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I 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 m

I 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 6y ago
The 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 6y ago
  Also 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 6y ago
  To 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 6y 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 6y ago
      I 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 6y ago
        I 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 6y ago
  Those 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 6y ago
    I 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 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Beyond 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 6y ago
        Now 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 6y ago
        Coke 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 6y ago
  I 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 6y ago
    Oh, 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 6y ago
      Another 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 6y ago
    Yeah, 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 6y 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 6y ago
    I 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 6y ago
      As 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 6y ago
  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 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 6y ago
This 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 6y ago
High-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 6y ago
Simple 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.

yodon 6y ago

The 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 6y ago
Also 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 6y ago
To 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 6y 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 6y ago
    I 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 6y ago
      I 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 6y ago
Those 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 6y ago
  I 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 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Beyond 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 6y ago
      Now 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 6y ago
        Coke 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 6y ago
I 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 6y ago
  Oh, 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 6y ago
    Another 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 6y ago
  Yeah, 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 6y 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 6y ago
  I 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 6y ago
    As 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 6y ago
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 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 6y ago

This 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 6y ago

High-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 6y ago

Simple 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.