klein@ucbcad.UUCP (Mike Klein) (07/18/85)
For all you folks out there making conjectures about what is really going on at Coca-Cola, I urge you to read a very good article that appeared on the first page of the July 15 Wall Street Journal. The gist of the article: the combination of public uproar and sudden poor sales was the cause of the Old Coke coming back, and yes, Coca-Cola was caught totally off guard. They took their first ad pictures of Coke Classic with a fake sleeve on a can. And yes, a few months was plenty of time for Coca-Cola to evaluate the market and make a gut-level decision. They are continuously monitoring market studies and go over them weekly. The first ones after New Coke (in May) showed good sales in line with what Coca-Cola had projected, but later ones (June) showed an unbelievably rapid decline in sales. The decision to re-introduce Old Coke was made within a few days, and the market research people had less than a week to come up with a new name and package. A lot of details (like how to handle advertising accounts) are still not settled. Let's face it. A lot of people outside engineering think that engineering is an exact, calculated science. We all know (or should know) that it's not. Similarly, people outside the business world often think that business decisions can be made in the same way by doing years of research. Coca-Cola put 4-1/2 years of research into New Coke and it was a complete disaster that will become a classic case history for years to come. The lesson: Coca-Cola's marketing formulas and models forgot the most important thing: people. -- -Mike Klein ...!ucbvax!ucbmerlin:klein (UUCP) klein%ucbmerlin@berkeley (ARPA)