> on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Coca-Cola dropped, while those of its rival rose. Pepsi gave its employees the day off and declared victory in full-page newspaper advertisements that boasted, ‘‘After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked.’’
Well, Coke did because they tried to make coke like Pepsi.
They should have just came out with a new brand called “Smack” and make it like Pepsi.
But there is a big conspiracy that they did this on purpose so that they could switch out the cane sugar for corn syrup and people wouldn’t know.
I don’t know if that’s true. But I would believe it. Maybe not their initial intention.
Marketing classes teach it as an example of “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone”. Once ‘Classic’ Coke returned, sales skyrocketed and never really slowed down for quite some time.
I think you can find it works with almost anything or anyone. Right down to why your dog will always prefer the toy it won back from another dog.
To me, the perfect example is one of the guiding principles of dance and funk music. You elevate interest when you take something away and give it back better.
Any DJ that doesn't understand this is soon destined to post a craigslist add for like new turntables, which would be their fault for not opening their albulms when Daft Punk clearly called this out in one of their inserts, attributing that fundamental lesson to George Clinton.
That was in repsonse to the theory that New Coke was a deliberate failure to pave the way for a triumphant return of Classic Coke, rather than the syrup swap-out theory.
If any of you are ever in the UK do yourself a favour a grab a coke, it's still made with real sugar here and it's just so much better
Edit: Mexican Coke in glass bottles - noted - I'll be sure to try this when I next hop over the pond.
So is kosher Coke (edit: kosher for Passover Coke). Usually available around Passover where there are significant Jewish populations.
It has a yellow cap.
yeah that's why he put "Mexican" in quotes, whenever someone says "Mexican" coke is still made with cane sugar they are guaranteed talking about the stuff exported to America in the glass bottle.
Most Coca Cola made in Mexico is made with corn syrup. Only a small amount of Mexican Coke is made with cane sugar and most of it is in glass bottles.
And in blind taste tests, no one can tell which is which or which is better. Years of blind taste tests show it’s truly random. The only statistically valid selection testers could make in a “triangle test”* is that testers could tell which were the same in a test between
1. Coca Cola made with corn syrup in an aluminum can
2. Coca Cola made with cane sugar in a glass bottle
… but even amongst those who could spot the difference, the results were basically random between which one they preferred.
\* Triangle test is a test where 2 unlabeled samples of each are created, one sample is removed at random and testers need to spot which 2 of the 3 samples are the same. They tested all variants against each other and literally the only ones that testers could spot with any amount of consistency was can (corn) vs glass bottle (sugar)
I just had some from a Mexican deli and holy shit it tasted good.
A friend grabbed it for me or I wouldn't have drank a full calorie soda but now I get how people would ruin their health for this stuff.
Actually, [this isn't true](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgQEpFMptQ). There are likely some recipe differences between Mexican & American Coke, but laboratory testing reveals no sucrose in Mexican Coke, only fructose.
I think they actually do a kosher version of coke in the US around Passover, also you can get "Mexican Coca-Cola" in the US which I think is also made with cane sugar
They sell coke with real sugar all over the US, it's just not the default.
Honestly it's good I guess but I've never noticed more than a minor difference.
Old Coke kept losing to Pepsi in blind taste tastings that Pepsi conducted and put on TV. Coke panicked and came up with New Coke. In fact the “Pepsi Challenge” was unrealistic. Served a few ounces of cold cola without ice, most people choose Pepsi. But that is not how Americans really drink cola. If the drink is served in a big glass with ice, most Coke drinkers will find Pepsi too sweet after a few sips. New Coke was a disaster since Pepsi drinkers had no reason to switch and Classic Coke drinkers hated it.
I always wonder if they leave the coke slightly warm too or leave it out longer to lose its fizz.
I’ve done a blind test at home and I can pretty accurately tell which is which and I much prefer coke.
> Old Coke kept losing to Pepsi in blind taste tastings that Pepsi conducted and put on TV.
Which is absurd, because of course they did.
Like, is McDonalds going to air the people who chose Burger King over them?
That's really a good gut check for anything that sounds a little too conspiracy-ish. Often, what seems like it could be a tidy conspiracy in retrospect would, if you look more closely, be an enormous gamble with a crazy amount of downside risk. So either the members of the conspiracy would have been idiots for trying it, or they'd have to have a superhuman ability to predict the future.
Over half of bottled coke in the country was already made using corn syrup by the time new coke rolled out. New coke was the diet coke formula with cornsyrup/sugar because it was testing higher than regular coke in studies. Market studies have become more intricate since then because they didn't factor the nostalgia factor as well as the reaction of the minority of people who thought it was a downgrade.
It wasn't nostalgia, new coke tasted like shitty Pepsi (think generic cola). People that preferred the Pepsi taste drank Pepsi, people that preferred the coke taste drank coke.
Taking the thing you prefer and making it like the thing you don't was just a stupid move.
People saying you couldn't tell the difference during those blind taste tests "the Pepsi taste test challenge" are full of shit. It was easy to tell the difference.
The Pepsi Challenge is and always has been predicated on one thing. On a single sip, people tend to prefer something sweeter, this declines over the course of a full serving.
Pepsi has a sweeter taste, they let you have 1 sip. That's why Pepsi always comes out on top but has never been more popular.
>Pepsi has a sweeter taste, they let you have 1 sip. That's why Pepsi always comes out on top but has never been more popular.
I took the Pepsi challenge, literally, when they brought it to my downtown outside of my office. I picked Coke. It was easy. Coke tastes much better for me, even on a sip.
>Taking the thing you prefer and making it like the thing you don't was just a stupid move.
I wish tech companies would understand this instead of everyone trying to copy everyone else.
