Who was the Real Marketing Gunies ?

Who was the Real Marketing Gunies ?

Dear Internet Business Friends,

When it comes to marketing strategy blunders, pretty much everybody remembers the nosedive failure of New Coke, right ?

But what most people don’t know is the fascinating story behind the story, and the valuable lesson it reveals ...

Coca-Cola was invented by Dr. John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, on May 8, 1886.

Pemberton brewed the mixture in his backyard in a three-legged brass kettle. The original ingredients were lime, cinnamon, coca leaves, and the seeds of a Brazilian shrub.

The concoction was originally intended as a nerve and brain tonic. People seemed to get a buzz off it, and it quickly became popular. Coca-Cola was soon served at pharmacy soda fountains far and wide.

The company thrived, dominating the cola market with virtually zero serious competition for decades while its nearest competitor, Pepsi, repeatedly flirted with bankruptcy.

In the thirties, Coke had a chance to buy Pepsi’s assets at a ridiculous fire sale price. Management sneered. Pepsi survived, and by the mid-forties began to prosper.

So much so, that by the early eighties, Coke was about to lose a marketing trump card to Pepsi.

Coke had been losing market share since the end of the Second World War, declining from 60% at that time, to just 24% in 1983.

Pepsi was winning the cola marketing wars with ads that showed blindfolded people taste-testing Coke and Pepsi, and then testifying their preference for Pepsi.

These ads were very effective because many of the people who said Pepsi tasted better were died-in-the-wool Coke drinkers. Seeing their fellow Coke drinker’s shock and dismay in discovering they actually preferred the taste of Pepsi was very persuasive.

Coke drinkers found themselves running down to the corner store to buy Pepsi so they could take the challenge too. Some became converts who then turned their friends on to the Pepsi challenge, and the campaign spread virally.

Pepsi was about to claim that not only did it taste better than Coke ( as proven in blind taste tests ), but that it was actually more popular. This would have added even more fuel to Pepsi’s already serious challenge to Coke’s market dominance.

Coke was also losing market share to new market entrants who catered to the rising consumer preference for diet, citrus, and caffeine-free beverages, while Pepsi’s marketing strategy was continuing to win new customers.

Better taste was the main thrust of their advertising. Why else would anybody drink such an otherwise worthless mixture of ingredients ? It seemed true. People really did prefer the taste of Pepsi.

This fact was further borne out by the runaway success of Diet Coke. Coke actually developed it from the ground up to taste more like Pepsi, rather than simply replacing the sugar content of the original recipe with artificial sweeteners.

All of the evidence pointed to Coke having a taste problem with the original recipe. Coke had, in fact, been working in secret for years on a new one.

Drawing on the success of Diet Coke, Coke’s marketing strategy called for the modification of that recipe to a sugar-based drink. They felt they could finally turn the tide by introducing “NEW Coke,” based on that formula.

In pre-launch blind taste tests, people thought the New Coke tasted sweeter and smoother than the original. Extensive research revealed that people preferred the New Coke to both the original Coca-Cola recipe and Pepsi.

New Coke was the solution, but what to do with the original ?

If they kept both on the market, it was a sure bet Pepsi would be able to claim it was more popular than both! And a marketing strategy that promoted both a new and an old Coke would only confuse the public and dilute the brand.

So the original recipe was dropped.

What happened when New Coke was introduced ?

It bombed completely, and utterly ! Here’s the brilliant tag line they used to introduce it. “The Best Just Got Better, Coke Is It !” Gee, that looks like a winner.

People hated the New Coke, many without even having to taste it. And they were incensed that the original had been “stolen” from them.

Within a week, thousands of stunned and outraged Coke drinkers flooded the company’s toll-free number, threatening to switch to Pepsi. In one bizarre communiqué, a retired Air Force officer explained how he had wished to be cremated and interned in a Coke can, but was now reconsidering.

One hundred years and countless millions of dollars in advertising had made Coca-Cola a part of people’s very identity. Drinking Coca-Cola wasn’t about taste at all.

It was about mental association.

Emotional Opium !

The act of raising that funny looking spiral bottle to your lips ... the cane sugary fragrance that followed ... the sharp carbonated bite that set your throat ablaze with each vigorous swig. For many people, the whole experience was anchored deeply to fond, albeit sometimes even imaginary memories — memories that had been reinforced repeatedly by Coke’s marketing.

Coke had no choice but to bring back the original recipe, amid a huge fanfare of publicity, as though it were the second coming.

Immediately Coke’s switchboards lit up like Christmas trees. Over the next several days, over eighteen thousand calls of gratitude came pouring in. One caller said she felt as if a lost friend had returned home.

The comeback of the original recipe drove Coke’s stock price into the ozone — to the highest level in twelve years ! Coke drinkers everywhere wept syrupy tears of joy and gratefulness at the miraculous redemption of their beloved caustic black glop.

What a hullabaloo about nothing. Sugar water.

For heaven’s sake !

Incredibly, from that point forward the tide turned. Pepsi’s clever ads lost their effectiveness. And Coke maintained the pole position. But the story doesn’t end there ...

Years later, a few enterprising neuroscientists decided to conduct their own taste tests — but with an interesting twist. They put the tasters in MRI machines so they could monitor the blood flow inside of their skulls while they drank.

They sent either Pepsi or Coke gushing down a long tube into the taster’s pie holes. Sometimes they were told which glop was coming. Sometimes they weren’t. When they knew what was coming, a particular part of the brain that deals with working memory and associations lit up. And it lit up more brightly with Coke than with Pepsi — proof positive that branding works !

The real attraction of Coke was not in the taste — not at all. It was in the symbolism. Coke symbolized the energy of youth. Drinking Coke identified you as hard driving, someone who worked and played for keeps, living life to the fullest.

So what can we learn from this story ?

Well for me, the most interesting aspect is the sway that drama and spectacle have over people. There’s a reality TV flavor to all this, isn’t there ?

Pepsi could have easily quoted some stat about how 3 out of 4 people or whatever it was prefer the taste of Pepsi in blind taste tests. But they dramatized it. They tickled our primal competitive nature and made an entertaining game of it. They showed real Coke drinkers experiencing the shocking realization that they did indeed prefer the taste of Pepsi.

And then there was the amazing drama of betrayal and redemption that followed when Coke pulled the plug on the original recipe. This was priceless theater and perhaps the biggest take-away selling gambit in marketing history. Overnight, the perceived value of the original recipe went through the roof !

At the end of the day, who was the real marketing genius ?

The common lesson in all this is the power of spectacle to draw attention to your offering and create sustained interest in your sales message.

How will you use it ?

To Your Success

Wingcent Ning
Success-Biz Marketing
wingcent@gmail.com
http://mysignaturebusiness.blogspot.com
Singapore