Forty years ago this week: New Coke officially bombed

Depending on who you listen to this was either legitimate corporate bungling on an unprecedented scale, or it was the greatest ever conspiracy by an American company against its customers.  There is no denying though: whatever it was, it worked.

It began in April of 1985.  Soft drink mega company Coca-Cola ehhh... "changed" the formula of its flagship product. "New Coke" was claimed to be much better than the original product  That is what all the advertising told us anyway.  I mean, even Bill Cosby swore and declared to us that Coke had been improved upon.  "The impossible has become a reality," he assured us.

Bill Cosby wouldn't lie to us, right?  Right?!?!?

People tried New Coke.  And the vast majority of them said that it tasted nowhere as good as the original product.  I remember it also.  It tasted more like Pepsi Cola.  In fact, if I had done a blind taste test with New Coke and Pepsi I probably wouldn't have been able to tell a difference between the two.

There is no telling how many letters and phone calls the Coca-Cola Company.  But it was a lot of them.  And the company wisely took notice of the outrage.  Less than three months later Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta went before a nationwide audience and admitted that the reaction to New Coke had, ehhhh... not been what the company calculated it would be.  So the original drink was going to be coming back, as Coca-Cola Classic.  This was a MASSIVELY big deal.  I think all the network news broadcasts that night opened with the Coke story.

So within a week or so we got Coca-Cola Classic on our shelves and vending machines, and they sold so fast that distributors could barely keep up.  Sales of the original Coke in the early weeks and months of its return eclipsed those of its competitors.  Which makes some wonder... and I am one of them... if the whole thing was an orchestrated stunt from the very beginning.  It was brilliant psychology at work, if truly it was.

Ultimate Classic Rock remembers the fortieth anniversary of the return of the original Coca-Cola formula.  Something that one had to have been there to really appreciate the enormity of.