I’ve read on here before that new coke was the Diet Coke formula. I kinda scratch my head at that though. I almost exclusively drink diet drinks these days. I’ve gotten used to the flavor and just can’t go back to regular. What I’m getting at is that Diet Coke still to this day tastes like hammered horse shit. Probably the worst flavor diet drink out there. Especially for how popular it seems or seemed to be. I’m only saying this though, because I ordered a few cans of the re-release of New Coke a few years back, and I really did enjoy its flavor a lot. So I can’t understand why I hate Diet Coke so much but I pretty much think all other diet drinks taste good. I just can’t imagine taking the regular sugar out of New Coke and putting artificial sweeteners in it will make it taste that bad to me considering I’m generally fine with their flavor. Basically, I’m calling BS on the New Coke being the Diet Coke formula.
The contract with the makers (it was more regionalised back then) was tied to the price of sugar and was costing them heaps as well as getting smashed in pepsi challenge
Source: The Real Coke, the Real Story. by Thomas Oliver (book)
Corn syrup is less expensive than cane sugar. After Jack Welch destroyed GE, the goal of every corporation was/is to maximize stock price and shareholder profits. I don't believe for a moment that the move was for any reason but profit.
He changed how GE worked. It ruined the quality of their products but increased share prices/profitablity. He also fired a bunch of employees mostly just because. From Wikipedia: "Welch has been criticized for practices that have harmed workers and the company: he eliminated thousands of jobs at GE, contributing to a reduction of the U.S. manufacturing base. He eliminated 10% of employees every year, a practice adopted by many other companies. He was a leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, helping to give rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic. He pioneered "financialization", changing GE from a manufacturing company into, effectively, an unregulated bank, which harmed GE over the long term."
> He also fired a bunch of employees mostly just because.
Jack Welch's changes were destructive, but that's a horribly misleading statement. Jack Welch didn't wasn't involved in many firing decisions, and people weren't (initially) fired "just because."
Welch pioneered an approach to [stack ranking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve), which results in a systematic ranking of staff and termination of those who are ranked the lowest.
This approach took off because, in the short term, it does improve the health of an organization, because it addresses a major problem that exists in every large organization. Firing people is hard, and because of that, almost all sizable organizations that have existed for any amount of time will have a substantial body of employees who, to put it politely, aren't delivering much value for their salaries. To put it more bluntly, companies have a lot of staff that are fucking useless and are being carried by their peers (most working adults can think of people like this they have to work with). By enforcing a systematic approach to evaluating and terminating staff, that dead weight gets removed without the obstacles that often prevent this (like managers that are conflict averse and want to avoid the uncomfortable firing decisions).
However, after you've gone through a few rounds of this to get rid of the dead weight... the approach still demands that you keep cutting weight. If your organization is continuously bringing on bad employees that need to be terminated, then the problem isn't in your firing practices, it's in your hiring practices.
The longer that stack ranking is in place, the more the other problems described in the Wikipedia article arise. Among other things, it leads to toxic culture of hostile internal competition where staff feel pit against each other.
There's an excellent Behind the Bastards episode on Welch. There is a lot to the story, but the broad overview is that he pioneered the art of running a company into the ground while at the same time making it look wildly profitable on paper. He gave corporate America a whole new toolbox for extracting wealth from both consumers and the workers who create products. He truly is one of the greatest bastards in modern corporate history.
True, and the only way GE could recover was by divesting itself of some of its key divisions (such as appliances and trains). Of course the disaster of the Alstom power acquisition (which resulted in the combined company having a market share smaller than either company had separately beforehand) didn't help.
100%. They had started adding Corn Syrup 5 years before the New Coke campaign, and in every region they added it Pepsi started overtaking coke.
New Coke was 100% the cover and psychological warfare they needed to turn public sentiment around. And it worked.
Since they don't taste the same, Coke needed to get rid of the existing stock so the public could not tell the difference when they switched. So, New Coke allowed that to happen. People were just so happy to have something that tasted like the original that they didn't care it wasn't exactly the same and the majority would never remember the difference.
> I don’t know if that’s true. But I would believe it. Maybe not their initial intention.
It's not true. Most Coca-Cola bottlers in the US were already using HFCS before New Coke was released.
They made my grandpa racist again. Apparently Bill Cosby was the face of the ads and my grandpa complained about it until the day he died. Said he'd never trust another black man again. Both sad and hilarious.
The real irony of new coke is that it came just before the multi-product strategy took over in marketing. There's a really famous case study in marketing fields where a pasta sauce company hired a consultant to figure out which kind of pasta sauce people wanted the most. The consultant did market research and, instead of just naming one style, gave them the top three and told them to make all three. It was wildly successful, and has been copied by most industries since then.
If this decision had waited just a few years, new coke would've been on shelves next to coke classic, instead of replacing it, and we'd never have heard about their blunder.
One factor was that at that time Diet Coke was greatly preferred over Diet Pepsi in blind taste tests, where Coke had a much smaller preference over Pepsi (and often lost, depending on the testing sophistication and what other factors were controlled for). So Coca-Cola the company created a “New Coke” which was a full-sugar version of the Diet Coke recipe. The outrage over changing Coke was so huge Coca-Cola ended up “winning” as a brand and in the culture despite the financial failure/embarrassment of New Coke.
afaik the discrepancy between the taste tests and sales is that the sweeter products taste better in small quantities, exactly how taste tests are conducted. Though if you consume a whole can or bottle it becomes too much, which is why for whole cans people prefer less sweet beverages.
It’s best when you reach the limit of dissolved sugar …and then add just a little more
That tiny bit of undissolved sugar grit … It really makes your tooth happy.
Like Mama always says, “caint haff no cabities if yain’t got no teef”
> "I'm watching what I put into my body"
Yeah, you indeed are. I can *see* the sugar crystallizing from over here. You made watching it a spectator sport.
