New Coke vs Original Coke: How a Faulty Assumption Failed a Business
As you can tell from the photo above, the Coca-Cola bottle is labeled as “Classic Coca-Cola”. I’ve never thought anything of it, I would sip Coke and go. Not that I don’t enjoy soft drinks (I personally drink soft drinks probably twice a year), I just don’t really taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke. However, there’s a big population of people who are passionate about it.
After thorough research, I found a story about the iconic soft drink brand, Coca-Cola. This incident of creating a new product based on assumption at Coca-Cola happened way before I was born and was solved a few years after.
It was the year 1985, Coke’s market shares were losing to diet soft drinks and Pepsi. There was a population of the soft-drinkers that preferred Pepsi’s sweeter taste to Coke’s. Of course, Coke made the assumption, “The general trend is that our audience likes sweeter soft-drinks to our original recipe.” Then generated the hypothesis, “We believe that our audience preferred sweeter tasting soft drinks, and we will know if we are right when we see that a large number of taster participants say they like a new recipe more than the original recipe.” Then, through surveys, taste tests, and focus groups, they concluded that the hypothesis was right.
However, what they did not account for was their already loyal customer base, who they thought was around 10–12% (that felt very negatively about a new recipe) based on their findings. When they launched with their new product, “New Coke/Coke 2”, they received a ton of backlash. This backlash primarily came from their loyal customer base in the Southern states. Coke received about 40,000 calls from customers who felt strongly about the new recipe and how these customers felt as if a family member died. This was “an intrusion on tradition”, so obviously it was a big deal. In fact, there were websites on the black web selling the original coke for an absurd amount of money.
It wasn’t until 2002 that Coke decided to come back with their original recipe and to clarify on the labels that the coke that was being sold was the “Classic Coca-Cola”.
This story of faulty assumption based on general trend is a huge lesson to businesses alike. In the case of an aspiring UX Designer, this is a lesson to really assess assumptions and keep questioning, “Are you sure?”