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When you’ve got a blue-chip, iconic brand, any rebrand (or reengineering) should be done with caution. Coca-Cola should know. After it changed its recipe in the mid-’80s, people began hoarding Classic Coke, fearful they’d lose the taste they’d come to love. Months later, Coke brought back its Classic recipe. It was a case study in marketing disasters.
Now, Coca-Cola is debuting a new formula for Coke Zero Sugar that’s supposed to more closely resemble its Classic soda. It’s rolling out a campaign to mark the experiment occasion, called “Best Coke Ever?” One of the ads shows a dinosaur and its reaper, a speeding meteor, arguing over whether the reformulated soda is actually the best Coke(editor’s note: Cherry—the answer is Cherry Coke). Another spot shows the drink’s new packaging.
The campaign’s tagline begs consumers to “Try it first!” before making judgments.
Where you’ll see it:
- On streaming platforms like Hulu, Roku, Amazon Fire, and Spotify
- On traditional TV like NBC, ESPN, and Fox
- On out-of-home inventory in 77 markets
- And, for sampling reasons, a block party in Harlem.
Some who have tried it have already aired their grievances on Twitter (as one does), calling it “bleh,” “flat,” and “ruined.” So we’ll see if the company comes crawling back with its old Coke Zero Sugar formula, like it did with the Classic flavor.
Zoom out: This isn’t the first time the soda giant has tried to improve Coke Zero Sugar—in 2017, it changed the recipe so it would “taste more like standard Coca-Cola,” per The New York Times. Its latest do-over comes as the company banks on Coke Zero Sugar as a crowd-pleaser; earlier this year, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told CNBC that the product is its “biggest driver of growth.”—RB