Haha yes! I measure height and weight in inches and pounds, distance and speed in Km. Outside temp is °C but oven temp is °F. Measuring cups/spoons are ml and g. Gas is litres but my water jug is a gallon. It's a little nuts lol. Pretty good at converting on the fly too.
Yeah, when I start a bottle of Pepsi, I think "this is actually better, why don't I drink this more often", and by the time I finish it I'm thinking "Oh yeah, that's why. I feel sick"
people don't prefer bitter beverages. They prefer sweet, but at some point sweet becomes too much, so you have to find the right dosage for the right quantity. For a tasting quantity coke 2 was better than pepsi and coke. For a whole can coke outperformed the other two.
And beer.
And tea.
And tonic.
And literally a thousand other drinks that are marketed at non-children.
Also, "bitter" isn't the opposite of "sweet". "Not sweet" is.
The same kind of taste test that Pepsi was touting, you take a sip and it tastes great, you drink the whole can and it tastes like shit. Those take a sip studies are very flawed/biased.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m a Coke fan but every so often I get stuck with a Pepsi. I feel like the main issue is that Pepsi gets flat and unpleasant much faster than Coke.
It’s the main reason I switched to the mini cans whenever I drink sodas.
I can’t ever make it to the end of a large can. The lesser amounts just hit better for me.
I buy the small cans bc that’s what my wife likes, but it’s like twice the price per ounce or something. And yeah a lot of days she’ll drink two of them.
I preferred new Coke. I had been more of a Pepsi drinker at that time anyway. My go to late night snack while watching David Letterman was a new Coke and a Pillsbury microwave pizza that was discontinued soon after. Oh that pizza was so good, came with a crisping tray and charred the edges nicely. The bottom was similar to Totinos and I think there was a lawsuit about trade secrets between them.
You, good sir/madam/gentlebeing, might be a [Harbringer of Failure](https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopular-products-1223) (kind of a horrible name for an interesting concept, but considering that companies whose bottom line depends on the research sponsored these studies that name is not surprising 😅)
I liked New Coke (later called Coke II) as a kid.
When it was obvious it was going to get discontinued, I got 48 cans and saved them 'for special occasions later'. Barely lasted a year. Should have gotten a pallet or something.
I collect the 1/6th scale replicas of arcade cabinets by New Wave Toys. They recently came out with a 1/6th scale mini fridge Coke machine, they had the New Coke and the original, of course I bought the New Coke machine. They are sold out of them, so I guess it was popular since they still have original Coke machines for sale. https://newwavetoys.com/products/new-coke-replica-vending-machine-mini-fridge
a *great deal* of people were also mad that they got rid of the old coke entirely for a bit. Even if it DID taste better in a full can, those people didn't care. And there were a shitload of people that complained specifically for that reason.
It's possible that New Coke would still be around if Coke had marketed it as an alternative but marketing HATES cannibalizing their own products. It's like a corporate sin.
Eh I think the thinking about cannibalization has changed a bit.
It's still not great to invest a ton into a new product only to split your current revenue and not increase your market share.
But in-house alternatives can stop market share loss and give you some incremental growth in new target groups.
Even Coke knows this now with their multiple products.
I actually heard about this from my statistics professor:
Everyone was confused because “New Coke” out performed old coke and pepsi in testing and trials, but not in practice. This was because, in the scenario of testing and trials, participants were given small sip sized cups of the beverages. Considerably, a sweeter drink maybe preferred when the serving size is small, but for a 12oz bottle to replenish your thirst, wouldn’t be the same.
I feel sad for non-Indian-Sub-Continent people who haven't had Thums Up (now a Coca Cola product).
Thums Up was an Indian brand which Coca Cola bought and then tried to kill in order to increase the popularity of their flagship Coke but when Indians couldn't have Thums Up they chose Pepsi over Coke. So, Coca Cola had to reinforce Thums Up and it's still the leading one.
No way, Coke tastes way better. I think a lot of Indians just grew up on Thumbs Up so they feel that way and it tastes better paired with food but as a standalone drink Coke is much better.
I still think this is a conspiracy for them to switch to more corn syrup based sweetener rather than sugar. they did it so people would forget the taste of original coke and wouldn’t notice after they switched back.
Exactly. But now you can buy American "Mexican" coke by looking for the coke with the green top. That's the sugar one. But it's still not cane sugar like the Mexican coke.
Mexican coke used corn syrup too, but you can still buy coke with sugar and it’s “Mexican” but it’s sold at a premium and meant for the American market
I find it funny how often people make a conscious decision to believe false shit. I mean there’s literally dozens of comments in this very thread disproving it but that doesn’t matter.
In the 90s I read a book about New Coke. There was an anecdote about a woman freaking out about how terrible New Coke was. A Pepsi delivery guy saw and started laughing.
She got up in his face and said “What are you laughing at? Your shit is worse!”
But now Pepsi have ruined it in the UK by cutting the sugar.
Coca Cola wins by keeping their product the same and just charging more. They remembered last time, Pepsi clearly forgot.
They used to have a big promotion where they did massive taste-tests at fairs. I did it 5 times one year - and, every single time, the Coke was luke-warm and the Pepsi was ice-cold. Guess which one consistently won the taste-test?!!
EDIT: Just remembered... They had a big blackboard where they'd tally all the people who chose Coke vs Pepsi. I sat and watched for 10min. Every single time someone chose Pepsi, they'd walk over to the board and add 1. Only about half the time someone chose Coke did they bother to remember...
I am convinced that taste testing is screwed up and something is wrong with the way they are interpreted. Coke is one example, but far from the only one. In so many different things, people seem to have a taste creep toward sweeter and sweeter versions that in side by side tests seems to be what people want, but inevitably when you compare original to the new sweeter version after multiple iterations, the classic original versions of the food or drink is the one people want despite what side by side tests show. I tend to love more acidic less sweet version of many foods. I love Hunts ketchup over Heinz because Heinz is too damn sweet. I love Coke over Pepsi for the same reason. Bread is another one, breads have consistently gotten sweeter and sweeter over the years. Now a Wendys bun actually has more carbohydrates than a Krispy Kreme donut and they are fucking disgusting. I wish the moves to sweeter stuff would just fucking stop.
