old Coke but they very much liked the new Coke. How could
New Coke fail?
But it did. It was a disaster. Coke drinkers rose up in outrage
against New Coke. There were protests around the country.
Coke was plunged into crisis, and just a few months later, the
company was forced to bring back the original formula as
Classic Coke — at which point, sales of New Coke virtually
disappeared. The predicted success of New Coke never
materialized. But there was an even bigger surprise. The
seemingly inexorable rise of Pepsi — which had also been so
clearly signaled by market research — never materialized
either. For the last twenty years, Coke has gone head-to-head
with Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior, and
Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world. The story
of New Coke, in other words, is a really good illustration of
how complicated it is to find out what people really think.
3. The Blind Leading the Blind
The difficulty with interpreting the Pepsi Challenge findings
begins with the fact that they were based on what the industry
calls a sip test or a CLT (central location test). Tasters don’t