19 ms·
New Coke, 35 years on
- stuff4ben 7y agoI wish someone would spill the secrets of how New Coke came to be from inside CocaCola's offices. From the boardroom to the marketing dept, to the "chefs" who made the new recipe. Now that would be an interesting read. To see the decisions that were made and office politics that shaped what almost caused CocaCola to go under.
- yodon 7y agoThe path to New Coke was quite simple, actually. Coke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests. The preference was simple - Pepsi was sweeter, and in blind taste tests people overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter drink. This hard data was seen as indicating a looming crisis and management felt the need to act and act quickly. What the data failed to show, however, was how brand aware consumers perceived the two drinks. Even though blind taste tests showed overwhelming preference for Pepsi, if you left the labels on the cans consumers overwhelmingly preferred Coke. Coke management listened to the researchers but all parties concerned failed to understand what the research was and wasn't testing, and what conclusions one could and couldn't draw from it.
- encoderer 7y agoAlso fascinating is that it was a failure/misapplication of consumer research. When testing New Coke vs their existing product people preferred the New Coke but they didn't ask the pivotal question: Would you prefer this instead of coke.
- yodon 7y agoTo add a little more color, the "which is sweeter" question, which drove the shift to New Coke, was as a leadership failure actually secondary to the deeper brand failing that was New Coke. Coke's brand has always been a golden-age concept, a celebration of all the good times you've had in the past drinking coke with family and friends (think of all the old timey photos and artwork you've seen in Coke ads, and it's been like that pretty much from the start). Pepsi's brand is the reverse, it's new and exciting and the future (for many years their slogan was "The choice of a new generation"). You'd think this was because Coke was the older product and Pepsi was the newer product, but they were both launched around the same time, and both are ancient compared to the age of their average consumers. When Coke became New Coke, it wasn't just making its flavor look like Pepsi's, it was committing the much bigger sin of making its brand look like Pepsi's. Given how tremendously much stronger Coke's brand was than Pepsi's, the idea of rebranding itself as "New" was the much deeper failing on Coke management's part than the flavor change, and arguably was the thing consumers actually reacted most negatively to, because it was destroying their relationship to one of the strongest brands in the world. No one wanted Coke to be New. They had Pepsi for that. They preferred Coke to be their connection to the golden age of all their past good times.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> because it was destroying their relationship to one of the strongest brands in the world. No one wanted Coke to be New. They had Pepsi for that. They preferred Coke to be their connection to the golden age of all their past good times. I don't believe anything resembling this kind of thinking process goes through a typical customer's head, even subconsciously. It doesn't pass the smell test as a rationalization, and sounds to me like something people in advertising industry write to each other in reports to justify their high salaries. I propose a simpler hypothesis: customers have already self-selected themselves into preferring Coke or Pepsi. New Coke didn't introduce any new value - people who would like it were already drinking Pepsi. At the same time, its existence was received as a threat by Coke customers, as a New Coke seems like something that's going to replace the good ol' Coke. People don't like change; in particular, they don't like when a product that works for them is changed, because that change is almost universally for the worse[0]. The difference between the above and what you described is that my hypothesis doesn't require from a customer to have anything other than a "Coke = cola drink that hits the 'sweet spot' for me" relationship. I don't see the reason to believe consumer brand perception to be anything more than that. Especially not consciously thinking about how a brand reminds one of the past, or something. -- [0] - Short-term. Sometimes it's worth to e.g. mix up user interfaces in software to enable further improvement. But with soft drinks, there's nothing other than short term.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoI find it strange how many people on the internet are convinced ads and branding just... don't work? They obviously do. Even if you think they don't work on you (which you're probably wrong about), they work on everyone else.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI didn't say they don't work. They do. And in tune with the article on averages (and curse of dimensionality) on the front page now[0], I'll happily concede that different brands may work strongly on different people at different times. Hell, myself I had periods in my youth when I had fanboy-level attachment to a brand or two. My point is that I doubt that the typical relationship with a brand is as sophisticated as 'yodon described. If it was, we'd all be falling victim to advertising bullshit much more often. So e.g. when Coca Cola airs another commercial with a grandfather pulling up coke during family supper, I believe almost everyone watching either smiles or rolls their eyes. I don't think their minds race to the memories of their family dinners, or old times, or whatever. That would be a dangerously strong emotional reaction to an ad. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956832
- karatestomp 7y agoThose blind tests are so weird. I’m not a huge soda drinker but I can tell Pepsi vs. Coke by smell, let alone taste, and I’m pretty sure I’m no super-taster. I mean yeah close clones of either might fool me (never checked) but I’m very sure I could tell those two apart without difficulty, and likely without even taking a drink.