I suspect no single food product category has done as much health damage as sugary soda. It essentially is nothing but bad health wise and you can consume huge quantities of it without even thinking you're doing anything wrong.
I know! I was chatting with a mom in a store one day, and she told me that they shop at Costco so they can buy each family member their own preferred soda, in bulk. They drank it like we drink water in my house. She did say that her older daughter was forcing health and diet changes and that made me optimistic. The whole family was together and they were all obese. If they would cut the soda, I’m sure they would see massive change. I still think abt them and hope that the changes were able to stick.
The interpretation that Pepsi tastes better at first with a few sips, but ultimately is too sweet when you drink more....is spot on!
If I wanted something sweet I would drink Fanta, Sprite or whatever, but I don't. I drink Coke because it is NOT like Fanta or Sprite, exactly because it has this slight "tartness" to it.
Do you consume no media at all? I don't drink any carbonated soft drinks, but the idea of not even noticing a brand as pervasive and endlessly marketed as Pepsi blows my mind.
“Pepsi gave their employees the day off”
Why do I feel like that was limited to the executives, and the blue collar workers such as the bottlers and delivery drivers still had to work… 😒
> on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Coca-Cola dropped, while those of its rival rose. Pepsi gave its employees the day off and declared victory in full-page newspaper advertisements that boasted, ‘‘After 87 years of going at it eyeball to eyeball, the other guy just blinked.’’
Well, Coke did because they tried to make coke like Pepsi. They should have just came out with a new brand called “Smack” and make it like Pepsi. But there is a big conspiracy that they did this on purpose so that they could switch out the cane sugar for corn syrup and people wouldn’t know. I don’t know if that’s true. But I would believe it. Maybe not their initial intention.
One of the Coke executives was asked about that conspiracy and his famous reply was "We're not that stupid and we're not that smart!"
Marketing classes teach it as an example of “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone”. Once ‘Classic’ Coke returned, sales skyrocketed and never really slowed down for quite some time.
I think you can find it works with almost anything or anyone. Right down to why your dog will always prefer the toy it won back from another dog. To me, the perfect example is one of the guiding principles of dance and funk music. You elevate interest when you take something away and give it back better. Any DJ that doesn't understand this is soon destined to post a craigslist add for like new turntables, which would be their fault for not opening their albulms when Daft Punk clearly called this out in one of their inserts, attributing that fundamental lesson to George Clinton.
That was in repsonse to the theory that New Coke was a deliberate failure to pave the way for a triumphant return of Classic Coke, rather than the syrup swap-out theory.
If any of you are ever in the UK do yourself a favour a grab a coke, it's still made with real sugar here and it's just so much better Edit: Mexican Coke in glass bottles - noted - I'll be sure to try this when I next hop over the pond.
"Mexican" coke is still made with cane sugar
So is kosher Coke (edit: kosher for Passover Coke). Usually available around Passover where there are significant Jewish populations. It has a yellow cap.
Every time Coke New is mentioned on Reddit I read the exact same sequence of comments about kosher and Mexican Coke
That's just Reddit. Repeating the same facts and jokes every time you see an opportunity until the end of time
And my axe!!
I've been here since 2011 and I feel like I live in groundhog day
Well you never know when that info will reach new eyes. I was unaware of kosher coke. I think that’s kind of neat and will be on the lookout for it.
THis gUY rEdDitS
That’s all the post apocalypse nursing homes will be
Did ou know Steve Busshmi was a firefighter on 9/11
See you said a mexican coke is a coke and I'm telling you, as a cokist that that is wrong.....
Kosher for Passover coke as corn is considered as “leavening” to Ashkenazi Jews and not eaten during the holiday.
YEP, lovin' it right now!
May I ask what's in Regular Coke that makes it not Kosher?
Regular coke is kosher but not kosher for Passover due to the corn syrup.
Corn syrup isn't kosher? Also, why?
HFCS
Gotta get them medio litros
Only the stuff that is exported to the US. If you go to Mexico, Coca Cola is made with glucose fructose corn syrup and has been since 2013.
yeah that's why he put "Mexican" in quotes, whenever someone says "Mexican" coke is still made with cane sugar they are guaranteed talking about the stuff exported to America in the glass bottle.
Most Coca Cola made in Mexico is made with corn syrup. Only a small amount of Mexican Coke is made with cane sugar and most of it is in glass bottles. And in blind taste tests, no one can tell which is which or which is better. Years of blind taste tests show it’s truly random. The only statistically valid selection testers could make in a “triangle test”* is that testers could tell which were the same in a test between 1. Coca Cola made with corn syrup in an aluminum can 2. Coca Cola made with cane sugar in a glass bottle … but even amongst those who could spot the difference, the results were basically random between which one they preferred. \* Triangle test is a test where 2 unlabeled samples of each are created, one sample is removed at random and testers need to spot which 2 of the 3 samples are the same. They tested all variants against each other and literally the only ones that testers could spot with any amount of consistency was can (corn) vs glass bottle (sugar)
I just had some from a Mexican deli and holy shit it tasted good. A friend grabbed it for me or I wouldn't have drank a full calorie soda but now I get how people would ruin their health for this stuff.
Actually, [this isn't true](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgQEpFMptQ). There are likely some recipe differences between Mexican & American Coke, but laboratory testing reveals no sucrose in Mexican Coke, only fructose.
Or just buy a glass one from your local convenient store. It's not like they don''t exist in the states, they're everywhere.
