This article highlights different forms of marketing strategies adopted by various companies in diverse situations. The examples presented are those of Coca-Cola (distribution operations), Volkswagen (creative advertising), Tata Tea (social cause marketing), Toyota (crisis management through public relations), Vodafone (brand communication) and Sunsilk (online marketing through a social networking site). The Toyota example is drawn from Japan. The rest are from India.

Marketing is relatively a very young stream having emerged in the early 1900s, as compared to economics, production and operations, accounting and other business areas. In point of fact, marketing orientation evolved from earlier orientations, namely production orientation, product orientation and selling orientation.

Marketing itself has been changing considerably as consumers' tastes and preferences are changing rapidly. Recent developments in marketing include relationship marketing (with focus on the consumer) and social marketing (with focus on benefits to society). Advances in marketing also look at greater degrees of segmentation and customization, even going to the level of one-to-one marketing.

Marketing consists of strategies and tactics used to identify, create and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer. Successful marketing is what separates the winners from the losers, as successful marketing focuses on making the competition unimportant by making other things more important, i.e., those which are not addressed adequately by the competitors.

Coca-Cola India (CCI) has a robust distribution network built in association with its bottling partners and contract manufacturers. In urban areas, it distributes products directly from the bottling plants to retailers. However, for covering rural areas, it has adopted a three-tier `hub and spoke' distribution model, to reach remote areas in a cost-effective manner.

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