Husbands everywhere agree: for maximum attention, nothing beats a good mistake. But nothing perhaps illustrates that better than the response to the Coca Cola company’s stunning announcement, in 1985, that they had reformulated their popular product and relegated the beloved Coke recipe to a locked vault forever…until they pulled it out again – quickly! The whole fiasco lasted 3 months and is considered one of the greatest marketing blunders of all time. The memory still reverberates 25 years later, and its anniversary was celebrated this month with business and marketing publications everywhere rehashing the Coca Cola co.’s epic fail during the cola wars.
But what did Coca Cola really, do so wrong? They wanted to give their customers a better product and they definitively delivered what they believed to be their version of “the taste of a new generation.”
What the Coca Cola Co. didn’t know could have hurt them a lot more had they not been a multi-million dollar behemoth. Because when Coke decided to reach out to new customers with New Coke, they almost lost their customer base who were loyal to the old one! What saved them from disaster is still analyzed and debated, but make no mistake about it- Mistakes were made and someone paid the price.
You see, what they know at Roth & Co is that there is no taste of a generation. There are myriad tastes of a generation and the people of that generation often don’t know how to verbalize what it is they like, they just know they like it when they get it. There is no ‘one’ customer, there are countless, and how many you will catch and hold depends on how well you can gauge and predict the market.
Roth & Co has spent the past 40 years studying the business market and insuring businesses like yours benefit from the wisdom that comes with careful study of the successes and failures that came before. Like an experienced coach hired to analyze every split second decision and play execution, Roth & Co delivers expert advice to businesses seeking growth anywhere across the spectrum; the startup hoping to gain a foothold in the marketplace as well as long established icons like Coke. Because mistakes are just not what calls attention to the clients at Roth & Co – preventing them does!