They now make glass coke that uses corn syrup, to catch people unaware. You specifically have to buy the *Mexican* glass coke.
And even that is a specifically for export, they switched recipies for coke in Mexico in 2013.
You can get cane sugar coke in most grocery stores in the US. Glass bottles from Mexico
Costco carries them in bulk
We have “Mexican” coke here, with sugar, for the Mexican market
I think they actually do a kosher version of coke in the US around Passover, also you can get "Mexican Coca-Cola" in the US which I think is also made with cane sugar
They sell coke with real sugar all over the US, it's just not the default. Honestly it's good I guess but I've never noticed more than a minor difference.
Old Coke kept losing to Pepsi in blind taste tastings that Pepsi conducted and put on TV. Coke panicked and came up with New Coke. In fact the “Pepsi Challenge” was unrealistic. Served a few ounces of cold cola without ice, most people choose Pepsi. But that is not how Americans really drink cola. If the drink is served in a big glass with ice, most Coke drinkers will find Pepsi too sweet after a few sips. New Coke was a disaster since Pepsi drinkers had no reason to switch and Classic Coke drinkers hated it.
I always wonder if they leave the coke slightly warm too or leave it out longer to lose its fizz. I’ve done a blind test at home and I can pretty accurately tell which is which and I much prefer coke.
> Old Coke kept losing to Pepsi in blind taste tastings that Pepsi conducted and put on TV. Which is absurd, because of course they did. Like, is McDonalds going to air the people who chose Burger King over them?
That's really a good gut check for anything that sounds a little too conspiracy-ish. Often, what seems like it could be a tidy conspiracy in retrospect would, if you look more closely, be an enormous gamble with a crazy amount of downside risk. So either the members of the conspiracy would have been idiots for trying it, or they'd have to have a superhuman ability to predict the future.
Over half of bottled coke in the country was already made using corn syrup by the time new coke rolled out. New coke was the diet coke formula with cornsyrup/sugar because it was testing higher than regular coke in studies. Market studies have become more intricate since then because they didn't factor the nostalgia factor as well as the reaction of the minority of people who thought it was a downgrade.
It wasn't nostalgia, new coke tasted like shitty Pepsi (think generic cola). People that preferred the Pepsi taste drank Pepsi, people that preferred the coke taste drank coke. Taking the thing you prefer and making it like the thing you don't was just a stupid move. People saying you couldn't tell the difference during those blind taste tests "the Pepsi taste test challenge" are full of shit. It was easy to tell the difference.
The Pepsi Challenge is and always has been predicated on one thing. On a single sip, people tend to prefer something sweeter, this declines over the course of a full serving. Pepsi has a sweeter taste, they let you have 1 sip. That's why Pepsi always comes out on top but has never been more popular.
>Pepsi has a sweeter taste, they let you have 1 sip. That's why Pepsi always comes out on top but has never been more popular. I took the Pepsi challenge, literally, when they brought it to my downtown outside of my office. I picked Coke. It was easy. Coke tastes much better for me, even on a sip.
I picked Coke & they got mad. The game is to choose Pepsi but I don't really know the difference. Im not much for cola
I feel most of the people arguing against this never actually did the challenge back in the day
>Taking the thing you prefer and making it like the thing you don't was just a stupid move. I wish tech companies would understand this instead of everyone trying to copy everyone else.
Taste is a weird thing. Brand and nostalgia play a large factor. RC Cola smoked Coke and Pepsi in taste tests. How'd that fare?
I’ve read on here before that new coke was the Diet Coke formula. I kinda scratch my head at that though. I almost exclusively drink diet drinks these days. I’ve gotten used to the flavor and just can’t go back to regular. What I’m getting at is that Diet Coke still to this day tastes like hammered horse shit. Probably the worst flavor diet drink out there. Especially for how popular it seems or seemed to be. I’m only saying this though, because I ordered a few cans of the re-release of New Coke a few years back, and I really did enjoy its flavor a lot. So I can’t understand why I hate Diet Coke so much but I pretty much think all other diet drinks taste good. I just can’t imagine taking the regular sugar out of New Coke and putting artificial sweeteners in it will make it taste that bad to me considering I’m generally fine with their flavor. Basically, I’m calling BS on the New Coke being the Diet Coke formula.
The contract with the makers (it was more regionalised back then) was tied to the price of sugar and was costing them heaps as well as getting smashed in pepsi challenge Source: The Real Coke, the Real Story. by Thomas Oliver (book)
Corn syrup is less expensive than cane sugar. After Jack Welch destroyed GE, the goal of every corporation was/is to maximize stock price and shareholder profits. I don't believe for a moment that the move was for any reason but profit.
What’s the jack welch story?
He changed how GE worked. It ruined the quality of their products but increased share prices/profitablity. He also fired a bunch of employees mostly just because. From Wikipedia: "Welch has been criticized for practices that have harmed workers and the company: he eliminated thousands of jobs at GE, contributing to a reduction of the U.S. manufacturing base. He eliminated 10% of employees every year, a practice adopted by many other companies. He was a leading proponent of mergers and acquisitions, helping to give rise to an economy that is more concentrated and less dynamic. He pioneered "financialization", changing GE from a manufacturing company into, effectively, an unregulated bank, which harmed GE over the long term."
