On March 7, 1985, at the age of ninety-five, Robert Woodruff finally stopped struggling, a little over a month before the world learned that The Coca-Cola Company was transforming the flavor of its most famous soft drink. While making Coca-Cola a global drink, he had dismissed those who praised him as a visionary. “I was just curious,” he would say, “to see if people in other countries would like it, too.” Though he lived almost a century, he remained an enigma even to his closest associates. “I’m not sure anyone really knew him,” Joe Jones reflected. Woodruff left Jones, his long-suffering secretary, a million dollars in his will. “And he earned every penny of it,” Wilbur Kurtz emphasized.*
To the end, Woodruff embodied contradictions. A sentimental, loyal, gentle man who gave his friends a single rose on their birthdays, he could also be harsh, vindictive, autocratic—a real bastard who sometimes barked obscenities. He had donated untold anonymous millions to worthy causes, including $230 million to Emory University, but he failed to provide bail for Charlie Ware, the black man shot as a result of conflict with the white Ichauway overseer. Woodruff could be a gruff, manly hunter, lord of the plantation, a huge cigar clamped between his teeth. Beneath his macho image, however, lay a fundamental insecurity and a phobia about being alone, leading to 3 a.m. vigils with his doctor or friends when he couldn’t sleep.
Whatever the truth may be, the inscrutable tycoon carried his secrets to the grave, leaving his “partner,” Roberto Goizueta, to face an incensed American public. Perhaps, having granted his permission to change the formula, Woodruff viewed his successor’s summer of agony with a wry smile from his vantage point in heaven, toasting Goizueta’s future health with a six-and-a-half-ounce bottle of good old-fashioned Coca-Cola.
THE BUNKER MENTALITY
Only days after Goizueta’s fateful January meeting with Woodruff, five McCann employees filed into an isolated fourth-floor room. With a paper shredder and Pinkerton guard posted at the door, Ike Herbert and Sergio Zyman informed them that they must produce an exciting set of introductory commercials in less than four months while maintaining strict secrecy. Although John Bergin and the other creative talent were flabbergasted, the decision appeared irrevocable. At first, Herbert forbade the word “new,” an indication of drastic alteration, but focus groups showed that a “new” product provoked the most immediate response, and Goizueta, afraid the introduction would be greeted with a gigantic American yawn, authorized the use of the word in bold black type on the label. The harried, claustrophobic McCann men quickly dubbed the tiny New York City U-shaped office “the Bunker.” Any new footage had to be shot with actors unaware they were pitching a new formula.
The meetings in the Bunker were disastrous. Gradually, more McCann men joined the secret team, but no one could brainstorm a campaign that would really resonate. Partly, they were handicapped by Zyman’s insistence on eschewing “reason why” advertising that described the new flavor or explained its replacement of the old formula. In desperation, they amended the recently modified “Coke Is It” campaign, which proclaimed the drink a “kick” and a “hit.” In London’s “Bunker II,” Marcio Moreira, the Brazilian who headed McCann’s international ad efforts, oversaw high-tech product shots featuring the new can. Later, these would be incorporated into commercial footage filmed in the United States. To the British production crews, a transformed Coca-Cola formula didn’t mean much. When the film director asked why “new” appeared on the Coke can, Moreira answered, “It’s a new tin,” eliciting a disinterested shrug. “We shot the whole fucking thing without anyone saying anything,” Moreira recalled. By this time, with barely a month left before the scheduled public introduction, an impatient Sergio Zyman assumed direct creative control, reducing McCann men to flunky status. In this nerve-racking atmosphere, the premier commercials lurched into final edit.
A DISASTROUS PRESS CONFERENCE
As the feverish ad men labored in their bunkers on both sides of the Atlantic, the media love-fest with Coke persisted in the early months of 1985. In January, Don Keough revealed a contract to bring Coca-Cola to Soviet citizens for the first time. Then, in March, the Company rolled out Cherry Coke, violating yet another old commandment never to add other flavors to the drink. Consequently, on Friday, April 19, 1985, when Goizueta invited the media to a press conference the following Tuesday for news on “the most significant soft-drink marketing development in the company’s nearly 100-year history,” he was confident of a friendly reception. The three-day lag virtually guaranteed a leak, allowing stunned Pepsi executives time to prepare their rebuttal. On Tuesday, the day of the big announcement, readers of the nation’s major newspapers saw a full-page ad in which Pepsi president Roger Enrico’s open letter to his employees crowed that “the other guy just blinked” and was “reformulating brand Coke to be more like Pepsi,” obviously because “Pepsi tastes better than Coke.” He concluded by declaring a companywide holiday that Friday.
