Why New Coke Failed

It wasn’t a conspiracy:

“The reason why coke changed it is a simple one, Pepsi happened. Whilst Pepsi had existed for practically the entirety of Cokes history they were never a large threat to the dominance of Coke after WWII. However this changed in the mid 70s with Pepsi running two well known ad campaigns. The first was the Pepsi Challenge with featured a blind taste test which showed that people preferred Pepsi to Coke. The second was an aggressive celebrity endorsement with the likes of Michael Jackson which pitched Pepsi as The choice of the new generation. As these campaigns were successful and the market share for Pepsi grew Coke knew they had to hit back. So they got food scientests to look into what was it that made people say the liked Pepsi and the answer they came up with was that Pepsi was sweeter then coke. So once they knew that they came up with a new sweeter version of Coke called New Coke that according to their own tests was preferred to both Pepsi and Old Coke.”

Full commentary New Coke Failure: What caused the New Coke campaign in the 80s to fail so spectacularly? What is the rationale for changing the Coke formula in the first place? : AskHistorians.


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