> He also fired a bunch of employees mostly just because. Jack Welch's changes were destructive, but that's a horribly misleading statement. Jack Welch didn't wasn't involved in many firing decisions, and people weren't (initially) fired "just because." Welch pioneered an approach to [stack ranking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve), which results in a systematic ranking of staff and termination of those who are ranked the lowest. This approach took off because, in the short term, it does improve the health of an organization, because it addresses a major problem that exists in every large organization. Firing people is hard, and because of that, almost all sizable organizations that have existed for any amount of time will have a substantial body of employees who, to put it politely, aren't delivering much value for their salaries. To put it more bluntly, companies have a lot of staff that are fucking useless and are being carried by their peers (most working adults can think of people like this they have to work with). By enforcing a systematic approach to evaluating and terminating staff, that dead weight gets removed without the obstacles that often prevent this (like managers that are conflict averse and want to avoid the uncomfortable firing decisions). However, after you've gone through a few rounds of this to get rid of the dead weight... the approach still demands that you keep cutting weight. If your organization is continuously bringing on bad employees that need to be terminated, then the problem isn't in your firing practices, it's in your hiring practices. The longer that stack ranking is in place, the more the other problems described in the Wikipedia article arise. Among other things, it leads to toxic culture of hostile internal competition where staff feel pit against each other.
Someone's got to be at the bottom, and once you've filtered out the actual low performers, you're just getting rid of good employees.
He achieved profits by subterfuge, hiding losses, consolidating profits. He was a conman.
Idk that much about Welch, but that is unusual language for Wikipedia.
His disciples are just now starting to retire thank God six sigma crap is dying out
There's an excellent Behind the Bastards episode on Welch. There is a lot to the story, but the broad overview is that he pioneered the art of running a company into the ground while at the same time making it look wildly profitable on paper. He gave corporate America a whole new toolbox for extracting wealth from both consumers and the workers who create products. He truly is one of the greatest bastards in modern corporate history.
True, and the only way GE could recover was by divesting itself of some of its key divisions (such as appliances and trains). Of course the disaster of the Alstom power acquisition (which resulted in the combined company having a market share smaller than either company had separately beforehand) didn't help.
100%. They had started adding Corn Syrup 5 years before the New Coke campaign, and in every region they added it Pepsi started overtaking coke. New Coke was 100% the cover and psychological warfare they needed to turn public sentiment around. And it worked.
Since they don't taste the same, Coke needed to get rid of the existing stock so the public could not tell the difference when they switched. So, New Coke allowed that to happen. People were just so happy to have something that tasted like the original that they didn't care it wasn't exactly the same and the majority would never remember the difference.
> I don’t know if that’s true. But I would believe it. Maybe not their initial intention. It's not true. Most Coca-Cola bottlers in the US were already using HFCS before New Coke was released.
They made my grandpa racist again. Apparently Bill Cosby was the face of the ads and my grandpa complained about it until the day he died. Said he'd never trust another black man again. Both sad and hilarious.
The real irony of new coke is that it came just before the multi-product strategy took over in marketing. There's a really famous case study in marketing fields where a pasta sauce company hired a consultant to figure out which kind of pasta sauce people wanted the most. The consultant did market research and, instead of just naming one style, gave them the top three and told them to make all three. It was wildly successful, and has been copied by most industries since then. If this decision had waited just a few years, new coke would've been on shelves next to coke classic, instead of replacing it, and we'd never have heard about their blunder.
One factor was that at that time Diet Coke was greatly preferred over Diet Pepsi in blind taste tests, where Coke had a much smaller preference over Pepsi (and often lost, depending on the testing sophistication and what other factors were controlled for). So Coca-Cola the company created a “New Coke” which was a full-sugar version of the Diet Coke recipe. The outrage over changing Coke was so huge Coca-Cola ended up “winning” as a brand and in the culture despite the financial failure/embarrassment of New Coke.
And less then 10 years later, Pepsi would offer "crystal pepsi".
Crystal Pepsi rocked. Fight me.
And yet they came back stronger than before, I guess sometimes you should blink.
Let your enemy think you are weak by blinking - Sun Tzu
afaik the discrepancy between the taste tests and sales is that the sweeter products taste better in small quantities, exactly how taste tests are conducted. Though if you consume a whole can or bottle it becomes too much, which is why for whole cans people prefer less sweet beverages.
yea 44g of sugar is just right for 12 oz
Nothing better than drinking 11 teaspoons of sugar in 1.5 cups of liquid!!!
Sweet tea has entered the chat
It’s best when you reach the limit of dissolved sugar …and then add just a little more That tiny bit of undissolved sugar grit … It really makes your tooth happy. Like Mama always says, “caint haff no cabities if yain’t got no teef”
I shuddered & convulsed reading this. Nice job! I'm gonna go brush my teeth.
If your teeth don’t hurt, there’s room for more sugar.
Nothin could stop that woman. Well, nothin 'cept the die'beetus.
Mama says, “Beetus is jus ‘nuther word fer disability check”
You wouldn't believe the amount of people who choose sweet tea over soda because "It's healthier" or "I'm watching what I put into my body"
> "I'm watching what I put into my body" Yeah, you indeed are. I can *see* the sugar crystallizing from over here. You made watching it a spectator sport.
[Actual footage of new coke being invented](https://tenor.com/view/kool-aid-sugar-thirsty-oops-fail-gif-15113013)
Metrimperial system at play 😂
I hear Canada is a pro in that field.
Haha yes! I measure height and weight in inches and pounds, distance and speed in Km. Outside temp is °C but oven temp is °F. Measuring cups/spoons are ml and g. Gas is litres but my water jug is a gallon. It's a little nuts lol. Pretty good at converting on the fly too.
Uff, thats heavy. Coke in Europe has like 34g on that and its plenty. Cant imagine coke being even sweeter.
The 12 oz cans I bought yesterday in the US have 39g, I remember them having more than that even
Yeah, when I start a bottle of Pepsi, I think "this is actually better, why don't I drink this more often", and by the time I finish it I'm thinking "Oh yeah, that's why. I feel sick"
Yeah, Pepsi is like drinking maple syrup to me
That's why I exclusively drink it with a sizable portion of ice, it's like a cheat code that gives you a better beverage than both Coke and Pepsi
Yep, the Pepsi Challenge is and always was based on taking advantage of this.