- gamegoblin 7y agoI thought the exact same thing. I decided to prove I could tell the difference to my wife, so we set up a blindfolded test, and I did absolutely no better than random. However, we did another test where I was given a sip of coke beforehand as a baseline, and then got 100% accuracy. But without the known-flavor baseline, I was essentially unable to accurately label the samples.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 7y agoBeyond the sweetness difference, Classic Coke has a lot more bite. It almost hurts during the first sip of a freshly opened can. Obvious if you are aware of it.
- majormajor 7y agoNow you're getting into canned-vs-bottled-vs-fountain territory, which is a whole different beast! I enjoy precisely that aspect of canned Coke, but I avoid it from bottles or fountains. Dr. Pepper for those situations.
- WalterBright 7y agoCoke in the glass bottle is the best Coke, because there is more carbonation. The plastic bottles are the worst because of the lowest carbonation.
- epicureanideal 7y agoI would be interested to know whether they tested this WITH FOOD. If I were just drinking a few sips of some soda, I probably would prefer Pepsi. But if I'm eating almost any kind of food, I prefer Coke, because it's not so overpoweringly sweet in comparison to whatever food I'm eating. And in general I don't just crack open a soda and drink it straight, I'm usually drinking it with some food, so 90% of the soda I buy is Coke despite what would show up in too-simple market research studies as a preference for Pepsi.
- mywittyname 7y agoOh, from a few sips you'd definitely prefer Pepsi. But you're right, Coke is amazing because it compliments food so damn well. There's a reason 90% or so of American restaurants use Coke, and it's not just because Pepsi owns Yum! brands, as this was the case since long before that happened. Edit: now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if Coke contains a chemical similar to MSG that acts as a flavor enhancer for savory foods.
- kenny11 7y agoAnother reason that restaurants (at least those with bars) prefer Coke is that Pepsi makes a terrible mixer. There's a reason that "rum and Pepsi" isn't a thing.
- WorldMaker 7y agoYeah, it's often mentioned too (and mentioned in the article) that people will have very different preferences for "a few sips" and "I'm going to drink a whole can of this in one sitting". New Coke is almost a poster child of how blind taste tests sometimes can be very blind in ignoring what should be important context information in people's preferences, exactly like "how much am I drinking of this?" and "what am I pairing it with?".
- WalterBright 7y ago> and in blind taste tests people overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter drink. I remember those taste test booths Pepsi would set up in shopping malls and such. Here's how they went for me: 1. They'd hand me two unmarked cups, one with Pepsi and one with Coke. 2. I'd take a sip from each, they'd ask me which I preferred. 3. I always knew which was the Coke, and would point to it. 4. They'd look away and say "Next!" I've always preferred Coke. I prefer less sugared drinks because the sugar tends to overwhelm the flavor of the drink. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to find lightly sugared drinks today, they all taste like syrup. I drink coffee black, and just buy plain soda water and add a bit of OJ to it.
- rustyshackleton 7y agoI got a sodastream while I've been working from home and using more or less syrup gives a lot of control over how sweet your drink is. If you like soda without cloying sweetness give it a shot. I've gotten a lot of value out of it.
- kalleboo 7y agoAs a kid my dad would water down his orange juice because it was "too sweet" and I thought he was insane. These days I water down my cola with sodastream carbonated water because it's too sweet...
- joezydeco 7y agoCoke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests Pepsi was also running television commercials ("The Pepsi Challenge") showing consumers doing exactly this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghMYzo0rgrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghMYzo0rgrw It was a popular campaign that certainly put pressure on Coca-Cola to act.
- michaelbuckbee 7y agoThis is often discussed in business schools as a danger of doing market research. Pepsi was running ads about beating Coke in tastes tests (which Coke confirmed). Pepsi is sweeter and people liked it better in a little sample sip, but to sit down and drink a whole glass was too much. New Coke was made to taste more like Pepsi.
- at_a_remove 7y agoHigh-fructose corn syrup has some advantages, from a corporate aspect. First off, the USA subsidizes corn production rather heavily. It mixes readily with water, whereas sugar had some issues when it came to the mixers in the vats. Once these sort of advantages come to light, all you then have to do is convince first yourself, then everyone else, that it tastes the same or better.
