“New Coke; tasted great, still a PR disaster.”
According to Snopes it wasnt in the long run - it reinvigorated Coke to the point where they even got accused that they’d done it deliberately as a marketting ploy:
Otara
What is New Coke? When did that come out? When did it stop? Why don’t I remember anything about it?
You kids are so young!
“New Coke” was a 1980s monstrosity. I never liked it. They identified “new Coke” with an extra gray line in the “twiddle” on the Coke logo that apes the shape of the classic Coke bottle. They advertised the hell out of it, trying to get peoople to change. They pushed it at McDonald’s. They told us how great it was.
People didn’t buy it. They started buying up and hoarding Old Coke. People were starting to speculate in soft drinks. A lot of folks started to protest. They wanted the original back. For a time, Coke trelented to the extent that they put out “Coke Classic” side by side with “New Coke”, which they continued to push. No dice. Peopple wanted The Real Thing. New Coke eventually died out altogether.
I’ve read how the decision to reformulate Coke was a rational business decision, but I still can’t buy it. For years Coke had claimed that their success was based on their adherence to the original formula (which, aside from the substitution of high fructose corn syrup in place of cane sugar, hadn’t changed since they went out of their way to remove cocaine from the coca extract. In terms of flavor, it was probably substantiaklly the same as it had been since Asa Candler reformulated Pemberton’s mix.) They’d been bragging about this for years, and the aggregate of all that incessant advertising (“Coke it it! Coke i the Real Thing!”) reinforced this. People grew up lon Coke. They took Coke Syrup when they had colds. They mixed cherry cokes at soda fountains. and all this was supposed to change overnight because of a few taste tests?
Obviously there was more to it than taste alone. There was emotional resonance. And Coke shoulda known this – they’d been trading on it for ages. All the Coke memorabilia and emotional commercials sold the idea of Coke and its associations much more than they sold flavored sugar water.
Dynamic Ribbon Device
They have. But there’s two problems- one is that Coke’s original formula uses tiny amounts of some rather pricey substances, amounts so tiny that the yaste differences is minor. So why bother with them? Well, somes dudes can tell the difference. But in any case, what tatses good to Coke drinkers is what comes in that red can. Most dudes can’t tell Pepsi from Coke*, and even 99% of those that can would be fooled if you put a good offbrand in a Coke bottle and served it. Most of the taste of Coke is in the mind of the consumer.
- Many here hhave claimed they have, and it’s possible that they can as something like 40% of soda drinkers can do so. But in order for them to really know they are able to, a blind taste test would have to be administered. Most Coke or Pepsis fans insist there is a difference when looking at the bottle.
Now, I can tell, but not always. See, especially with fountain drinks- the syrup mixture and the taste of the local water will change the taste HWAAAAY more than the small brand differences- so much so that sometimes I have problems telling the difference between diet and regular. With canned sodas, freshness is important.
By this, I mean that if you find someone who claims to greatly prefer one over the other, and offer him a correctly labeled can of each, he will sip both and tell you that he still prefers his favorite. If you offer him a blind taste test- with cans or bottles for both- he should be able to choose his favorite consistently aropund half the time- note the word consistently as anyone will get it right half the time, of course. With the “other” offered to him in his fave’s bottle, my guess is that 90%+ won’t say a thing.
I did take part in a blind taste test, and the difference was obvious to me.
This is the part that is incredible to me. I know that many, perhaps most, people can say that diet doesn’t taste that different from regular, but I’m one of those people who gets an unbearable aftertaste from the artificial sugar. I’ve never found a diet cola that I could drink. How anybody could not taste the difference is beyond me.
But that’s the dilemma that manufacturers face when trying to work with the mass consumer audience. They have to pitch their products to the great middle. Trying to hit the tiny niche audiences is expensive and sometimes counter-productive. (There was a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago recounting how Kit Kat lost 10% of its market in Britain by trying to add on new flavors.)
There’s no WAG about this. The cola market is old and settled. The only new brand that has made even a tiny headway in recent years is Jolt Cola and that did so by increasing the caffeine, not changing the cola taste.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t dozens if not hundreds of tiny cola brands in the U.S. Find a specialty store and browse. But reproducing Coke’s taste will get you nowhere in the market and a lawsuit in the courts. Again, why bother?
But if you matched the GC profile, sugar and acid levels exactly, wouldn’t you pretty much have the same flavor?