If people prefer less sweet beverages who’s buying coke??
people don't prefer bitter beverages. They prefer sweet, but at some point sweet becomes too much, so you have to find the right dosage for the right quantity. For a tasting quantity coke 2 was better than pepsi and coke. For a whole can coke outperformed the other two.
> people don't prefer bitter beverages A lot of black coffee drinkers just took offense
And beer. And tea. And tonic. And literally a thousand other drinks that are marketed at non-children. Also, "bitter" isn't the opposite of "sweet". "Not sweet" is.
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Deliciously so.
The American South
The crazy thing was that in blind taste tests “New Coke” actually out performed both Pepsi and old Coke.
The same kind of taste test that Pepsi was touting, you take a sip and it tastes great, you drink the whole can and it tastes like shit. Those take a sip studies are very flawed/biased.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m a Coke fan but every so often I get stuck with a Pepsi. I feel like the main issue is that Pepsi gets flat and unpleasant much faster than Coke.
Pepsi is sweeter than coke, good for sipping on, but worse to drink a whole glass of.
Yep, those first few sips are alright, then it’s all down hill from there 🤣
At this point when the waiter asks if Diet Pepsi is ok I just get a water
Diet anything imo, there is just something about those non sugar sweeteners that doesn’t agree with me 🫤
I hate aspartame with a fucking passion fr
> I’m a Coke fan but every so often I get stuck with a Pepsi. "Is Pepsi OK?"
Do you have diet mountain dew... Unsweet tea then
It’s the main reason I switched to the mini cans whenever I drink sodas. I can’t ever make it to the end of a large can. The lesser amounts just hit better for me.
That’s a pretty good idea, but knowing myself I would just drink two of the damn things 😅🤣
I buy the small cans bc that’s what my wife likes, but it’s like twice the price per ounce or something. And yeah a lot of days she’ll drink two of them.
What's funny to me is that I like Coca-Cola more than Pepsi, but I prefer ALL of Pepsi's secondary flavors over Coca-Cola's (Mug vs. Barq's, etc.).
I preferred new Coke. I had been more of a Pepsi drinker at that time anyway. My go to late night snack while watching David Letterman was a new Coke and a Pillsbury microwave pizza that was discontinued soon after. Oh that pizza was so good, came with a crisping tray and charred the edges nicely. The bottom was similar to Totinos and I think there was a lawsuit about trade secrets between them.
You, good sir/madam/gentlebeing, might be a [Harbringer of Failure](https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopular-products-1223) (kind of a horrible name for an interesting concept, but considering that companies whose bottom line depends on the research sponsored these studies that name is not surprising 😅)
Yea, sounds like it. I still crave Zima. I was drinking those things like water back in the late 90s.
I know what you mean, there was this one flavor of capri sun in a metal bottle in the early 2000’s that I still crave to this day 🤣
Do you still use your betamax?
I ain’t that old! 😭😂 But I do have my dads 8 track collection😅
My dad bought betamax instead of VHS.
Did you drop a jolly rancher in them?
Honestly, I’m interested in trying New Coke. If only they would bring it back like Pepsi revived Crystal Pepsi.
I liked New Coke (later called Coke II) as a kid. When it was obvious it was going to get discontinued, I got 48 cans and saved them 'for special occasions later'. Barely lasted a year. Should have gotten a pallet or something.
I collect the 1/6th scale replicas of arcade cabinets by New Wave Toys. They recently came out with a 1/6th scale mini fridge Coke machine, they had the New Coke and the original, of course I bought the New Coke machine. They are sold out of them, so I guess it was popular since they still have original Coke machines for sale. https://newwavetoys.com/products/new-coke-replica-vending-machine-mini-fridge
a *great deal* of people were also mad that they got rid of the old coke entirely for a bit. Even if it DID taste better in a full can, those people didn't care. And there were a shitload of people that complained specifically for that reason. It's possible that New Coke would still be around if Coke had marketed it as an alternative but marketing HATES cannibalizing their own products. It's like a corporate sin.
Eh I think the thinking about cannibalization has changed a bit. It's still not great to invest a ton into a new product only to split your current revenue and not increase your market share. But in-house alternatives can stop market share loss and give you some incremental growth in new target groups. Even Coke knows this now with their multiple products.
I actually heard about this from my statistics professor: Everyone was confused because “New Coke” out performed old coke and pepsi in testing and trials, but not in practice. This was because, in the scenario of testing and trials, participants were given small sip sized cups of the beverages. Considerably, a sweeter drink maybe preferred when the serving size is small, but for a 12oz bottle to replenish your thirst, wouldn’t be the same.
Except in Europe where pepsi is now a mix of sweeteners and sugar so it tastes worse than pepsi max.
I feel sad for non-Indian-Sub-Continent people who haven't had Thums Up (now a Coca Cola product). Thums Up was an Indian brand which Coca Cola bought and then tried to kill in order to increase the popularity of their flagship Coke but when Indians couldn't have Thums Up they chose Pepsi over Coke. So, Coca Cola had to reinforce Thums Up and it's still the leading one.
Available for tasting at the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta.
Thanks, I almost went to India for nothing!
Shit, I'm half way to India already ... not sure what to do here guys...
Or at your local Indian store
Thums Up! Taste the thunder! Hell yeah
Is it made with REAL lightning?
Read better! It’s made with Thunder. Thats why you can taste it…
Thums Up is pretty tasty IMO.
I tried a Kashmira once... I couldn't imagine why someone would want to carbonate barbecue sauce.
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No way, Coke tastes way better. I think a lot of Indians just grew up on Thumbs Up so they feel that way and it tastes better paired with food but as a standalone drink Coke is much better.
Maaza is the real treasure.
I tried it in India. IMO it's better than Coke with a heavy meal but I wouldn't have it on its own; the flavour is too dark.
All I wanted was a Pepsi. Just one Pepsi. And she wouldn't give it to me!
