Coca Cola’s legendary existence could have surrendered to other soft drink companies, simply because of its failure to recognize the power of brand.
When we talk about top brands, Coca Cola comes to mind. Personally, I find Coca Cola a whole marketing case where you can learn almost all aspects of marketing and strategic branding more than any other company in the world.
But even the strongest brand has a weakness, and Coca Cola’s weakness could have ended its legend.
Coca Cola started in 1886 as a pain relief remedy, and then it became highly popular as a refreshing drink after adding carbon dioxide to it and serving it “ice cold.” It even became a tradition to serve it to guests in its original (and classic) bottle.
But even the strongest brand has a weakness, and Coca Cola’s weakness could have ended its legend.
Like any successful brand, everybody tried to copy its concept and sell “just another” carbonated soft drink; they even copied Coca Cola’s visual branding. Some even tried to come up with names that could be confused with Coca Cola, such as Lola Cola. At the end of the day, only the best survived. At that time they were Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Royal Crown (known as RC Cola, which died later on).
Pepsi market share was nothing compared to Coca Cola. It remained weak until the day came when Pepsi decided to become the opposite of Coca Cola. Pepsi changed its branding, started targeting minorities and lower income markets, and positioned its drink as a drink for the younger generation. Pepsi even used MJ in their commercials!
In 1975, Pepsi did its best marketing maneuver ever: It did the Pepsi Challenge! It was basically a blind taste test (blind, you have no clue what’s in the cups). The test had two samples: Coca Cola and Pepsi.
They moved from town to town and college to college looking for young people to compare the two drinks, and the result was usually Pepsi. Some does argue that this is basically because Pepsi has more sugar. Pepsi’s popularity started to grow rapidly.
If the Pepsi Challenge was a branded taste test instead of a blind one, it wouldn’t have got the feedback it did.
Coca Cola panicked. After all these years of being as the top carbonated soft drink with no one to challenge its status, Pepsi—which was known internally in Coca Cola as “the imitator”—was stealing Coca Cola’s market share.
Because Coca Cola “thought” it had to act, it decided to launch one of the worse marketing failures known in history. It decided to replace the original Coca Cola recipe drink with a new drink: New Coke.
The result was disastrous; Coca Cola has received 400,000 negative feedbacks through calls and letters, a group of people formed an organization and filed a case against Coca Cola for refusing their “Freedom of Choice,” and a man sold his wife’s investments to fill up his truck with all the bottles of original Coca Cola he could get. A psychiatrist described the calls Coca Cola received from their customers as sounding as if callers had lost a family member.
Three months later, Coca Cola returned the original Coca Cola and discontinued the New Coke. Since then, “Classic” was added to the original Coca Cola name, as we can see it now.
We can imagine that Coca Cola was stupid to do such a thing, but having a closer look, what Coca Cola missed was the value of their brand and its effect on the taste. If the Pepsi Challenge was a branded taste test instead of a blind one, it wouldn’t have got the feedback it did.