You're not just imagining it: the 1980s are back! It's not just Netflix drowning us in nostalgia with Stranger Things and Fuller House. Women are wearing scrunchies, Ghostbusters and Blade Runner are returning to the multiplex, Hulk Hogan is back showing off his moves on videotape, and Teddy Ruxpin is returning to toy stores. Just for fun, we even elected a 1980s curio as President of the United States! But is everything we remember about the eighties the totally tubular truth? "Just say no," says Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings, so we've asked him to take us on a DeLorean ride back in time, separating the "Straight Up" facts from the "sweet little lies" of our foggily remembered Bartles & Jaymes youth. As they say, knowing is half the battle.
The Debunker: Did America Hate "New Coke"?
It's the go-to marketing textbook test case for "how to @#$% everything up at once." In April 1985, the Coca-Cola Company tweaked the flavor of its flagship soda for the first time since it got rid of cocaine in the 1920s. Everyone remembers this as a disastrously tone-deaf misstep by executives who apparently knew nothing about their own product or customers. By summer, Coke announced that its original formula would be coming back as "Classic Coke," and the much-touted "New Coke" was consigned to the dustbin of history. But maybe you can imagine a parallel universe where almost everyone preferred the taste of New Coke and sales actually rose in 1985? Well, my friends, that universe…is ours.
The story behind New Coke is pretty simple: in the 1980s Pepsi was playing up its "Pepsi Challenge" campaign, in which their soda routinely beat Coke in blind taste tests. Coke commissioned a new, sweeter formula that could beat both Coke and Pepsi head to head, and "New Coke" was born. Test audiences overwhelmingly preferred it, and only 10-12 percent were shaken up by the idea of Coke changing its recipe. Sure enough, after the new formula hit store shelves, sales rose 8 percent year-to-year, according to Time, and the company's stock went up. How did it all go wrong? It turned out that the Coca-Cola Company had underestimated the importance of its legacy close to home. Coke was a big point of regional pride in the South, and that's where the company first started noticing backlash: angry letters, heckling of deliverymen, shoppers hoarding old Coke before it vanished from store shelves.
Once the media got hold of the irresistible "die-hard cola holdouts" story, New Coke-bashing became chic, and sales flattened. It was game over for the reformulated soda. After Classic Coke returned to stores in July, it took less than a year for New Coke's market share to dwindle to just 3 percent.
Today, the brief shining "New Coke" moment is sometimes suggested as a clever bit of corporate misdirection, a way for Coke to switch from cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup without anyone noticing the different taste. The corporate history doesn't really bear that out, however. Many Coke bottlers had been using half corn syrup since 1980, and the decision to allow bottlers to go to 100% corn syrup came six months before the New Coke announcement. If Coke had a secret sweetener switcheroo in mind here, they @#$%ed it up as badly as their did their recipe.
Quick Quiz: In the UK, what title character of a 1970 hit "tastes just like cherry cola" because the BBC wouldn't let the Kinks plug Coca-Cola on the radio?
Ken Jennings is the author of eleven books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.