In New York City on Tuesday morning, Keough and Goizueta were exhausted, not fully recovered from the previous day’s bottler convention in Atlanta. They walked onto a stage at Lincoln Center for a press conference before seven hundred journalists and film crews, along with satellite hookups to media in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Houston. The lights dimmed, leaving only three huge red screens with the logo. “We are, we always will be. . . .” swelled a chorus. “Coca-Cola, All-American history.” The screens filled with shots of the Grand Canyon, wheat fields, cowboys, athletes, the Statue of Liberty, and old Coke commercials. Even for a gullible public, this effort would have been too much. For a jaded press, it was insulting. No one saluted or dabbed away a tear.
Then Goizueta declared that “the best soft drink, Coca-Cola, is now going to be even better.” He explained that the new flavor had been discovered as a result of experimentation on Diet Coke and that the Company would now “buy the world a new Coke.” It was, he asserted, “the boldest single marketing move in the history of the packaged consumer goods business,” adding that it was also the “surest move ever made.” Keough emphasized that while the new formula beat old Coke 55–45 in 190,000 blind taste tests, it increased the margin by 61–39 when both drinks were identified. Coke had always provided a “mirror of the times,” Keough explained, sometimes even shaping them, and now the new formula would “propel Coca-Cola into this second century.” He promised that the superior taste would flow globally by the centennial celebration in May of 1986.
As soon as the floor was thrown open, however, the media lobbed unfriendly questions. “Are you one-hundred-percent certain that this won’t bomb?” a St. Louis reporter inquired. Another journalist asked Goizueta to describe the new taste. At first, he demurred, saying that “it’s a matter better left to poets or copywriters.” When pressed, he stumbled through a chemist’s reply: “I would say it is smoother, uh, uh, rounder yet, uh, yet bolder . . . a more harmonious flavor.” Keough added that “the taste kind of surrounds you.”
Even though Keough and Goizueta had carefully rehearsed every answer, their attempts at humorous deflection fell flat. Had they changed the product in response to the Pepsi Challenge? “Oh, gosh, no,” Goizueta answered. “The Pepsi Challenge? When did that happen?” Would the old formula remain in the Trust Company vault? High-strung and miserable without his cigarettes, Goizueta slowly lost his composure. “It stays there,” he snapped. A hostile reporter, phoning from the traditional Coca-Cola heartland of Houston, began to ask a question but turned it into a protest: “Are you tell—I mean, if we wanted Pepsi, we’d buy Pepsi,” prompting a big laugh from her fellow journalists. “Well, honey,” Keough replied patronizingly before correcting himself and calling her ma’am, “this new product is Coca-Cola, even better.” Goizueta interjected: “It’s not even close to Pepsi. Not at all. Not at all.” Unaccountably, when asked if they had tested the new Coke against Pepsi in taste tests, the executives refused to divulge that in fact it did beat Pepsi by a small margin. Instead, Goizueta arrogantly responded: “Surely, we
did. But we don’t have to show them and we don’t want to.”
In response to the final question, asking whether Diet Coke might be reformulated “assuming that this is a success,” Goizueta answered testily. “No. And I didn’t assume that this is a success. It is a success.” Moderator Carlton Curtis, the Company’s top public spokesman, quickly cut off further questions, and the ordeal was over. It had not been a shining moment for the executives. Even the normally unflappable Keough admitted at one point during the grilling, “There’s a lot of things I’d rather be doing than being here right now.”