- bsder 7y agoSimple answer: Diet Coke. A lot of people preferred the taste of Diet Coke to standard Coke and Diet Coke was the fastest growing product at the time. And Diet Coke was apparently cannibalizing a lot of the Coke drinkers. So they made the normal Coke taste more like the Diet one. Which failed biblically. I just wish I could get my old saccharine-based Diet Coke back.
- franze 7y agoNot mentioned in the article was the "market research gone wrong". New Coke was market tested in supermarkets with taste samples and questionnaires. New Coke was preferred in these taste tests. But the context was wrong, a small sip in the supermarket under surveillance is not a bottle at home / cinema / picknik. But: "almost ruined" is wrong, too. After this CocaCola basically got the status as USA national heritage. So maybe it was the most successful marketing ploy in modern history. (CocaCola denies this). Source: Some marketing books from the 90s and 00s.
- ashtonkem 7y agoThe position of insiders in Coca Cola is literally “we wish we were smart enough to have planned this as a marketing ploy, but it was dumb luck and mistakes”.
- rangibaby 7y ago“Some cynics say we planned the whole thing... ...The truth is we are not that dumb and we are not that smart.”
- Brendinooo 7y agoI use this quote often; it's the single greatest takeaway from the New Coke story for me.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI heard something about sweetness? If you're taking little sips you much prefer sweeter, but you wouldn't want an entire drink of that much sweetness. I heard that's why Pepsi Cola (sweeter than Coke) wins in those blind taste tests... but everyone still drinks Coca-Cola instead.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoPepsi leaves a very nasty lingering sweetness at the back of my throat for hours after drinking it. There would be no contest if I was presented a blind tasting between the two and I could likely identify diet and zero varieties of each brand.
- 7thaccount 7y agoI've never had New Coke, but heard it was good. Can anyone speak to the flavor?
- denimnerd42 7y agoyou've at least heard it being more like Pepsi right?
- 7thaccount 7y agoYes, I remember reading it was meant to be closer to Pepsi, but have never heard it verified.
- stronglikedan 7y agoI remember it not being bad, and being preferred by my dad, who was a Pepsi drinker. However, I've always been a Coke person, and it didn't live up to Classic. That said, it probably could have been successful under a different brand name.
- acwan93 7y agoWhen I visited Coke’s HQ in Atlanta and did the public tour, there was a section where you can sample all the different Coke flavors from all around the world. I asked about New Coke and the guide gave me a sour look. I guess the question gets asked really frequently.
- pravda 7y agoNew Coke was much better then old coke! I find Coca Cola "Classic" undrinkable. Too tart, for my taste.
- timcederman 7y agoI bought some as part of the Stranger Things promotion, so assuming it actually does match the original recipe, it was pretty good. I did blind taste tests with the rest of the family and everyone picked New Coke as their preferred flavour. I guess the best way to describe it is it seemed a bit sweeter (but not more sugary), in the same way Tab had a sweeter flavor profile compared to Diet Coke.
- gambiting 7y ago"According to Mullins, the issue was not just the new taste, but that the company had done something “un-American” - taken away his “freedom of choice”." Ah the good old "I want freedom of choice, but if you exercise yours then that's un-American". And we think that entitlement is a 21st century invention.
- kiplkipl 7y agoAlthough the new definition of entitlement - that means exactly the opposite of the old definition - is.
- titanomachy 7y agoDo you mean that the old definition is the right to have something, and the new version is the mistaken perception of that right?
- kiplkipl 7y agoExactly. So now using the old definition can be ambiguous and has to be replaced by something 'wordier'. I can't do anything about it but I do think it's a shame.
- majormajor 7y agoThe idea that "rightful entitlement" has a much older heritage than "perceived entitlement" doesn't seem supported: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4240 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4240 > The earliest cluster of uses of entitlement meaning "(rightful) claim" that I've found is associated with post-WWII veterans' benefits, as in this 1947 Popular Mechanics ad > In the 1960s, psychoanalysts also start using entitled and entitlement with strongly negative connotations, resulting in the emergent term of art "narcissistic entitlement". > Meanwhile, by the 1970s, the phrase entitlement programs is being used in its modern sense (defined benefits paid by the federal government) in discussions of the federal budget — and the connotations are by no means positive.
- munificent 7y agoThis "article" is a brilliant little ad for new the Stranger Things-themed re-release of New Coke.
- armadsen 7y agoYou mean the re-release they did a year ago and that is long since sold out? If this is advertising for that, it's a pretty dumb strategy to publish it a year too late. (Amazon has them but only from third party sellers.)
