The Real Coke, the Real Story

The Real Coke, the Real Story

by Thomas Oliver
The Real Coke, the Real Story

The Real Coke, the Real Story

by Thomas Oliver

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Overview

“Examines why the set-in-its-ways Coca Cola Company tampered with a drink that had become an American institution—and blundered into one of the greatest marketing triumphs of all time.”—New York
 
On April 23, 1985, the top executives of the Coca-Cola Company held a press conference in New York City. News had leaked out that Coke, the king of soft drinks, would no longer be produced. In its place the Coca-Cola Company would offer a new drink with a new taste and would dare call it by the old name, Coca-Cola.
 
The new Coke was launched—and the reaction of the American people was immediate and violent: three months of unrelenting protest against the loss of Coke. So fierce was the reaction across the country that it forced a response from the Coca-Cola Company. Stunned Coca-Cola executives stepped up to the microphone and publicly apologized to the American people. They announced that the company would reissue the original Coca-Cola formula under a new name, Coke Classic.

The Real Coke, the Real Story is the behind-the-scenes account of what prompted Coca-Cola to change the taste of its flagship brand—and how consumers persuaded a corporate giant to bring back America’s old friend.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780804151313
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 10/09/2013
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
Sales rank: 987,792
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Thomas Oliver is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, Coke’s hometown, and a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution. He has been writing on financial subjects for six years and has covered the Coca-Cola Company during that time.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE
 
On April 23, 1985, the top executives of the Coca-Cola Company held a press conference in New York City. News had leaked out that Coke, the king of soft drinks, would no longer be produced. In its place the Coca-Cola Company would offer a new drink with a new taste and would dare to call it by the old name, Coca-Cola. At the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center, some two hundred reporters, photographers, and cameramen eagerly awaited confirmation of the sensational news, while hundreds more participated via satellite hookup in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Toronto.
 
Why, after all, was there so much interest? Because Coke is more than just a soft drink. What the famous Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White wrote is true: “Coca-Cola is the sublimated essence of all that America stands for. A decent thing, honestly made, [and] universally distributed.”
 
Coke had grown up with twentieth-century America, where rites of passage are marked by moving from sipping Coke as a soda pop to mixing it with rum as an adult’s elixir. And that famous Coca-Cola logo appears on signs and billboards in virtually every other country as well, linking America to the rest of the world and looming as large as a symbol of the United States as the Statue of Liberty. Coke is so strongly identified with the United States that when countries fall out with us politically, Coke’s exile sometimes closely follows the expulsion of our ambassador. Antiwestern insurgents often identify Coca-Cola as the most visible example of capitalism in their countries and have blown up or taken over more than one Coca-Cola bottling plant in retaliation for some alleged grievance.
 
At home, Coke is more than a drink: it is sandlot baseball, high school pep rallies, that first driver’s license, hot rods, swimming pools, and street dances. It is the pause that refreshes and reminds us all of the good times, and it has even helped us through some of the bad.
 
With that passionate public concern in the background, amid the television lights and the red wash of Coca-Cola banners, on that April day in 1985, Roberto C. Goizueta, the chairman and chief executive officer of Coca-Cola, announced that the “best has been made even better.” The world’s largest soft-drink company had developed an improved taste for the world’s number-one soft drink. After one hundred years, Coke would have a new taste.
 
Goizueta said that his company’s decision to make the change was based on nearly two hundred thousand consumer taste tests, which had revealed a resounding preference for the new flavor. “To market research experts, to our bottlers, and to the retail trade, these numbers represent a staggering superiority,” declared Donald R. Keough, the president of Coca-Cola. In no uncertain terms Goizueta told the press that the bold change was backed by tremendous confidence and enthusiasm on the part of the Coca-Cola Company. It was “the surest move the company ever made,” he said.
 
And so the new Coke was launched—and the reaction of the American people was immediate and violent: three months of unrelenting protest against the loss of Coke. So fierce was the reaction across the country that it forced a response from the Coca-Cola Company. On July 11, 1985, Goizueta and Keough called another press conference. This one took place at the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, and this time there was no hoopla, no dog-and-pony show, no bragging and arrogance—only unadorned humility. Stunned Coca-Cola executives stepped up to the microphone and publicly apologized to the American people. They announced that the company would reissue the original Coca-Cola formula under a new name, Coke Classic.
 
Never before had a major corporation told the American people that it was sorry, never before had a corporate giant begged consumers for forgiveness—and never was an apology so quickly accepted.
 