New Coke didn’t die out, it just changed names. In fact, although you can’t get it here, they still make it.
???
I’ve never seen or heard of this.
What happened to “crystal” coke? Is it still made?
Oh, I beleive you, after all about half can tell the difference.
About diet- if you drink Diet, and ONLY diet for about a month, that funny aftertaste will go away and sugared sodas will taste syrupy. I can tell the difference- 90% of the time, but what I was trying to say that with Fountain drinks the syrup mix and the local water will sometimes be so overpoweringly wrong that I can’t even tell the difference between Diet and sugar- and that is a much larger difference between Coke and Pepsi. *If * the mix is right, and *if * they use filtered water or bother to change the filter- then I prefer Fountain drinks.
Jolt is pretty dead. However, there is still room in the Cola wars for different flavours of the “Big Two”- Lime, lemon, Cherry, Vanilla, and so forth.
Reproducing Cokes tastes won’t get you duded- there’s not grounds. In fact, it has been done. What will get you sued is claiming to have reproduced Coke’s taste. In other words saying “Tastes just like Coke” will get you sued. (Saying: “tastes better than Coke” is OK, however, and one local campaign tried “tastes just like the real thing” :dubious: )
The big difference between Coke and Pepsis is that Coke has more 'spicy/cinnamon" taste and is more “syrupy” and Pepsi has slightly mor esugar and more citrus notes. Oddly, this leads to the big agument- which tastes “sweeter”, with both Coke addicts and Pepsi fans saying that the other product is “too sweet”. They are both right, actually. Although Pepsi has a tad more sugar, Coke has a slightly more syrupy “mouth feel”, and “spicy notes” tend to emphasise sweetness, while “citrus notes” tend to cut the sweetness. But both Coke fans and Pepsis addicts will swear that the other product is “too sweet”!
Is it enough to just know the ingredients of a recipe? Wouldn’t the process, temperature, blending sequence, timing and other factors all have an effect on the final taste?
The cola wars are all about very subtle difference in tastes - well, that and marketing. Even a beer drinker such as myself knows that a bottle of red wine improves after it is allowed to breath for a few minutes.
Also, if my memory serves me - and it often doesn’t - Wendy’s taste tested their hamburgers with the same ingredients (tomatoes, lettuce, meat, etc) but stacked in different orders. Consumers showed a distinct preference for some orderings over others. So here we have exactly the same ingredients, but differences in flavors. Not a perfect analogy to a cola, but still…
Jolt’s a local product and there was an article in the paper recently talking about how they’re beginning to come back after a long flat time.
I agree. In fact, I said exactly that earlier in the thread.
Or, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in his great book “Blink,” “Pepsi’s success in the blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous - in the real world no one drinks Coca-Cola blind!”
I wasn’t aware that New Coke beat Pepsi in the tests, but that only strengthens the point. People, or at least the people who prefer Coke, do not choose their drink based on the taste, but on other factors.
Oddly, I prefer Pepsi over Coke, and RC (if I can get it) over either, largely because it tastes sweeter to me. If I didn’t want sweet, there are a lot of beverage choices better than pop of any sort.
Because some people have different preferences and opinions than you. In this case, these differences lie in the realm of beverages. I know, I know… shocking!
What do *you * drink?
One of my old professors did market research during the summers. One thing he did was a taste test for a cola company (I don’t remember which one).
To participate in the test, you had to claim that you could tell the difference between Coke & Pepsi. You couldn’t be like me, one who just drinks whatever’s on sale. You had to say that you had a preference.
Then he placed four cups on front of you, two were your stated preferred drink and the other two contained a different product. Your job, as a taster, was to taste all four cups, group together the two cups with matching products, then identify which pair contained your preferred cola.
We ran the numbers as part of a class exercise.
They were no better than random chance.
The lesson: You make think you can tell a difference but most people can’t when tested.
There’s some sort of marketing term for this but there’s an enormous identity that has to be built in the mind of a consumer when you’re competing with a product that is basically identical to other brands. Cigarettes are a classic example. If your product is the same as all the others, you can’t sell it on taste, or whatever it is that your product is really about. You have to instead sell it on image and other intangibles.
If you see coke or pepsi ads, they’re not selling a refreshing beverage, they’re selling *life *or *action *or *lifestyle *or whatever. Most people that state a preference in a brand of identical products have, probably inadvertently, bought into the image of the product and not the actual product.