- lukeduff 7y agoThen they ruined it (in the US at least) by replacing the sugar with corn syrup.
- ajphdiv 7y agoDo they have different formulas for different countries? I’ve had coke products in several different countries and they all tasted different to me. The most noticeable was a coke in Germany tasted less sweet compared to US coke.
- Ancalagon 7y agoyes, in the US anyways corn syrup is used in place of sugar cane which is used in say Mexico
- RandallBrown 7y agoI don't believe this is (100%) true anymore. Mexican Coke you buy in the US is sweetened with cane sugar, but Mexican Coke you buy in Mexico is often sweetened with high fructose corn syrup.
- seisvelas 7y agoYou are right that it is not 100% true, but it is mostly true. The US uses corn syrup because the US government heavily subsidizes corn. Some Mexican producers in Mexico do use corn syrup, which is a cheap import from the US, but even here the majority use sugar. This kind of thing happens in with other countries as well. In New Zealand you can get local coke which is sugar-sweetened or imported American coke with corn syrup. People didn't switch to corn syrup because it's better or even cheaper in and of itself, they switched because the US government goes to ridiculous lengths to make it cheap.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoMaybe not "heavily". It was 2B out of a 50B corn crop. So, 4% classed as 'heavily subsidized'? And a large portion of this is in the form of insurance against bad weather/crop loss. Otherwise, we'd have no farmers left in a couple of year (everybody has a crop loss once in a while). FWIW.
- 7y ago
- josh_fyi 7y agoOr possibly New Coke was a huge boost, through the attention that the controversy aroused. After the New Coke fiasco wrapped up, Coca Cola sales soared.
- projektfu 7y agoI agree with this. Coke was really hurting in the overall market when New Coke was introduced.
- ycombi3 7y agoThey have had very deceptive advertising tricks in the past, such as "original formula" not being the original at all, and having to fix it to "original taste." To me that is very underhanded.
- tomohawk 7y agoWhere they really screwed up was when they changed from using sugar to high fructose corn syrup. This drastically changed the taste of Coke. If you want original Coke, you can get Mexican Coke, available from many stores, which still uses sugar. I find American coke to be an entirely different beverage, which is almost undrinkable.
- bigtex 7y agoWho else remembers the original Crystal Pepsi, before they changed the formula? I will admit I drank that stuff like water.
- abawany 7y agoI bought a few for old times sake during the last limited release in 2016 (edit:err, 2018 I guess, [1]). They didn't keep for very long and tasted a bit off to me or maybe my palette has evolved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Pepsi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Pepsi
- th0ma5 7y agoMy theory is Cherry Coke is actually cherry flavored New Coke. Also, I tried the Stranger Things rerelease of New Coke and it is good, I feel like they should bring it back.
- teslabox 7y agoI like the conspiracy theory about how the New Coke fiasco was actually deliberate subterfuge for switching the product from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Corn-syrup coca-cola tastes different than Coca Kola's classic sugar formula, and allegedly people noticed the difference when the Coca-Cola company was doing tests, pre-New Coke. My cousin-in-law only drinks "Mexican Coke" (but Mexicans drinking coca-cola in their country get HFCS-Coke too. Wikipedia says only mexican coca-kola produced for export is made with sugar). Fortunately HFCS is no longer contaminated with mercury [0] [1] (or less contaminated?), thanks to the efforts of a whistleblower [2]. The last problem to deal with is how HFCS preparations might have more calories than listed on the label, on account of residual starch molecules that aren't split into glucose. Residual starch adds calories but don't affect the perceived sweetness. I previously wrote about how the original soda products were herbal beverages: Coca-Cola is made with flavorings from the Coca leaf and the Kola nut, Root beer is made with roots, Dr. Pepper's 21 plant flavors, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670 [0] Mercury in High-Fructose Corn Syrup? - https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090127/mercury-in-high-fructose-corn-syrup#1 https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/20090127/mercury-in-... (2009) [1] https://www.iatp.org/documents/much-high-fructose-corn-syrup-contaminated-mercury-new-study-finds https://www.iatp.org/documents/much-high-fructose-corn-syrup... (2009) [2] FDA WHISTLEBLOWER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT MERCURY IN OUR FOOD - https://www.foodwhistleblower.org/fda-whistleblower-speaks-out-about-mercury-in-our-food/ https://www.foodwhistleblower.org/fda-whistleblower-speaks-o... [edit: added some words to first paragraph re sugar and Coca-Cola company's taste tests pre-new-coke.]
