Word: coking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Meanwhile, frantic efforts were being made to design a new can. Such a job normally takes at least 60 days, but time was now agonizingly short. Bill Schermerhorn, Coke's brand manager, made an urgent telephone call last Monday to Alvin Schechter, creative director of the Schechter Group, a Manhattan design firm. By 10 p.m. Tuesday, Schechter had completed the assignment. The red can features the traditional Coca-Cola script with the word "Classic" in black roman type...
...weeks, the tightly knit world of market research has been abuzz with gossip about Coke's mistake. "It appears to be a colossal marketing blunder," says George Mihaly, head of the consulting division of Crossley Surveys. Mihaly discovered widespread adverse reaction to the new Coke while conducting an unrelated study of upper-level managers. When asked for their opinion of the change in Coke, all the executives gave it a negative review. Since he had done some work for Coke in the past, Mihaly told, his findings to high-level contacts at the company. The early warnings were apparently ignored...
Mihaly believes that the Coke experience shows up some of the weaknesses of taste tests. He is critical of them in general because consumers have difficulty distinguishing slight variations in taste...
...Coke's 500 U.S. bottlers felt the wrath of consumers most directly. The bottlers, who are mainly independent businessmen, take syrup sold by the company, mix it with carbonated water, and ship the finished product to stores and other vendors. They are thus the brand's local distributors. Some recalled being stopped on the street in recent weeks by angry and argumentative Coke drinkers. "The consumer resented the fact that we put a flavor out there and said. 'This is what you're going to like,' " observed Frank Barren, corporate secretary of Rome Coca-Cola Bottling in Georgia...
...experience has taught many bottlers a lesson. "What Coca-Cola didn't realize was that the old Coke was the property of the American public," says Bobby Wilkinson, president of Huntsville Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in Alabama. "The bottlers thought they owned it. The company thought it owned it. But the consumers knew they owned it. And when someone tampered with it, they got upset...