The Taste Test Coca-Cola Won and Still Lost

In the spring of 1985, the consumer hotline at Coca-Cola went from about four hundred calls a day to fifteen hundred, and almost none of the callers wanted to buy anything. They wanted their drink back. On April 23 the company had changed the formula of its flagship product, and on July 11, seventy-nine days later, it gave the old one back and admitted, in front of the whole world, that the most valuable part of its own product did not belong to it.

The reaction is worth describing before the reasoning, because the reasoning had been impeccable. More than forty thousand letters and calls arrived, some written as if after a death in the family. People emptied shelves to stockpile the old drink. Journalists covered it like a political crisis. And when the company announced the return of the original formula, thirty-one thousand six hundred people called within two days, this time to say thank you.

None of this had been careless. Pepsi had been gaining ground for years with public taste tests, and Coca-Cola answered the way a serious company answers, with research. Years of blind tests, surveys and focus groups, nearly two hundred thousand consumers sipping from unmarked cups and preferring, in their majority, the new taste. On paper it was the best-documented decision in the company's history. On paper.

The public had not rejected the taste. It had voted for the taste itself, blindfolded. What it rejected was the gesture, the fact that someone had touched, without asking, a thing it considered its own. Donald Keough, the company's president, answered the rumor that the whole affair had been a marketing trick with a line worth keeping, we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.

The tests had measured the liquid and left the bond out, and that gap opens at any scale, from a global company to a three-person workshop. Every company has a layer the owner cannot change alone, because it lives outside the factory and the office, in the memory and the habits of the people who choose it, in the way a product came to mean a summer, a grandmother, a Sunday afternoon. On that layer you cannot sign changes on their behalf, however much data you have on the table, because data answers the question of what people prefer, and that layer answers a different question, what is theirs.

A real brand is precisely the proof that people have invested something of their own in you, time, habit, a piece of identity, and the investment comes, like any investment, with a right of veto. Most owners dream of a brand their customers are attached to and never think about the second half of that contract, which is that an attached customer will contradict you the moment you change what is his. Coca-Cola had the rare luck of finding this out loudly and fast. Most companies find it out in silence, through customers who do not call, do not write and do not come back.

The file hides a less comfortable lesson as well. The research answered correctly the question it was asked, which taste is better, and stayed silent on the question nobody asked, what this product means to the people who drink it. Data is loyal to the question, not to the truth, and a company that only asks the questions it can answer with numbers will sooner or later take a decision that is perfectly documented and perfectly wrong. Roberto Goizueta, the chief executive, summed it up with the elegance of a man who had already paid, saying they had set out to change the dynamics of the cola market and had done exactly that, though not in the way they had planned.

In a small company the secret formula takes humbler forms. The packaging redone because the old one looked dated, the original product dropped because the margin is better on the new one, the small free service nobody ever billed and somebody cut in an efficiency meeting. Each of these may carry a layer that is not yours, and the simplest way to find out is the one Coca-Cola skipped, asking first.

Which part of your company actually belongs to your customers, and could you name it? And if thirty thousand people called tomorrow, what would they be defending, your product or their habit? I will ask you for one thing. Make a note of what you are not allowed to change about your brand without asking, before the market teaches you, because the market gives that lesson once and charges full price.