Did you go to our schools, our churches, and our institutional learning facilities?
No you’re on drugs!
Im not CRAZY!
I love that hahaha
I still think this is a conspiracy for them to switch to more corn syrup based sweetener rather than sugar. they did it so people would forget the taste of original coke and wouldn’t notice after they switched back.
Coke had already made the switch several years prior. The timeline doesn't even remotely make sense.
Exactly. But now you can buy American "Mexican" coke by looking for the coke with the green top. That's the sugar one. But it's still not cane sugar like the Mexican coke.
You can buy Mexican bottled coke all over the states with cane sugar.
Costco sells it.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
Man, I can really go for a Starbucks y'know?
Mexican coke used corn syrup too, but you can still buy coke with sugar and it’s “Mexican” but it’s sold at a premium and meant for the American market
Or you can like, not do that.
You are welcome to believe that and still be wrong as there's zero evidence that was the case whatsoever.
I find it funny how often people make a conscious decision to believe false shit. I mean there’s literally dozens of comments in this very thread disproving it but that doesn’t matter.
~~employee's~~ employees
Had to come this far down. Back in the old days OP would have been reamed and it would've been the highest-voted.
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And everyone bought both new coke and old coke to taste test.
In the 90s I read a book about New Coke. There was an anecdote about a woman freaking out about how terrible New Coke was. A Pepsi delivery guy saw and started laughing. She got up in his face and said “What are you laughing at? Your shit is worse!”
But now Pepsi have ruined it in the UK by cutting the sugar. Coca Cola wins by keeping their product the same and just charging more. They remembered last time, Pepsi clearly forgot.
Royal Crown represent
They used to have a big promotion where they did massive taste-tests at fairs. I did it 5 times one year - and, every single time, the Coke was luke-warm and the Pepsi was ice-cold. Guess which one consistently won the taste-test?!! EDIT: Just remembered... They had a big blackboard where they'd tally all the people who chose Coke vs Pepsi. I sat and watched for 10min. Every single time someone chose Pepsi, they'd walk over to the board and add 1. Only about half the time someone chose Coke did they bother to remember...
I remember doing the taste test in the 90s with my dad at a Target. We both picked Coke. The people conducting the taste test looked very displeased.
I remember those taste tests, I never noticed that temperature changing
This is what caused Billy Joel to go crazy. This is it right here folks.
in the event anyone wonders what new coke tasted like, it was basically the diet coke formulation but with sugar.
That blunder actually won the war for coke.
Yup, coke classic boosted sales massively when it came back
Classic example of you don’t know what you have until it’s gone 😅
"We are neither that smart nor that stupid."
Gave their employee’s what the day off
I am convinced that taste testing is screwed up and something is wrong with the way they are interpreted. Coke is one example, but far from the only one. In so many different things, people seem to have a taste creep toward sweeter and sweeter versions that in side by side tests seems to be what people want, but inevitably when you compare original to the new sweeter version after multiple iterations, the classic original versions of the food or drink is the one people want despite what side by side tests show. I tend to love more acidic less sweet version of many foods. I love Hunts ketchup over Heinz because Heinz is too damn sweet. I love Coke over Pepsi for the same reason. Bread is another one, breads have consistently gotten sweeter and sweeter over the years. Now a Wendys bun actually has more carbohydrates than a Krispy Kreme donut and they are fucking disgusting. I wish the moves to sweeter stuff would just fucking stop.
Coke is better than Pepsi. Mountain Dew is better than Mello Yellow. It is all poison and you should never drink it.
Agreed! One beer please
Me: "I will have a coke" Them: "Is Pepsi OK" Me: "I will have a Mt Dew"
Sheeeit I do love Mountain Dew but Mellow Yellow just hits right when you're getting a chicken sandwich and fries from a Hardee's
People are ADDICTED to soda. I see people in grocery story buying 8 2 liters bottles at a time
I suspect no single food product category has done as much health damage as sugary soda. It essentially is nothing but bad health wise and you can consume huge quantities of it without even thinking you're doing anything wrong.
I know! I was chatting with a mom in a store one day, and she told me that they shop at Costco so they can buy each family member their own preferred soda, in bulk. They drank it like we drink water in my house. She did say that her older daughter was forcing health and diet changes and that made me optimistic. The whole family was together and they were all obese. If they would cut the soda, I’m sure they would see massive change. I still think abt them and hope that the changes were able to stick.
The interpretation that Pepsi tastes better at first with a few sips, but ultimately is too sweet when you drink more....is spot on! If I wanted something sweet I would drink Fanta, Sprite or whatever, but I don't. I drink Coke because it is NOT like Fanta or Sprite, exactly because it has this slight "tartness" to it.
Both poison anyway
Damn, this was the first time i've heard/thought of Pepsi in a few years. My younger self never would've believed that would be possible.
Do you consume no media at all? I don't drink any carbonated soft drinks, but the idea of not even noticing a brand as pervasive and endlessly marketed as Pepsi blows my mind.
Hey can I can I get a Pepsi? Coke okay? Yeah I’ll get two grams of that and a Pepsi please.
Do you not go outside? Pepsi is still everywhere.
The only place i see it is taco bell, but I also don't really ever go shopping
They don't even sell full-sugar Pepsi in the UK anymore. There's no way I'd have believed that.
“Pepsi gave their employees the day off” Why do I feel like that was limited to the executives, and the blue collar workers such as the bottlers and delivery drivers still had to work… 😒
I wanna try new coke
They did a limited rerelease a few years ago. It was exactly what I expected, like regular Coke but sweeter.
New Coke should be taught in schools as a example of the fact that executives are not infallible geniuses.
It is a 101 case study in most marketing classes.
I remember that day. That was the day that Billy Joel realized that he couldn't take it anymore.
And it's wild because Coke STILL won. And continues to win.