal to the brand with always choosing it over the competition (pepsi). The consumer believed that the product they offered was the best on offer and the highest quality, to an extent where they were even willing to pay higher prices to purchase the preferred brand (Resci, 2019). The consumer believed that Coca-Cola was their best option due to the popularity on the brand among other consumers and the power the brand had created for itself through its large campaigns. Therefore, when Pepsi commenced this taste test they damaged Coca-Colas brand image and put slight doubt into the consumers heads to whether they were actually purchasing the right product. Hence Pepsi sales increased after the advertisement was aired (Yglesias, 2013) as the consumers began trying the products to perform a ‘taste test’ of their own to try and identify their own preference. The consumers began to form their own opinion separate to what the brand had wanted them and lead them to believe.
Consumers also make the decisions to purchase dependent of where and how the product is available to them (Solomon, Bamossy, Askegaard, Hogg, 2016). For the consumer they want ease of availability and to be able to get the product in the quickest and easiest way. Convenience is key. As this is a low involvement purchase if the consumer occurs any issues or inconveniences when trying to purchase it is most likely that they just wont make the purchase. Availability for the consumer effects their purchase decision as for example if the closest shop to the consumer only sold Pepsi but the consumer initially wanted Coca-Cola, it is likely they would just settle and purchase the Pepsi (Johnston, 2016). The wait time matters to the consumer also, if the consumer is trying to purchase a soft drink product and the queue is increasing large the consumer will question their purchase decision and evaluate how much they actually need the product. No matter how big the marketing campaign is or how much the brand has spent on pushing the product, if it isn’t easily available to the consumer they wont complete purchases. The target market that Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Lucozade market to are the millennials. And with studies that say laziness is in a millennials top 4 traits (Armstrong, 2017), convenience largely effects the target market consumers’ decision to purchase.
Coca-Cola have acknowledged a growing trend with consumers, which is their attentiveness with their health and being aware of what they are putting in their body. This is an internal influence which all brands have to take into consideration with marketing and targeting their consumer segments. In 2018 Coca-Cola launched a £10 million marketing push on diet coke. This was done with the objective of increasing the sales of diet coke and influencing consumers to choose the no calorie option of the the original recipe (Fleming, 2018). Coca-Cola are paying attention to the consumers’ influence in order to maximize their potential.
The brand wants the consumer to react by increasing purchases of the diet and zero products. They have tried to connect with the consumers through their attitude towards life. The ad is aimed at the millennials and want to fit the motif of doing what you feel like when you feel like. The consumer then reacted to the push on Coca-Colas diet products. By Coca-Colas consideration of the consumers thought process, internal and external influences and their needs within Maslow’s Hierarchy to maintain a healthy lifestyle, they have appealed to the market. Diet Coke sales in the months after the ad were larger that classic Coca-Cola sales, which is unusual for the company (Felming, 2018). Therefore, proving the spend on the marketing push was worth it for the brand to improve their diet product sales and improve the ethical image of the brand.
Lucozade wanted to make their product more desirable to the consumer and catch a large audiences attention. They wanted to target their ‘Lucozade Zero’ product to the younger demographic. They attempted this by partnering up with ITV2 show ‘Love Island’.
The strategy was to join forces with a show that attracts a heightened audience during the summer months where soft drink sales are forecasted to increase (Promomarketing, 2018). Lucozade took this opportunity to play on the consumer’s intense interest and to some extent, obsession of the show. The brand ran a competition which involved purchasing a Lucozade product to be in with that chance of winning tickets to the ‘Love Island’ finale. The consumers’ decision making process for the product is then altered as Lucozade have introduced a pull factor for the consumer. The competition an chance of winning, essentially a free holiday to the set is pulling the consumer towards a purchase. Another pull factor which would influence the consumers’ decision is social status (White Shark, 2012). The consumer may consider how impressed peers would be with winning the prize and how much it would boost their social media status. For the demographic that watches this show this is something that matters to the consumer, then they would be more likely to purchase the product in order to win the prize. Lucozade was one of eleven brands to partner with the award winning TV show due to its high viewer statistics (Lepitak, 2018).
A popular strategy for all three brands in regards to their marketing campaigns is using celebrity endorsements to entice the consumer. Using a celebrity to endorse a product is said to give it a competitive advantage. The endorsement improves the effectiveness of advertising, increases the consumer’s awareness of a brand and creates brand recall for the consumer (Johansson, Bozan, 2017). When a product is endorsed by a celebrity sales increase on average by 4% (Elberse, Verleun, 2012), proving that the consumer is influenced by this marketing strategy. Reason being that celebrities are influential figures, if a brand successfully partners with a celebrity whom is prominent with the brands target market it will improve the worth of the product to the consumer. The consumer may also think that by purchasing the product endorsed by the celebrity it will make them more like said celebrity and even give them something in common. An example of a good brand and celebrity partnership is Pepsis endorsement series with singer Beyoncé. This was well partnered as the singer’s fans and Pepsis target market are very similar.
As identified above, Consumers are influenced by multiple different factors both from the brand and from the consumer themselves. In regards to our three brands, it is evident that the consumer now values health awareness above other factors. The consumers brand loyalty intensely influences the choice they make when faced with the soft drink isle. They are inclined to purchase something if they know the endorsed face attached and trust the endorser.
Soft Drink Marketing 