The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: mystery-ak on May 09, 2021, 01:26:05 pm
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May 9, 2021
Old Coke, New Coke, Woke Coke, Broke Coke
By William Sullivan
By the time the Cola Wars really heated up in the 1980s, Coca-Cola had perennially enjoyed the upper hand over Pepsi in a rivalry that dated to the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1975, however, Coke began to feel threatened by Pepsi, due to a marketing ploy -- “the Pepsi Challenge.” It was a blind taste test to show that “more people preferred Pepsi over Coke.”
Interestingly, this wasn’t just a gimmick. Internal research at Coca-Cola confirmed that when the brand association was extracted from the equation, “consumers preferred Pepsi,” with its “sweeter, more syrupy flavor.”
In one of the most famous business decisions in modern history, Coca-Cola reacted to what they believed to be consumer sentiment in 1985. People were “in love with the notion of Coca-Cola, but they weren’t necessarily drinking Coca-Cola” to the extent they had been before. So, it changed the signature formula of the drink to taste more like Pepsi, with the new concoction becoming known as “New Coke.”
It was a move that has been described as both a “colossal business blunder” and an “unintended stroke of marketing genius.” Coke fans were immediately outraged, and Pepsi was delighted to be “The Choice of a New Generation,” a slogan that persisted into the 1990s. Coke was the past, and Pepsi was the future, my generation was told.
And yet, it simply didn’t work out that way.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/old_coke_new_coke_woke_coke_broke_coke.html
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Gone Coke