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.

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Star Wars is harboring betrayal!

Okay, let me say first that I love this little film!  Whatever has happened to Star Wars in recent years, there still are and always will be the true fans who thrill to share their love of the saga with others.  This spot shows the kind of energy that we used to have at a new Star Wars movie.  The costumes, the mock lightsaber fights, screaming lines from the movie out loud... 

...it was a whole different and in so many ways better world than it is today.  I know, I was there.  I didn't just see it with my own eyes, I was part of it.  Maybe it will come back someday.  Especially for the youngsters.  The ones who George Lucas intended Star Wars to be particularly for.  The grownups have tried to make Star Wars into something it was never meant to be.  So we get bullcrap like The Acolyte and movies with no clear plan in mind (coughcoughsequeltrilogycoughcough).

Actually, I'm coming to like Episodes VII through IX now.  The more time that goes by since that trilogy ended, the better those movies seem.  And the children seem to like them well enough.  I saw lots of young girls dressed as Rey when The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker came out.  If they were enjoying that, just as my generation did Star Wars in our own youth, well... what's wrong with that?

Anyway...

Coca-Cola has this new film that celebrates what it means to be a Star Wars fan.  Here it is:

Okay, like I said I love that spot!  But my memory can be a harsh thing.  Because what might be to the chagrin of some, I also remember a time more than a quarter century ago when that was not Coca-Cola in cahoots with Star Wars.  And this is why things like YouTube are so handy.

Behold the Pepsi commercial that premiered during the Super Bowl in 1997, days before the Star Wars: Special Edition was released in theaters:

Not kidding: in the space of two months I saw Star Wars movies eleven times altogether.  A New Hope four times, The Empire Strikes Back four times anda three for Return of the Jedi.  That was my second winter at Elon and I was sort of the stereotypical "Star Wars geek" for our campus.  Ahhhh, those were good times.

Okay, I'm feeling my Star Wars mojo coming back, a little.  We will always have the original movies at least to bask in.

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New Coke: 25 years since big biz's biggest bomb

I'm still not entirely persuaded that this wasn't a planned stunt. Like last week's to-do about the 4G-equipped iPhone that some Apple engineer, ahem, "drunkenly" left in a bar. Sure got the Intertubes abuzz about it, aye? So yeah, mark me down as being in the "planned marketing conspiracy" column on that one.

Nearly a full quarter-century earlier, something similar happened to another American mega corporation. That time it was The Coca-Cola Company. On April 23rd 1985, executives announced that the original, world-famous Coca-Cola formula was being retired. Seems that the "old Coke" wasn't cutting it anymore in the "cola wars" between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So the time-honored Coca Cola was to be put to pasture. In its place we would be getting something called "New Coke".

Witness anew what is arguably the lowest point of the illustrious career of Bill Cosby...

"Better than ever"?? I still remember the one time that I tried to drink New Coke. It tasted like crap! What were you thinking, Bill?! We trusted you! And Coca-Cola betrayed us! No Jell-O Pudding for you.

With a wrathful vehemence not seen since the Cabbage Patch Kid riots of '83, Coca-Cola found itself besieged with angry phone calls, letters and organized protests. Three months later then-CEO Roberto Goizueta announced - via a televised spot with all the gravitas of an Oval Office address - that the crisis was ending: the old Coca-Cola was coming back as "Coca-Cola Classic".

And within days of hitting shelves again for the first time, sales of original Coca-Cola soared. Coca-Cola Classic fast eclipsed sales of Pepsi. To this day, Coca-Cola remains the best-selling soft drink in the world.

How could it not have? By that point in the summer of 1985 Coca-Cola dominated much of the pop cultural discussion, both here and abroad. People were talking about Coke like they had never talked about it before.

New Coke by itself was a business failure... but New Coke did make people want the original Coke like never before. New Coke pulled off what had never been done on this large a scale before: it created genuine demand for something that was already so successful it didn't need demand.

I don't care what the "official" documents say: I'm fairly convinced that the New Coke fiasco in my book was brilliant and quite intentional psychological marketing. Not completely convinced though. Wanna know why? Because it does bother me, that the mass of people can be manipulated by something so simple. And so part of my mind doesn't want to acknowledge a great fear that history and human nature have perhaps confirmed too many times already. But anyhoo...

If you want to know more about New Coke, which we got ambushed with twenty-five years ago this week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a good write-up about it, including how Coca-Cola is now chronicling the New Coke episode at the World of Coca-Cola.

(If nothing else, it has to be said that New Coke was a product so bad that it made Billy Beer taste good.)

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