how do you even drink that because it's delicious what the Coca-Cola company has been offered the chance to buy Pepsi's business multiple times including for only $50,000 in 1933 but Coke turned them down instead Coke tried to sue Pepsi for using the word Cola in their ads claiming that they were trying to rip off Coca-Cola's product this backfired when Pepsi counters sued that Koko was using anti-competitive tactics to build a monopoly the courts agreed and ruled that Cola was a generic term anyone could use however since Koke missed their chance to buy Pepsi they ended
up getting locked in an ongoing marketing battle with them at one point Coke and Pepsi both started cutting their prices and offering discounts to try and compete with each other but they soon realized this was hurting both of them whether they made a secret deal behind closed doors or not is unknown but soon they both reverted back to their normal pricing and tried to compete on Advertising instead but eventually Pepsi had the simple but genius idea to actually compete on taste in 1975 Pepsi launched the Pepsi challenge where they gave people two white cups one
containing Pepsi and one containing Coca-Cola people didn't know which was which and were encouraged to taste both to see which they preferred the test results showed that Pepsi was preferred by slightly more people and so Pepsi started using this stat in all of their advertising and all across America more people pick Pepsi Time After Time After Time Co completely denied this was true but when they conducted their own tests they found that Pepsi did indeed score slightly higher in a blind taste test meanwhile Coca-Cola was slowly but steadily losing market share they tried everything huge
marketing campaigns and price promotions but every year Coke's market share slightly declined and Pepsi slightly increased it started to seem that perhaps the Pepsi challenge was right the problem was that more people simply preferred the taste of Pepsi and thus Coca-Cola began an incredibly secret mission they were going to change Coke's formula after rigorous testing and trials they discovered a new Cola formula that consistently performed better than both original Coke and Pepsi over and over they repeated the blind tase test and the data was clear the new formula was more popular and so just short
of Coca-Cola's 100-year anniversary they did the unthinkable they changed the Coca-Cola formula and replaced it with new Coke Coca-Cola is about to announce what it calls the most significant development in its history Pepsi Cola says Coke is merely trying to match Pepsi's success these two products Pepsi and Coke have been going at it eyeball to eyeball and in my view the other guy just blinked and immediately the chaos began every single day thousands of phone calls and letters arrived at kooch's offices they were mixed sure of destroy people begging for the old version of KB
and people who were downright Furious Koke had had the nerve to take away the original formula Koke expected the uo would soon die down especially once people actually tried the new formula but the outrage simply intensified the media was equally full of outrage reports and at the coke phone lines were constantly jammed with complaints for months when new Coke advertisements were shown on giant screens and stadiums people loudly booed it became popular to hate New Coke of course many of the people complaining hadn't even tried the new formula as one Coke employee put it we
could have introduced The Elixir of the Gods and it wouldn't have made any difference it was soon very clear that taste hadn't been the issue it didn't matter if New Coke technically tasted better in blind taste tests success had never been about taste in the first place thanks to its incredible marketing the world viewed Coca-Cola as an old friend a piece of everyday life for around a 100 years Coke had been present never changing no matter what was going on in the world it was an icon and changing something that meant so much to people
was considered a betrayal one angry letter commented that changing Coke is like making the grass purple another claimed you've taken away my childhood even months later the protests were not dying down and it soon became clear the company had to revert back to the old formula they had made a gigantic mistake there were very few instances in history of such strong backlash against the company's decision and yet despite that the new Coke disaster ended up being one of cat's greatest marketing triumphs you see when Coke caved in and brought back the original formula under the
name classic Coke suddenly all of the anger turned to Euphoria and praise suddenly all the letters and phone calls arriving at the company were filled with adoring fans thanking the company and commenting how how much it meant to them one Coke marketer said you would have thought we'd invented a cure for cancer immediately after reintroducing the old flavor Coke sales dramatically increased business week named the whole thing the marketing blunder of the decade but some skeptical analysts felt the company had staged the entire thing for publicity and to remind customers how much coke means to
them if the whole stunt really was planned it would be one of the greatest marketing strategies imaginable but that was not the case at all new Coke was a catastrophic misjudgment by Coke they really had thought people would prefer New Coke in fact even after they reintroduced the classic version they kept New Coke available in shops as well because they thought once people actually had more time to try the new flavor eventually people would convert to the new formula I'm Don K president of the Cocola company when we brought you the new Taste of coke
we knew that Millions would prefer it and millions do and we knew that it would beat the taste of our major competitor and it does what we didn't know was how many thousands of you would phone and write asking us to bring back the classic Taste of original Coca-Cola well we read and we listened and you know the rest they're both yours the new Taste of coke and Coca-Cola classic your right of choice is back but they were wrong again sales of New Coke never improved and eventually it was removed from circulation completely however despite
being so completely wrong the end result was that New Coke had unintentionally made people realize how much they loved original Coke the whole thing helped people feel more attached and loyal to Coke than ever before by taking the classic Taste of coke away it showed people how much they missed it when it was gone it was a reminder how important to them Coca-Cola was and so even though temporarily removing classic Coke created a huge backlash against the company as soon as they brought it back Coke sales increased and people felt really grateful to the company
and thus New Coke was one of the most successful mistakes ever now it's time to address a question I get very often which is where do you get started if you want to make YouTube videos like this yourself on whatever topics you find interesting and the answer to that is today's video sponsor skillshare an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators there's a variety of classes from famous YouTubers teaching their own methods but if you want to do documentary style videos with Motion Graphics I recommend Evan abrams's introduction to Adobe After Effects
which will show you all the basics to get started and because skillshare is curated for learning there's no ads and lots of new premium classes added all all the time the first 1,000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so click the link below now to get started for free and start exploring your creativity today I hope you enjoyed this story of New Coke and if you want more business stories like this check out these videos next that I think you'll really like thanks
for watching to the end you are a legend and I'll see you in the next video
