Happy Throwback Thursday! Today, we’re featuring the year 1985. That year, Coca Cola took a huge gamble by doing away with its original recipe and introducing a new, sweeter version they called New Coke. Spoiler alert: It was an epic failure.
In the mid-1980s, Coca-Cola was losing market share to their rivals, Pepsi. So senior executives commissioned a super-secret project to create a new flavor of Coke. In taste tests, surveys, and focus groups, the company found that sweeter soda was an overwhelming favorite, topping both regular Coke and Pepsi. So the company decided to go all in on a new, sweeter flavor of Coke.
New Coke was launched on April 23, 1985, and production of the original formula stopped later that week. While the product was accepted by many, there were a huge amount of people who resented the change (especially Southerners). Coca Cola received more than 40,000 calls and letters from customers expressing their anger or disappointment. Their hotline received over 1,500 calls a day. The company even hired a psychiatrist to listen in on the phone calls, who told executives that some people sounded like they were discussing the death of a family member.
The public outrage was surprising to Coke’s executives. After all, they had done their market research with taste tests and surveys. However, they had made one fatal mistake: they severely underestimated their customer’s emotional attachment to the brand.
So, just 79 days after the introduction of New Coke, Coca Cola announced it was bringing the original formulation back. It was such a big deal that TV networks broke into regular programming with special reports and it was even discussed on the Senate floor. Unsurprisingly, Coca-Cola Classic quickly outsold New Coke. The new formula was rebranded to “Coke II” in 1990 before it was eventually phased out in 2002. However, in 2019, the company announced it was reintroducing the New Coke formulation to promote the 3rd season of Stranger Things on Netflix. They produced around 500,000 cans, which were mostly sold online. The demand was so high that it caused the Coke website to crash. The reintroduced flavor got much better reviews than it did in 1985. Learn more here.