New Coke

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New Coke bottle

New Coke was the unofficial name of the soft drink successor to Coca-Cola , which was launched by the Coca-Cola Company in 1985 . Although the product name was not officially changed, but it was due to the advertising campaign "The New Taste of Coca Cola" under this synonym known until 1992, when the new formula was sold in the few regions of the world where Coca Cola II was renamed.

However, the modified formula of the “new Coca-Cola” did not achieve the desired success with consumers and was consequently withdrawn from the market after a few weeks. This approach turned out to be one of the biggest marketing disasters in advertising history.

history

By the late 1950s, Coca-Cola's sales were five times greater than Pepsi-Cola's. Pepsi-Cola then focused its marketing efforts on establishing itself as a drink for young people with the slogan " the drink of the youth " and thereby differentiating itself from the broader focus of Coca-Cola. PepsiCo supplemented this in the 1970s with the so-called " Pepsi-Challenge ", in which consumers were asked to compare Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola tastes in a blind test. In this direct comparison, most consumers preferred the sweeter Pepsi-Cola. In the 1980s, PepsiCo tightened this marketing approach by appearing globally at the same time as the “ Pepsi Challenge ”, found one of the most effective slogans in advertising history with the “ Pepsi Generation ” and hiring personalities such as Don Johnson and Michael Jackson as advertising media. As a result, Coca-Cola increasingly lost market share to Pepsi-Cola. According to marketing expert Matt Haig, at the beginning of the 1980s it was only the better distribution channels for Coca-Cola that prevented Pepsi-Cola from becoming the top-selling soft drink in the USA.

After Roberto Goizueta became President of the Coca-Cola Company in 1980 , he and Don Keough introduced Diet Coke in 1982 . In-house, the extremely successful introduction of Diet Coke, which since its launch in 1982 had quickly become the third-strongest cola drink after Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, was also attributed to the fact that this drink was closer to Pepsi-Cola than Coca-Cola in terms of taste . With the competition from Pepsi-Cola, the market share of the Coca-Cola brand shrank from 60 percent in 1945 to 24 percent in 1983, whereby the company tried to expand its market share again as the world's top-selling cola brand with newly introduced variations .

As a result, the Coca-Cola Company announced at a press conference on April 19, 1985 that there would be a change in the Coca-Cola product. During the press conference it was stated that a new product was about to be launched, but no indication was given that the company would change the most successful product in its range, Coca-Cola itself. This change was only officially confirmed when the company launched the new product on the following Tuesday, April 23, with the slogan “The New Taste of Coca Cola” in the USA and ceased production of the traditional formula. Due to the new taste with the changed recipe (including vanillin instead of natural vanilla), the new cola was also called New Coke . There were also inconsistent changes in the type and, above all, the amount of sugar used. The company had a blind test carried out on 190,000 test persons with the result that the new recipe was superior to both the "old" Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola.

Up to 40,000 letters of complaint arrived at the Atlanta headquarters . PepsiCo reacted very quickly to its competitor's mistake and, just weeks after New Coke was launched in the United States, ran a television advertisement in which an old man sitting on a park bench mourned the old Coca-Cola. On July 11, 1985, Robert Goizueta had to announce the withdrawal of the decision and the reintroduction of the old recipe, which was then marketed in the USA as Classic Coke. The news was rated so remarkable in the US that, among other things, ABC News interrupted the current program for a short message. The Coca-Cola Company announced in 2009 that it would no longer use the word "Classic" to appeal to younger consumers.

Trivia

Coca-Cola manager Don Keough later commented on the New Coke fiasco:

“ Some critics will say that Coca Cola made a marketing mistake. Some critics will say that we planned all of this in advance. The truth is, we are neither that stupid nor that smart. "

In the 13th episode of the first season of the animated series Futurama there is an allusion to this supposed marketing concept. The main characters of the series visit the production facilities of "slurm", a soft drink that takes on the role and distribution of Coca-Cola in the series. There they meet the "slurm queen", who announces that they will bring the hideous tasting "New Slurm" onto the market in order to then earn billions with the later marketing of "Slurm Classic".

literature

  • David Greising: The world should drink Coca-Cola: This is how Roberto Goizueta made Coca-Cola the No. 1. Modern Industry, Landsberg am Lech 1999 (Original title: I'd Like the World to Buy a Coke , translated by Brigitte von Werneburg) ISBN 3-478-36720-4 .
  • Matt Haig: Brand Failures . Kogan Page Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-7494-6300-7 .
  • Mark Pendergrast: For God, Fatherland and Coca-Cola. Heyne, Munich 1995 (original title: For God, Country and Coca Cola , translated by Heike Rosbach). ISBN 3-453-08784-4 .
  • Klaus Schmeh: The 55 Biggest Flops in Economic History , Redline Economy at Ueberreuter, Frankfurt am Main / Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-8323-0864-4 .
  • Josiane Ferrari: Anatomy of the management paradigms in the context of the product development process in practice: two case studies from the consumer goods industry 2002, DNB 965693716 (dissertation Uni St. Gallen 2002, 325 pages).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Matt Haig: Brand Failures . Kogan Page Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-749-46300-7 . P. 11.
  2. ^ A b c Matt Haig: Brand Failures . Kogan Page Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-749-46300-7 . P. 9.
  3. ↑ a b Matt Haig: Brand Failures . Kogan Page Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-749-46300-7 . P. 10.
  4. ↑ Got tired . In: Der Spiegel . No. 17 , 1986 ( online - 21 April 1986 ).
  5. ↑ a b Matt Haig: Brand Failures . Kogan Page Limited, London 2011, ISBN 978-0-749-46300-7 , p. 12.
  6. ^ Coke scraps "Classic" tag from the flagship cola report at Reuters