Sometimes, the best thing to do in PPC and advertising in general is to look at the mistakes multi-national companies have done while trying to market their product and to learn from their mistakes. Every mistake a company has done in the marketing sector will have a moral to the story helping you as an advertiser to learn from their mistakes. PPC is a form of online advertising where the actions of your competitors can be seen as crucial to your campaign’s success. If your competitors who are bidding for the same keywords decide to increase their CPC, you will gain less traffic. The way you react to changes within your campaign is what determines the success of it.

You may not know about one of the biggest marketing mistakes ever in our lifetime involving Coca Cola.

Coca Cola and Pepsico have always had a strong rivalry because they are the two biggest competitors in the soft drinks market. Coca Cola has always been the business to have more market share over Pepsico. This left Pepsico wondering how they were going to steal market share from Coca Cola. There answer was a new marketing campaign directed straight at Coca Cola.

In the 1980s, Pepsico created a marketing campaign going around America testing the taste of Pepsi against Coco Cola. They did this by placing Pepsi and Coca Cola in two plain glasses, letting the public drink them and decide which was tastier. It turned out that the majority of people preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coca Cola. From this, Pepsico started gaining market share over Coca Cola and not matter what Coca Cola did, they kept losing market share. They were panicking because no matter what they did, Pepsico had the better hand stating that their drink tastes better than Coca Cola’s.

Due to this, Coca Cola thought the taste was the problem losing them market share. Therefore, they changed the Coca Cola formula to make it sweeter and created a huge marketing campaign called ‘The New Taste of Coca Cola’ or ‘Coca Cola II’. This was one of the worst decisions ever by a multi-national company.

Coca Cola assumed that the reason they were losing market share was the taste. But, the taste isn’t the only reason why people would buy Coca Cola. They bought it for the branding, the name, the image and the taste of Coca Cola. Riots occurred which lead Coca Cola to bring back the classic more successful formula. After this happened, Coca Cola started regaining market share back from Pepsico.

The Message

From this, it is clear that it is important to identify the problem and not ‘assume’ like Coke once did. If your CPC is increasing, your CTR is decreasing or your traffic is decreasing in your PPC campaign, don’t ‘assume’ it’s for this reason because if it isn’t, it may cause your campaign to go into turmoil. Identifying the problem is key to success. Once you have done this, you can then learn where to go about in reducing this problem.