COKE WAS IT
Despite the ordeal, Goizueta and Keough remained certain that their bold move would succeed. They had told the simple truth—New Coke, as it was inevitably called, tasted better than the old version. It was only a matter of time before Coca-Cola would sweep past Pepsi and reclaim the coveted Nielsen rating lead in supermarket sales. With great pageantry, the Company launched its sampling campaign, literally transforming downtown Atlanta into a three-ring circus. “Step right up to the greatest taste on earth,” the barker cried. In New York, the first cans off the line were ceremoniously delivered to workers renovating the Statue of Liberty. Red and white balloons, fireworks, and banner-waving airplanes filled the skies. “We’re using every glitzy thing you can imagine,” one spokesman confided to the press.
No amount of hoopla could mask the shocked misery of loyal Coke drinkers, however. All of the taste tests had missed one crucial point. Roy Stout’s researchers had never informed their respondents that the hypothetical new formula would replace the old. Incredibly, no one had examined the psychological ramifications of withdrawing the old formula. In the rush to unveil the great new flavor, a kind of corporate hypnosis had occurred. “No one would have listened if someone had said we were going to catch unholy hell,” Sergio Zyman admitted later. “Everybody just said, ‘This can’t go wrong.’”
For Coke loyalists such as Dan Lauck, a San Antonio television news reporter, New Coke couldn’t go right, however, and taste tests were irrelevant. Lauck drank nothing but six-and-a-half-ounce bottles of ice-cold Coca-Cola at the rate of fifteen a day. The thirty-six-year-old was so fond of Coke that he skipped breakfast and lunch to keep his weight down so he could drink more. When he heard about the flavor change, Lauck rushed out and bought 110 cases. He had no intention of conducting taste tests; he would never switch.
If Zyman had taken the 1984 Lintas report on the personality of Coca-Cola drinkers more seriously, he wouldn’t have been so surprised at the reaction of devoted consumers like Lauck. “The world is immutable, it doesn’t change, there are certain self-evident truths,” the report had stated.* Bill Backer had crawled directly into their minds back in 1969 when he had written, “That’s the way it is, / And the way it will stay, / What the world wants today / Is the real thing.”
That truth was quickly and forcibly brought to the Company’s attention. Within a week, over a thousand calls a day were jamming the company’s 800 line, almost all of them expressing shock and outrage at New Coke. The media loved the hot story, which pierced the American heart. “Next week, they’ll be chiseling Teddy Roosevelt off the side of Mount Rushmore,” a Washington Post columnist groaned. The Detroit Free Press mocked Goizueta’s “smoother, rounder, bolder” taste, wondering in print if that made the old drink “lumpy, square, and bashful.” Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune mourned the passing of his old friend. “Every part of my life is associated with Coke,” he wrote, chiding the Company for “a sort of smugness—that if you don’t like New Coke, you will.” Newsweek’s headline declared, “Coke Tampers with Success,” identifying the old soft drink as “the American character in a can.” At the press conference, Keough had promised that “you’re just flat going to enjoy it,” but many consumers modified his remark, complaining that it was difficult to enjoy a drink that was so flat. One elderly woman, interviewed at an Atlanta supermarket, sipped New Coke and gave her verdict: “To use the vernacular of the teenagers, it sucks.” George Pickard, a Nashville songwriter, quickly cashed in on the publicity with a recording entitled “Coke Was It.”
At first, Goizueta and Keough reveled in the avalanche of free publicity, negative or otherwise. Within days, 96 percent of all Americans knew about the flavor change. The Company proceeded with the national roll-out, along with a new Cosby campaign and modified “Coke Is It” spots. Even granting the rushed and secretive conditions under which the commercials were spawned, they seemed inexplicably clumsy, all too literally interpreting the singsong lyrics, often with negative or violent implications. As the singer bragged of “a style, a groove,” a little girl watched her wobbly bowling ball drift toward the gutter. “It is Saturday night” showed an ugly professional wrestler twirling an opponent before a body slam, the spinning feet catching the referee in the head. A teen shook up her New Coke and sprayed it in her boyfriend’s face; a master sergeant screamed at a private; a Brahma bull rider ended a commercial rolling helplessly on the ground with his legs splayed in front of a huge Coke sign. Coca-Cola had always promoted romance. In these commercials, a girl jumped up, threw her napkin in the boy’s face, and stormed off. As a fitting capper for the stumbling campaign, several commercials ended with the line “it’s more than a taste, it’s the smile on your face,” as a hockey goalie lifted his face mask to reveal a smiling teenager—only he was missing four or five teeth.
