Marketing Campaign: Coca-Cola Removes “Classic”

The most pop­u­lar soft drink in the world, at least by brand aware­ness if not sales as well, is mak­ing a major change to its mar­ket­ing strat­egy in its new mar­ket­ing cam­paign:

Two decades after adding the des­ig­na­tion, the Coca-Cola Co. is remov­ing the word “Clas­sic” from its promi­nent loca­tion on the flag­ship cola sold in the U.S., a com­pany spokesman said Friday.

“The rea­son for being, for clas­sic as a descrip­tor, has all but dis­ap­peared,” spokesman Scott Williamson said.

The “Clas­sic” tagline — right under the script Coca-Cola logo — was added in 1985, when the com­pany intro­duced a for­mula that con­sumers called “New Coke.” New Coke never caught on and was sold spar­ingly until it was dropped in 2004.

Coke Ads

The rea­son for intro­duc­ing the “clas­sic” tagline was obvi­ous: Cus­tomers hated “New Coke,” so the com­pany wanted con­sumers to be sure that the prod­uct they were pur­chas­ing was the for­mer one. But as the com­pany spokesper­son tells MSNBC, fewer young peo­ple today remem­ber New Coke, and older con­sumers are likely no longer wor­ried about buy­ing that par­tic­u­lar drink by mis­take. So why keep “classic”?

Still, I am skep­ti­cal that the change will have a sig­nif­i­cant effect. As Geof­frey James notes in a blog post, a com­pany can actu­ally decrease prof­its by focus­ing on expen­sive brand­ing strate­gies when other fac­tors, like sales itself, are more impor­tant. But the most impor­tant thing for Coke is that peo­ple around the world are drink­ing less and less of the soft drink, and the com­pany has had to think of cre­ative ways to respond.

If I were the chief mar­ket­ing offi­cer of Coca-Cola, I would not focus on remov­ing the “clas­sic” tagline or print­ing mis­lead­ing claims in adver­tise­ments. It undoubt­edly costs money — labor and pro­duc­tion costs — to change label designs and remove the tagline alto­gether, and rev­enue will not increase enough — if at all — to off­set the added expenses. (Besides, in my head, the word “clas­sic” still has pos­i­tive con­no­ta­tions. I can still remem­ber a jin­gle from my youth: “Coca-Cola CLASSIC… Can’t beat the REAL THING!” I like hear­ing the word.) More­over, mak­ing disin­ge­nous claims harms the brand image in the minds of con­sumers who are increas­ingly skep­ti­cal of adver­tis­ing in general.

Coke Nutri­tion Facts

If I were the CMO with a mar­ket­ing degree, I would focus on a seg­men­ta­tion strat­egy. Prod­ucts like Coca-Cola Zero tar­get con­sumers who had been turned off my the level of high-fructose corn syrup in the bev­er­age. Off the top of my head, I think I heard that the com­pany is also devel­op­ing sports drinks to com­bat brands like Gatorade. Coca-Cola has also devel­oped a prod­uct line with zero car­bo­hy­drates. The com­pany needs to develop addi­tional prod­ucts to tar­get spe­cific, diverse pop­u­la­tions rather than need­lessly remove a word from its labels and make claims whose truth­ful­ness is questionable.

Ear­lier: Coke Nutritional-Facts and the Coke Marketing-Mix