It 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

It 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.