Coca Cola

Coca-Cola’s Branding Lesson

Summary

In April, 1985, Coca-Cola replaced it’s flagship cola brand with a new formula in order to compete with Pepsi-Cola. Coca-Cola’s strategy was to change the formulation of coke to more slightly sweeter taste of Pepsi. After conducting taste tests on 190,000 consumers, Coca-Cola announced the formulation change. But consumer reaction was unfortunately negative for Coca-Cola. Finally, after several months of slumping sales, Coca-Cola announced that the old formulation would return as ‘’Coca-Cola Classic ‘’and join ‘’new’’ Coke in the marketplace.

The new Coke debacle taught Coca-Cola a very important, painful, public lesson about it’s brand. Coke’s brand image has emotional components and consumers have a great deal of strong feelings of the brand. Coke clearly is not just seen as a beverage by consumers but rather it seems to be viewed as more of an American icon and much of its appeal lies not only in its ingredients but also in what it represents in terms of Americana, its heritage and relationship with consumers.

Key points

* The first startegy was to introduce a new cola formula that is tastes sweeter than the the original one.

* The company reduced the productin of original one as it couldn’t have two directly competing products on the shelves at the same time.

* The copmapny severely underestimated the power of its first brand.

* Thetime and money and skill poured into consumer research on the new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people.

* Coca-Cola had learnt that marketing is about much more than the product itself.

* The key brand asset was originality for the coca-cola company which they misunderstood.

* One advertisement of this company once appeared across the United States declaring: ‘The only thing like Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola itself. It’s the real thing.’ By launching New Coke, Coca-Cola was...