- hindsightbias 7y agoIt took almost 30 years, but the look on first-time Mexican Coke drinkers faces was priceless. They all became conspiracy believers that day.
- yodon 7y agoIt definitely was not a planned conspiracy that way. Did Coke switch to corn syrup after, yes, but they lost far too much stock market value, lost far too much market share, and far too many key marketers at Coke had their careers destroyed by the fiasco to have made it an even remotely economically sensible approach for anyone involved to have taken simply as a way to shift to corn syrup (which could easily have been done slowly and quietly over a year or two of formula drift without anyone noticing or complaining and certainly without any of these catastrophic brand and career and revenue impacts). Yes, Coke did spend untold millions trying to recover from the debacle, and yes, they were ultimately successful, and yes they did switch to corn syrup during that turn around, but sometimes the answer really is incompetence rather than conspiracy, even if the conspiracy version is more fun to advocate for on the Internet.
- dannykwells 7y agoMy understanding is that this was, long-term, very good for Coke. Check out this line: " On 11 July 1985, once the extent of the soda brand’s mistake had become evident, Coca-Cola relaunched the original recipe, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic. According to the beverage corporation, the news of the drink’s long-awaited return “made the front page of virtually every major newspaper”. " Talk about free advertising!! From a biased source: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/news/the-story-of-one-of-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunders-ever https://www.coca-colacompany.com/news/the-story-of-one-of-th... "The events of 1985 changed forever the dynamics of the soft-drink industry and the success of The Coca-Cola Company, as the Coca-Cola brand soared to new heights and consumers continued to remember the love they have for Coca-Cola. "
- mixmastamyk 7y agoI remember it often on the nightly news as well.
- Gunax 7y agoWhat I find incredible is just how similar everything tastes. Either my qualia are objectively different from everyone else's, or it's 90% marketing fluff and psychological tribalism. It's not so much that there can't be a difference between the various cokes, Pepsis, and other brands--I just find it hard to believe that the difference is so great that people can find one repulsive and the other divine. It's all just sweet, fizzy drink. Side by side I might be able to tell coke and new coke apart. I don't find it difficult to believe that people have a preference. I find it difficult to believe that one could be so swayed by the difference to revolt. So I cannot shake that it's more tribal identity than taste... Sort of like rock vs hip-hop. Yea, I know telling people it's mostly mental is going to be controversial, so sorry.
- andreyk 7y agoPersonally, I absolutely find non diet coke way worse than diet or zero coke due to its syrupy-ness. So I think many drinks do have very distinct tastes (though many are also similar).
- Marcus316 7y agoIt's quite possible you're right, and I can't deny that my brain is pretty twisted anyways. That said, I feel like there's a clear difference in taste between brands, at least for my own taste buds. I drink Coca-Cola as my preferred choice. I can't stand Pepsi (and will order a new drink in a restaurant if Pepsi shows up when I ordered Coca-Cola; I can tell, even if it's not labeled). There's a specific sweetness to each, to my tastebuds. I also enjoy RC Cola, but it's also a different flavour from either of the two most well-known brands. I get pretty specific in my tastes, especially surrounding extra flavourings. I dislike vanilla flavouring added to my colas, though I will still drink it paired with another flavour such as orange or cherry. I will choose Cherry Coke (classic) over just Coke any day, but will choose just Coke over Cherry-Vanilla Coke. I'm willing to drink Wild Cherry Pepsi (actually quite good), even though regular Pepsi is not a flavour I enjoy. There's an interesting version of Pepsi called Pepsi Throwback (at least, that's what it's called around here) which I also enjoy greatly. It uses a different sweetener than regular Pepsi. I can't stand either Diet Coke or Coke Zero (or any Diet soft drinks, really); neither taste right, to me. Now, I still think New Coke vs Coke was overblown. I don't fault the Coca-Cola company for trying to shake things up a bit, and perhaps the new formula could have appealed better, given time and a better launch. We'll never know, though ...
- dempedempe 7y agoThe end of Mad Men implies that Don Draper is the creator of Coca-Cola's "Buy the World a Coke" ad[1]. Is he also responsible in later years for New Coke? [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GxtZpFl3pPM&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GxtZpFl3pPM&feature=youtu.be
- TomatoTomato 7y agoI wonder if they had made a subtle changes year after year that people's tastes would have adjusted.
- thulecitizen 7y agoYay! Sugar water!