Ana Maria Guay
Out with the old, in with the new, right?
Well…
On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola announced a change to its famous and almost century-old secret formula. The new formula was sweetened with corn syrup in an attempt to maintain a waning market edge over Pepsi and diet soft drinks.
Unfortunately, “New Coke” fizzled out spectacularly. So spectacularly that Coke’s debacle routinely tops the lists of “worst rebrands” of all time, even decades later.
What lessons can we learn from Coca-Cola’s greatest mistake?
Market research isn’t everything
It’s not that Coca-Cola hadn’t done its homework. In fact, they’d conducted a sizable market research project that included 190,000 blind taste tests overall. Results did suggest the new, sweeter cola beat out both original Coke and Pepsi by a significant degree.
So what went wrong? For one thing, the taste tests were flawed. They were simple sip tests that didn’t account for how tasters’ opinions might change if choosing what they’d drink at home for a month, rather than a brief taste. Worse, the tests never asked how tasters would feel if they knew the new formula was going to replace the old one.
Don’t underestimate emotion
The biggest error Coke made, however, was overlooking consumers’ cultural and emotional investment to the classic Coke formula—especially in the Southeast. Coca-Cola originated in the South with headquarters in Atlanta, and though “New Coke” actually met with initial acceptance elsewhere in the country, Southerners revolted.
As newspaper articles from 1985 show, there was an enormous regional backlash against Coke’s decision to change “tradition.” Southerners had a powerful emotional investment in the “classic” and timeless elements associated with Coke’s brand. They were even bitter that Coke had chosen to announce the change in New York rather than Atlanta.
Throw a marketing Hail Mary
As the backlash escalated into thousands of phone complaints and grassroots protest groups calling for the return of the original formula, Coca-Cola quickly relented. It only took them 79 days to announce the return of “classic” Coke.
Coca-Cola’s PR strategy offers a worthwhile lesson in damage control. Faced with a marketing jumble, they adjusted their tactics for different audiences, using hip computer-generated spokesperson Max Headroom to target youth drinkers with “Coke II” while marketing the returned “Coca-Cola Classic” to older demographics.
What we can learn from New Coke
Clearly, the “New Coke” disaster didn’t sink Coca-Cola, since the brand is still one of the most popular and recognizable in the world today. Still, the catastrophe does offer some valuable takeaways:
- Be careful relying solely on market research.
- Take into account customers’ brand loyalty and emotional investment.
- Use thoughtful, targeted marketing to recover from a PR disaster.
And perhaps the greatest lesson of all…if it ain’t Coke, don’t fix it.
