Coca-Cola Sees Red
I try to make good eating choices. Along with making healthy
food selections, comes the benefit of lower calorie choices. This isn’t always
the case, but healthy eating habits often mean less caloric intake. However, there
is one unhealthy choice that I partake in, although in limited quantities. I sometimes
drink diet soda. I know that the best option would be to avoid soda entirely,
but I subscribe to the Pareto Principal, also known as the 80-20 rule. Eighty
percent of the time I make healthy choices and twenty percent of the time I
might eat or drink something to tickle my palate, even if it does keep those
extra ten pounds on my body! But I refuse to consume ridiculous amounts of
calories by drinking high sugar content soda. Instead, I choose to drink diet
soda.
My friends also fall into the 80-20 rule: eighty percent
of them have dietary habits similar to mine, and twenty percent choose
to eat whatever they feel like eating. It’s interesting to note that my ‘twenty
percent’ group of friends are very quick to criticize me when they see me
drinking my diet drink, while they gulp down large regular sodas, along with
fries, donuts and other items on my ‘never-ever-eat’ list. They are convinced I
will die of brain cancer, due to the aspartame ‘poison’ in the soda. I do make a point of limiting my aspartame
intake to very small amounts – not the large amounts given to rats in
experiments. I’ve done my research...I know what I’m doing.
Those in the diet-soda-is-okay school of thought verses
the diet-soda-will-kill-you school of thought can be quite adamant about their
opinions. It was into this tangled web that Coca-Cola met a PR disaster last
Christmas.
Coca-Cola is a
company which has obviously had a lot of PR experience, both positive and negative. One of their
most successful re-branding efforts included using the polar bear as their
advertising mascot, introduced very successfully into the North American market
in 1993.
However, one of their
biggest campaign disasters was the 1985 Coke formula-change, known as "New Coke". You would think they would’ve learned from
this. Before deciding upon a strategy and going forth with a new plan, every
campaign must build a strong foundation of research, understanding their
stakeholders, having their objectives and goals in place along with their key
messages. Coca-Cola knows this, yet they failed again just a year ago.
In October of 2011,
Coca-Cola introduced a new colour into their Holiday cans of Coke. Instead of
the traditional red cans, they brought out white cans. Their intentions were
good. They wanted to use this colour change in a new campaign called "Arctic Home" that would bring donations and awareness to the efforts expended by WWF (World Wildlife Fund) to protect the polar bears’ habitat. Perhaps Coca-Cola spent all of
their research on people’s perceptions about the polar bears' plight and how
their public would react to the idea of supporting WWF. Their research,
objectives, strategy and key messages regarding this part of the campaign were
probably very well-done. However, they didn’t think deep enough and go far enough
with their assessment.
Coca-Cola was reminded how
fickle their public can be. Yes, their public was glad the WWF was going to help
save the polar bears. But, Coca-Cola confused a big part of their public when
they changed the can colours from red to white. Going with white cans meant
that the diet drinkers’ silver cans were quite similar in colour. Remember the
opinionated crowds that either wanted to drink only diet soda, or only non-diet
soda? Well, horrors! Diet drinkers were buying the white cans instead of the
silver cans and getting real-sugar cola, along with all those extra calories!
No wonder we, the diet-drinking-public, gained all that weight over Christmas
last year! Others avoided the white cans because they assumed they were diet
drinks. Many people felt that “abandoning red was blasphemy.” [1]
“Some consumers complained that it looked confusingly similar to Diet Coke’s silver cans. Others felt that regular Coke tasted different in the white cans. Still others argued that messing with red bordered on sacrilege.” [2]
We can only assume that
Coca-Cola did not take enough time to research and survey their publics regarding
the actual can-colour change. Even though the drink was not altered in any way;
even though the beloved polar bear icon was not only promoting the drink, but
was being helped by the sales of it; the entire campaign was a big flop. A
great overall idea met failure because a small detail was not researched
thoroughly enough. This is a great lesson and case study for us as PR students.
Let’s remember this and hopefully we can avoid ever making this kind of PR
strategy error.
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