Back in June 1985, viewers of the popular soap opera General Hospital were glued to their screens for another explosive episode (the plot was apparently “Frisco quits Teen Time” and we didn’t really care to investigate further). Suddenly, ABC interrupted the show for an urgent news brief! Barely able to wait for the theme music to stop, anchor Peter Jennings solemnly announced that “The old taste of Coca-Cola is coming back.” At last, America’s national nightmare was over. The demon New Coke was dead!
New Coke had been launched in a blaze of publicity just 80 days earlier. And by all accounts, the launch went great! Sales shot up and surveys showed that customers loved the new flavor. Yet in less than three months, New Coke managed to become the biggest joke in America, the equivalent of drinking out of a mop bucket you found in the Port Authority. The ridicule was so bad that the company had to perform one of the most humiliating climb downs in marketing history and reintroduce the old Coke flavor.
But just what did kill New Coke? Was it a vast right-wing conspiracy? Pepsi spies planting negative stories? Could it even have been a sinister plot by Coke itself, who always intended for the new taste to fail in order to boost sales of classic Coke? Or did the soda just taste like hummingbird piss? People have literally been arguing over this for the past 35 years, so it looks like it’s up to us to settle things once and for all. So strap in and enjoy the ride, because we’re willing to risk our lives to solve this mystery.
New Coke Was Launched In A Desperate Attempt To Stay Number One
New Coke had been born several years earlier, when executives at Coca-Cola — the massively successful Fortune 500 company — apparently became concerned that people might hate their product. Coke was an American icon, but sales had been quietly dropping for years. Meanwhile, arch-rivals Pepsi had massively increased their market share thanks to ad campaigns like the Pepsi Challenge, a series of blind taste tests which revealed that customers loved the taste of Pepsi, whereas they tended to react to Coke by doing a spit-take and screaming “oh God, dozens of rats must have died in this one!” As supermarket sales continued to fall, it became clear that Coke might be passed by Pepsi as America’s favorite soft drink.
It was a horrible fate, and Coke executives were presumably about 20 minutes into some kind of mass suicide when somebody suggested changing the recipe. After all, Pepsi was sweeter than Coke and everyone seemed to love it. So why not just make Coke sweeter? Even better, the company already had a sweeter formula ready to go, having accidentally stumbled on it while trying to invent Diet Coke. Taste tests revealed that consumers consistently preferred the new taste to either Pepsi or the old Coke, making them the first tests in years that didn’t end with an enraged Coke executive punching through a two-way mirror and beating an entire focus group unconscious with a two-liter of Mr. Pibb.
Coke was soon gearing up for an all-out launch of the new taste, with internal documents declaring “in its size, scope and boldness, [New Coke] is not unlike the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944 … [New Coke] can not, must not fail.” That sounds like the speech a grizzled general gives you before you airdrop in to fight Godzilla, but it shows how seriously executives were taking the launch. Obviously it’s not a good sign when your CEO is standing in front of a giant American flag, wearing a mech suit that replaces his blood with New Coke, screaming “This is the future! God is dead, New Coke rules in heaven!” But it does show a certain level of commitment. Most daringly of all, the company decided to totally replace the old Coke, which was taken out of production to make way for the new formula. From now on, if you wanted a Coke, you’d drink New Coke or you’d drink nothing.
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Soda Wars: Pepsi Strikes Back
New Coke debuted in April 1985, and at first everything went great. Sales shot up by eight percent overnight and the company was flooded with calls praising the new taste. One experienced soda connoisseur (a random child) declared it “the best Coke I’ve ever had, it’s just delicious!” Other people said even nicer things, but nobody could understand them, since their mouths were full of delicious New Coke. Since it was the 1980s, executives were probably just about to celebrate with some kind of Coke and coke party when the first cracks started to show.
Who Killed The New Coke?
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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