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Coca-Cola had invested a whole lot in making their flavor synonymous with, well, every positive emotion they could think of. It is amazing that they decided to

Coca-Cola had invested a whole lot in making their flavor synonymous with, well, every positive emotion they could think of. It is amazing that they decided to get rid of their flavor and try again. It would be like Google getting into the farm equipment business and just shutting down google.com because it was distracting them.

Retric 18y ago
I think new coke had more to do with switching to corn syrup than anything else. Corn syrup tastes worse so you can't do a strait up switch but by introduce new Coke and then bring back the old taste with a minor change and people don't notice.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Does Pepsi use corn syrup? Do the other soda companies? It's a little weird for them to risk their brand on making their product worse by way of risking their brand on throwing the whole product out. And (I am not a flavor scientist, so this is perhaps uninformed) why not just sweeten with 10% corn syrup and 90% sugar, and gradually raise the syrup ratio?
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  They had actually switched to corn syrup before New Coke, but not all bottlers were using it yet. All bottlers did use it after. A lot of people (oddly, even in the markets that had already switched to HFCS) thought that Coke Classic was not genuinely the same as the old formula for that reason.
mattmaroon 18y ago
That's a terrible analogy because Google doesn't have a competitor winning in whatever the digital equivalent of blind taste tests would be. And Coke didn't launch into a new industry, they simply improved their product in response to a competitor's having a better one. Imagine Powerset's semantic search starts taking off, and one after another blind study is done that shows people find Powerset has more relevant results. Would Google not react? That's exactly what Coke did. They reacted to what they (probably rightfully) perceived as a huge threat. They saw that Pepsi was preferred by a wide margin. They saw Pepsi Cola eroding their market share. What they didn't know was that the two had nothing to do with each other. Pepsi was gaining traction because it had merged with Frito-Lay, giving it a distribution network rivaling Coke's, which nobody had previously had, and because it was cheaper. How was Coke to really know that people don't buy a drink based on taste? This wasn't the sort of thing that anyone really understood at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to take Munger's view.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  It might be a terrible analogy if you read the absurd part but missed the point. The point was that they announced plans to get rid of the old flavor. Get rid of it! If Google announced that they would switch from the keyword/boolean model to something else, and there was no way to get the old Google back, their users would be annoyed. How was Coke to really know that people don't buy a drink based on taste? Munger has been doing these qualitative growth investments for about forty years. I am pretty sure he didn't think that Coke would be wiped out as soon as someone made a better-tasting drink.

Retric 18y ago

I think new coke had more to do with switching to corn syrup than anything else. Corn syrup tastes worse so you can't do a strait up switch but by introduce new Coke and then bring back the old taste with a minor change and people don't notice.

byrneseyeview 18y ago
Does Pepsi use corn syrup? Do the other soda companies? It's a little weird for them to risk their brand on making their product worse by way of risking their brand on throwing the whole product out. And (I am not a flavor scientist, so this is perhaps uninformed) why not just sweeten with 10% corn syrup and 90% sugar, and gradually raise the syrup ratio?
mattmaroon 18y ago
They had actually switched to corn syrup before New Coke, but not all bottlers were using it yet. All bottlers did use it after. A lot of people (oddly, even in the markets that had already switched to HFCS) thought that Coke Classic was not genuinely the same as the old formula for that reason.

mattmaroon 18y ago

That's a terrible analogy because Google doesn't have a competitor winning in whatever the digital equivalent of blind taste tests would be. And Coke didn't launch into a new industry, they simply improved their product in response to a competitor's having a better one. Imagine Powerset's semantic search starts taking off, and one after another blind study is done that shows people find Powerset has more relevant results. Would Google not react? That's exactly what Coke did. They reacted to what they (probably rightfully) perceived as a huge threat. They saw that Pepsi was preferred by a wide margin. They saw Pepsi Cola eroding their market share. What they didn't know was that the two had nothing to do with each other. Pepsi was gaining traction because it had merged with Frito-Lay, giving it a distribution network rivaling Coke's, which nobody had previously had, and because it was cheaper. How was Coke to really know that people don't buy a drink based on taste? This wasn't the sort of thing that anyone really understood at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to take Munger's view.

byrneseyeview 18y ago
It might be a terrible analogy if you read the absurd part but missed the point. The point was that they announced plans to get rid of the old flavor. Get rid of it! If Google announced that they would switch from the keyword/boolean model to something else, and there was no way to get the old Google back, their users would be annoyed. How was Coke to really know that people don't buy a drink based on taste? Munger has been doing these qualitative growth investments for about forty years. I am pretty sure he didn't think that Coke would be wiped out as soon as someone made a better-tasting drink.