The Cosby ads weren’t much better, even though the comedian’s new television show achieved enormous popularity. In the TVQ (Television Quotient) ratings of celebrity endorsers, Cosby dominated the number one spot for “most persuasive” and “most familiar.” It didn’t help, however, that the overexposed Coke sponsor had stressed the tart taste of old Coke just before the sweeter version replaced it. Now, he switched gears. Dressed in a silly-looking toga, Cosby intoned: “The words I’m about to say will change the course of history. Here they are. Coca-Cola has a new taste.” His words weren’t terribly convincing. “Now, more than ever, Coke is it!” he finished, but his fatuous smile looked pasted on.
A LONG, DRY JUNE
At first, Roy Stout’s weekly surveys indicated a positive response to the new flavor; as delivery trucks roared into U.S. cities throughout May, millions of curious consumers tried the notorious taste. But the furor refused to die. By the middle of the month, five thousand calls a day were assaulting the ears of the poor employees manning the consumer hot line. Roberto Goizueta was shaken when his father, who lived in Mexico City, told him that everyone there was in an uproar, even though New Coke hadn’t arrived yet. Even Goizueta’s nemesis, Fidel Castro, took potshots at Coke, directing Radio Havana to pronounce that the death of the Real Thing was symptomatic of American decay.
By the beginning of June, eight thousand calls a day were coming in. The media still hyped the story, particularly when a fifty-seven-year-old Seattle opportunist named Gay Mullins saw New Coke as his ticket to fame and fortune, founding the Old Cola Drinkers of America. The chubby, white-bearded Mullins, wearing a protest T-shirt, publicly dumped bottles of New Coke into the city sewers. The self-appointed spokesman became the media’s favorite gadfly, even though he repeatedly failed to identify Coke in blind taste tests. After one suit was thrown out of court, Mullins filed a second class-action attempt to force the Company to return to the old formula. New Coke became, according to one journalist, “a universal conversation topic, like the weather or money or love.”* Houston Astrodome crowds booed New Coke commercials on the stadium’s giant video screen. One Beverly Hills wineshop owner obtained a limited supply of the rare old formula, selling bottles for three times their list price. As Roberto Goizueta noted with annoyance, it was chic to dump on New Coke. “We could have introduced the elixir of the gods,” one bitter Coke man said, “and it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
In addition to phone calls, the Company fielded over forty thousand letters of protest. Each unhappy consumer received a form letter from Lynn Henkel, an assistan
t manager at Coca-Cola USA, assuring them that “our latest research shows that . . . consumers overwhelmingly like our great new taste.” This official response was cold comfort to most consumers, who either mailed back the enclosed coupon or tore it up. The letters, like the phone calls, were cries from the heart, making it clear that much more than a soft drink was involved. A bewildered consulting psychologist told Company officials that the emotions he heard were similar to those of grief-stricken parents mourning the death of a favorite child. Most letters came from people who had never written to a company—young and old; upper, middle, and lower class; literate and unlettered. The message, however, was essentially the same—The Coca-Cola Company had betrayed them:
I’m 61 and have been a confirmed “Coke” drinker since that memorable day my Dad took me on a little excursion up Mill Mountain in Roanoke, Va., and bought me my first Coke with a package of Planter’s Salted Peanuts. . . . I was five years old. . . . “Old” Coke is sensual, it has pizzazz. God! On a hot day you wish you could jump into a tub of it and gulp down a 16 oz. bottle all at the same time.
My littele sisther is cring because coke changed and she sayed that shed is not going to stop cring every day unitl you chang back. . . . I am geting tryer of hearing her now if you don’t chang I’ll sue evne if I’m just 11.
I am a very heavy coke drinker. I do not drink coffee, tea, milk, water, nothing but coke. I drink coke all day long. I always have a glass or can of coke. Always. I have now to try and find something to drink that I can tolerate. It will not be new coke. Never.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 55