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New Coke, 35 years on

independent.co.uk

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Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#71

Post by dreamcompiler »

Gunax wrote: post #65

What I find incredible is just how similar everything tastes. Either my qualia are objectively different from everyone else's, or it's 90% marketing fluff and psychological tribalism. It's not so much that there can't be a difference between the various cokes, Pepsis, and other brands--I just find it hard to believe that the difference is so great that people can find one repulsive and the other divine. It's all just…

I could tell the difference easily. New Coke tasted just like Pepsi, and Pepsi is too sweet. I can drink a whole Coke and feel refreshed, but if I do that with Pepsi I feel slightly queasy. It's like chugging maple syrup. In a blind taste test sweeter always wins, but less sweet is preferable to me (and apparently to a lot of people) in a full serving.

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#72

Post by hindsightbias »

teslabox wrote: post #41

I like the conspiracy theory about how the New Coke fiasco was actually deliberate subterfuge for switching the product from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Corn-syrup coca-cola tastes different than Coca Kola's classic sugar formula, and allegedly people noticed the difference when the Coca-Cola company was doing tests, pre-New Coke. My cousin-in-law only drinks "Mexican Coke" (but Mexicans drinking coca-cola in…

It took almost 30 years, but the look on first-time Mexican Coke drinkers faces was priceless. They all became conspiracy believers that day.

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#74

Post by mywittyname »

epicureanideal wrote: post #55
yodon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The path to New Coke was quite simple, actually. Coke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests. The preference was simple - Pepsi was sweeter, and in blind taste tests people overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter drink. This hard data was seen as indicating a looming crisis and management felt the need to act and a…

I would be interested to know whether they tested this WITH FOOD. If I were just drinking a few sips of some soda, I probably would prefer Pepsi. But if I'm eating almost any kind of food, I prefer Coke, because it's not so overpoweringly sweet in comparison to whatever food I'm eating. And in general I don't just crack open a soda and drink it straight, I'm usually drinking it with some food, so 90% of the soda I bu…

Oh, from a few sips you'd definitely prefer Pepsi.

But you're right, Coke is amazing because it compliments food so damn well. There's a reason 90% or so of American restaurants use Coke, and it's not just because Pepsi owns Yum! brands, as this was the case since long before that happened.

Edit: now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if Coke contains a chemical similar to MSG that acts as a flavor enhancer for savory foods.

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#75

Post by yodon »

teslabox wrote: post #41

I like the conspiracy theory about how the New Coke fiasco was actually deliberate subterfuge for switching the product from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Corn-syrup coca-cola tastes different than Coca Kola's classic sugar formula, and allegedly people noticed the difference when the Coca-Cola company was doing tests, pre-New Coke. My cousin-in-law only drinks "Mexican Coke" (but Mexicans drinking coca-cola in…

It definitely was not a planned conspiracy that way. Did Coke switch to corn syrup after, yes, but they lost far too much stock market value, lost far too much market share, and far too many key marketers at Coke had their careers destroyed by the fiasco to have made it an even remotely economically sensible approach for anyone involved to have taken simply as a way to shift to corn syrup (which could easily have been done slowly and quietly over a year or two of formula drift without anyone noticing or complaining and certainly without any of these catastrophic brand and career and revenue impacts). Yes, Coke did spend untold millions trying to recover from the debacle, and yes, they were ultimately successful, and yes they did switch to corn syrup during that turn around, but sometimes the answer really is incompetence rather than conspiracy, even if the conspiracy version is more fun to advocate for on the Internet.

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#77

Post by joezydeco »

yodon wrote: post #24
stuff4ben wrote: post #2

I wish someone would spill the secrets of how New Coke came to be from inside CocaCola's offices. From the boardroom to the marketing dept, to the "chefs" who made the new recipe. Now that would be an interesting read. To see the decisions that were made and office politics that shaped what almost caused CocaCola to go under.

The path to New Coke was quite simple, actually. Coke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests. The preference was simple - Pepsi was sweeter, and in blind taste tests people overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter drink. This hard data was seen as indicating a looming crisis and management felt the need to act and a…

Coke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests

Pepsi was also running television commercials ("The Pepsi Challenge") showing consumers doing exactly this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghMYzo0rgrw

It was a popular campaign that certainly put pressure on Coca-Cola to act.

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#78

Post by WorldMaker »

epicureanideal wrote: post #55
yodon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The path to New Coke was quite simple, actually. Coke learned that in blind taste tests, consumers overwhelmingly preferred Pepsi to Coke, by a wide margin and repeatable across a wide range of tests. The preference was simple - Pepsi was sweeter, and in blind taste tests people overwhelmingly preferred the sweeter drink. This hard data was seen as indicating a looming crisis and management felt the need to act and a…

I would be interested to know whether they tested this WITH FOOD. If I were just drinking a few sips of some soda, I probably would prefer Pepsi. But if I'm eating almost any kind of food, I prefer Coke, because it's not so overpoweringly sweet in comparison to whatever food I'm eating. And in general I don't just crack open a soda and drink it straight, I'm usually drinking it with some food, so 90% of the soda I bu…

Yeah, it's often mentioned too (and mentioned in the article) that people will have very different preferences for "a few sips" and "I'm going to drink a whole can of this in one sitting".

New Coke is almost a poster child of how blind taste tests sometimes can be very blind in ignoring what should be important context information in people's preferences, exactly like "how much am I drinking of this?" and "what am I pairing it with?".

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#79

Post by T-hawk »

teslabox wrote: post #41

I like the conspiracy theory about how the New Coke fiasco was actually deliberate subterfuge for switching the product from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Corn-syrup coca-cola tastes different than Coca Kola's classic sugar formula, and allegedly people noticed the difference when the Coca-Cola company was doing tests, pre-New Coke. My cousin-in-law only drinks "Mexican Coke" (but Mexicans drinking coca-cola in…

The HFCS theory is pretty simply debunked. Coca-Cola had already switched to HFCS long before New Coke, starting five years prior, in 1980.

Snopes: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/new-coke-fiasco/

Re: New Coke, 35 years on

#80

Post by bsder »

stuff4ben wrote: post #2

I wish someone would spill the secrets of how New Coke came to be from inside CocaCola's offices. From the boardroom to the marketing dept, to the "chefs" who made the new recipe. Now that would be an interesting read. To see the decisions that were made and office politics that shaped what almost caused CocaCola to go under.

Simple answer: Diet Coke.

A lot of people preferred the taste of Diet Coke to standard Coke and Diet Coke was the fastest growing product at the time. And Diet Coke was apparently cannibalizing a lot of the Coke drinkers. So they made the normal Coke taste more like the Diet one.

Which failed biblically.

I just wish I could get my old saccharine-based Diet Coke back.

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