Word: coca-cola
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Coke's change was immediately greeted by angry protest. For three straight months, Coca-Cola headquarters received some 1,500 phone calls daily, as well as a barrage of angry letters. Wrote one correspondent: "Changing Coke is like God making the grass purple or putting toes on our ears or teeth on our knees." Among the most common complaints: new Coke was dull and watery and tasted distressingly like Pepsi...
...chastened Keough admitted last week, "The passion for original Coke was something that just flat caught us by surprise. The simple fact is that all of the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the depth and emotional attachment to the original Coca-Cola felt by so many people...
Keough denied a widely held belief that the company had brought out new Coke as part of a deliberate, Machiavellian plot to create support for the older product. Said he: "Some critics will say Coca-Cola has made a marketing mistake. Some cynics say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is, we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart...
...brand brouhaha began back in 1980, when Goizueta and Keough were picked for Coca-Cola's top jobs. They were determined to reverse a disturbing trend. Over the previous decade, Pepsi had been steadily gaining on Coke. Using a brash advertising campaign built around the "Pepsi Challenge" slogan, the rival cola was becoming increasingly popular with younger drinkers, who seemed to prefer its sweetness to the crisper taste of Coke. The inroads were largest in supermarkets, where Pepsi in 1977 actually overtook Coke in sales. Because of its dominance in the fountain and vending-machine trade, however, Coke still holds...
...Coke now concedes, its test marketing was flawed. Among other things, Coca-Cola neglected to inform consumers that choosing new Coke meant saying farewell to old Coke. "We failed to tell the tasters graphically enough that their preference for the new would mean that they would never be able to taste the original Coke again," explained Ira Herbert, vice president for worldwide marketing...