Don’t be like Coke, but if you have to, be like Coke
Coke and Pepsi have battled for cola supremacy since the beginning of the 20th century. One of the more interesting chapters of their rivalry occured in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That’s when Pepsi started a marketing campaign called the Pepsi Challenge. The Pepsi Challenge was designed to demonstrate that people preferred the taste of Pepsi to Coke by inviting large groups to take blind taste tests and select which soft drink they preferred. As Pepsi had hoped, participants selected Pepsi over Coke by a wide margin.
During the Pepsi Challenge years, Coke’s market share diminished, and company executives began to panic. On April 23, 1985, Coke CEO Roberto Goizueta announced that Coca-Cola was moving away from its proprietary formula that had remained unchanged for nearly a century. Instead, it would release a new blend of ingredients that provided a “bolder,” “rounder” and more “harmonious” flavor. New Coke, as it would be called, was tested extensively with over 200,000 individuals providing feedback. Coke was confident that its new product would catapult sales, and it had extensive research to support the decision. The change seemed risky to outsiders, but Goizueta asserted that he and his colleagues considered it “the surest move ever made.”
As New Coke hit the market, there was widespread public outcry over the change. The taste its users knew and loved had been stolen out from under them. People began hoarding old Coke products and refused to purchase New Coke. Thousands of individuals called to complain. The negative feedback was overwhelming. A few months after the release of New Coke, the company announced that it would bring back original Coke, calling it Coca-Cola Classic. This decision was exactly what Coke loyalists were hoping for, and sales of Coca-Cola Classic shot through the roof. Switching to New Coke, and then back to Coca-Cola Classic, ended up recouping much of the market share previously lost to Pepsi. After the dust settled, company president Donald Keough said, “Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.”
At Canopy, we have changed our application several times. Generally speaking, our updates have successfully helped our users make greater progress in their lives. One of the features we recently updated was task management. In the previous version, users managed their tasks primarily at the client level (i.e., users would navigate to an area set aside for a specific client and would see all of the tasks to do for that specific client there). Through conversations with customers, we discovered that they wanted to manage the work they were doing for all of their clients in one central place. We researched the topic extensively. We validated that our design was what people wanted. We felt sure that the release would be a success.
When we released the global task-management area, we included a client filter so users could quickly view the tasks related to a specific client if they wanted to. However, we removed the area at the client level for them to see tasks related to that specific client. When we released the update, our customers loved the new global area, but they hated that we did not leave a place to see client-specific tasks at the client level. Even though they could see the same thing on the global level by using a filter, the removal of the client-specific area irritated them tremendously. We spent a considerable amount of time on phone calls with people asking us why we had taken something away that they had come to rely on.
Like Coke, we listened to our users and acted swiftly. We met with customers, gathered their feedback, and quickly designed a solution. In about two weeks, we had all the functionality of client-level tasks back in place, integrated seamlessly with the new global area. Our customers were ecstatic, and we generated a tremendous amount of goodwill as they watched us rapidly do whatever was necessary to make our product fit their needs. Several who complained added additional licenses. Looking back, taking something away and then quickly putting it back likely endeared our users more than had we left it there in the first place. This effect was summed up by Coke’s Goizueta, who said, “The most significant result of ‘New Coke’ by far, was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal…a signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value.”
We at Canopy would never advocate intentionally frustrating your users just so you can make them happy again by giving back something that shouldn’t have been removed in the first place. However, in the process of improving your applications, you may run into a situation where you need to take a page from Coke’s playbook. If you prove to your customers that you’re willing to do whatever it takes for them, don’t be surprised if a small gaff can actually lead your users to value your product even more than they did before. So, as the title of this article suggests, don’t be like Coke, but if you have to, be like Coke.
