On This Day in History Shit Went Down: April 23

The New Coke fiasco

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I have an MBA and worked in marketing, and marketers are a special kind of stupid. There’s a reason that Dilbert cartoon made fun of us. The clusterfuckery of the launch of “New Coke” is a prime example.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 23, 1985--

Despite Dilbert creator Scott Adams turning out to be a Trump-loving conspiracy-theory douchenozzle who has blocked me on Twitter, I liked the strip. The stupidest character was “Ratbert,” who became vice president of marketing for a technology company with his primary qualification being “I spent a week in a dumpster at Procter and Gamble.” 

Last year I wrote about how Coca-Cola is an evil empire. Now let’s poke fun at how they are also stupid and pissed off a chunk of their customer base with the launch of New Coke. In the 1950s, Coke outsold Pepsi five to one. But in the 1980s Pepsi used celebrity endorsements to position the company as the youthful choice, making Coke seem like a drink for old farts. Coke was losing market share. Not wanting to give up their chunk of the sugar-water pie, the marketroids got to work.

“The Pepsi Challenge” was a blind taste test that revealed most preferred Pepsi’s sweeter taste. And Pepsi milked the shit out of it. So the brainiacs at Coke thought they’d come up with a new formula that people liked better than both the old Coke and more than Pepsi too. Genius!

Except they fucked it up, and marketing professors got a case study to teach their students about “how not to.” Coke came up with a new formula and did a whopping 200,000 taste tests, finding that it beat both old Coke and Pepsi. Seemed like they were all set to regain market share with this wonderful new taste. They were so confident that on April 23, 1985, the company didn’t launch New Coke as an alternative, but a replacement. Old Coke was out, gone. New Coke was the only Coke. And people fucking hated it. 

What went wrong? The marketers failed to realize that taste wasn’t the only thing that mattered to their customers. First off, the taste test was a “sip”. As a small sip, the sweeter product tasted good, but after an entire can it was an “Ow, my pancreas!” overdose. The marketroids also discounted the decades of nostalgia and product loyalty people connected to the original. Suddenly the company had taken their beloved Coke and said, “None for you!” and forced upon them something they weren’t asking for. Well, fuck you, Coke. You’re not the boss of me. 

Some were fine with the New Coke, but the company got a lot of hate and brought back the old formula as “Coke Classic” within three months, which resulted in a significant boost in sales, leading to allegations that the whole fiasco had actually been a genius marketing ploy. But it wasn’t. New Coke was finally discontinued in 2002. 

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