But how could the company that owns the world’s most famous trademark have been so wrong about its significance? How was a $7 billion corporation, which produces not just Coke but diet Coke, Tab, Sprite, Minute Maid orange juice, and movie hits like Ghostbusters, brought to its knees by consumers? Could Coca-Cola’s management team, with its sterling track record, really have been so blind that it didn’t foresee the fiasco? Or was the whole event a huge publicity stunt, a carefully calculated plot to launch a new cola and boost the sales of the old one?
 
The Real Coke, The Real Story is a behind-the-scenes account of how and why the company changed the taste of its flagship brand. Much of the story has never been told before. It involves the life of the Coca-Cola Company itself, from its early boom years, through a period of benign neglect and increasing losses to its major competitor, to the resurrection of the company under a new management in 1980. The Coca-Cola Company of the early 1980s was one of the most admired business organizations in the United States, according to a Fortune magazine poll of eight thousand business executives and analysts. It purchased Columbia Pictures Industries, formed Tri-Star Pictures, introduced diet Coke and cherry Coke, all the while increasing shareholders’ return on investment by 22 percent. It seemed the management of Coca-Cola could do no wrong—just a moment before it made what appeared to be one of the major blunders in the chronicle of American business.
 
The result of that mistake is another part of the story—the remarkable reaction of those who refused to accept the axiom that the consumer is powerless in the face of a corporate giant and who persuaded Coca-Cola to bring back America’s old friend.
 
CHAPTER 1
 
THEY DON’T MAKE COKE ANYMORE
 
The Coca-Cola Company’s news of April 23, 1985, sent shock waves across America. The unique taste of Coke would soon be a thing of the past, no more than a memory evoking a different era, a different way of life. Some people cried, some scoffed, some wrote scathing articles, and others frantically set about to stockpile enormous hoards of their irreplaceable longtime favorite. But everywhere Coke’s large and loyal following asked, “Why did they do this to Coke?”
 
Dan Lauck, a reporter on KHLO-TV in San Antonio, Texas, drinks little else but Coke—no beer, no coffee, no tea or milk. Although he may have a mixed drink three or four times a year, he never mixes Coke with alcohol—“Why ruin a good Coke?” he asks. The thirty-five-year-old insists on drinking only Coke that comes in the original six-and-a-half-ounce bottle, and his habit, which has gone on since his college years, is to consume twelve of these bottles a day. If he plays tennis in the hot Texas sun, he may drink a whole case in a single day. To compensate for his immense caloric intake from Coke, Dan has had to forgo both breakfast and lunch.
 
Everywhere he goes, Dan carries a hand-held cooler. If he finds himself in a restaurant that doesn’t serve the real thing, he’ll bring in one Coke at a time from the ample supply in his VW convertible. And when he and his wife, Meg, go to a movie theater that serves a cola other than Coke, Meg lugs along an insulated pocketbook that is really a camouflaged cooler packed with bottles of Coke.
 
Dan will do just about anything to maintain his habit. At one time he was living and working in New York and the local Coca-Cola bottler stopped producing Coke in six-and-a-half-ounce bottles, so for five or six years Dan periodically drove all the way to Wilmington, Delaware, to buy his stash. Once he rented a truck and brought back 150 cases.
 
When Dan arrived at work on April 23, a day that Cokaholics have dubbed Black Tuesday, his managing editor asked if he felt as if his life had just gone down the toilet. Dan didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t believe her when she told him that they were changing the taste of Coke. He called the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, and the people there confirmed what the world was just beginning to learn.
 
“I couldn’t have been more surprised if someone had told me that I was gay,” said the husband and father of two. “I was flabbergasted, and after twenty minutes in the funk, I asked our director if I could borrow his pickup truck.” Dan drove to the San Antonio bottler and purchased 110 cases for $979.00. The next day he was torn between feeling guilty about spending so much money and wanting to stockpile even more Coke. “I thought about cashing in some of my wife’s stocks and buying more,” he said.
 
Libby Lavine is a short, auburn-haired woman who gets teary-eyed when she hears the old Coke song “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony; I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company.” In the basement of her comfortable home in Birmingham, Michigan, stands an old Coke vending machine stocked with ten-ounce bottles. Libby’s kitchen telephone is shaped like a Coke bottle, with the push button numbers located under the base. Nearby is a transistor radio shaped like a modern-day Coca-Cola vending machine. Using all the discipline she can muster, Libby restricts herself to three ten-ounce bottles a day.
 
When Libby Lavine heard the Coca-Cola Company’s news, she not only rushed out and bought $700 worth of Coke, she also got angry. She called the Daily Tribune in nearby Royal Oaks and placed a classified ad asking for letters from other old-Coke fans. A Daily Trib reporter picked up the story about her letter-writing campaign, and Libby was so swamped with mail that she rented a post office box to receive the letters. Within the first three days she got one hundred, and there would be many, many more.
 

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