All Afizz Over the New Coke

Talk goes better with Coke. At wedding receptions, graduation parties, offices, homes and supermarkets, Coke’s decision to change for the first time in 99 years the taste of the world’s best-selling soft drink has become a universal conversation topic, like the weather or money or love. Everyone has an opinion: some like the new Coke, some hate it, others do not care at all. Some believe Coca-Cola’s strategists made the marketing coup of the decade, others call it a monumental blunder.

The complainers, not surprisingly, are popping off loudest. To them, changing the taste of the real thing was like tampering with motherhood, baseball and the flag. The new drink, they say, is nerdy and has none of the old Coke’s snap. Executives at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta say they get 1,500 calls a day, almost four times the normal volume. Most of the callers, says Coke, are “concerned.” And how. “I hate the new stuff,” says Sharlotte Donnelly, 36, an anthropologist in Cincinnati. “It’s too sweet. It tastes like Pepsi.” Says Wendy Koskela, 35, vice president of an insurance brokerage in San Francisco: “Real Coke had punch. This tastes almost like it’s flat.”

Gay Mullins, 57, is too angry just to gripe. A Coke drinker for 50 years, he has formed an association in Seattle called the Old Cola Drinkers of America. The group’s aim is to force Coca-Cola to switch back to the original + formula or at least release it to another bottler. Mullins first set up a hotline featuring a recorded pep talk: “Let’s get Coca-Cola to start making the old Coke again.” After receiving 60,000 calls, the line was disconnected last week. Mullins talks about filing a class action against the company, claiming that he and millions of other Coke lovers have been deprived of their freedom to choose the old flavor. He says he now plans to try for a seat on Coke’s board of directors.

But his efforts may fizzle. Mullins has spent all of the $30,000 he committed to his protest, and his twelve-member staff may have to fight on as unpaid volunteers. To raise more money, the Old Cola Drinkers are selling T shirts for $6 that are embossed with a new-Coke can in a red circle crossed by the universal don’t-do line.

Some sharp operators spotted opportunities in Coke’s move. Dennis Overstreet, the owner of a wine store in Beverly Hills, bought 500 cases of the old stuff when he heard of the change. Two weekends ago, Overstreet sold the last of his stock, at $1.25 a 6 1/2-oz. bottle, or $30 a case. “They lined up around the block,” he said. “It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” One customer: Rock Singer Al Stewart (Time Passages), who called from London and put five cases on his American Express card.

Weldon Tanner, 43, an Atlanta businessman, has been stashing the old Coke in his pantry since April 23, the day Coke announced the change. He often consumes six bottles a day, though, and had reduced his inventory to ten cases by the end of last week. Tanner plans to head north, to small towns in North Carolina, to look for more. “I plan to work the boondocks,” he says, “and I’m sure I’ll find some there.”

In Huntington Woods, Mich., Libby Lavine, 35, is drinking down her stock of 700 bottles and cans of Coke, and has begun a campaign to bring back the old Coke. Says she: “There is only one person who likes the new Coke and that is Bill Cosby. I want to get thousands of letters, and my husband and I will take them down to Atlanta and give them to the Coca-Cola company.”

Brian Dyson, president of Coca-Cola USA, believes some people are tasting things in the new drink that are not there. Example: the new Coke is not less fizzy as some complain. “There is a zero difference in carbonation between the new and the old,” he says. Dyson insists that the bickering will not work: “We are going to stick with what we have done.”

It is still too early to tell how the new Coke is doing. The sketchy numbers out so far are distorted by the enormous publicity over the taste change. So swiftly did the word spread, says Coke, that 81% of the U.S. population knew of it within 24 hours, more people than were aware in July 1969 that Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. By now, says Dyson, fully 96% of Americans, or 225 million people, know that Coke has altered its taste.

Coke officials say they are pleased by the early returns. In May, Coke sales shot up a sparkling 8% over the same month in 1984, double the normal growth rate. Some of the increase included sales of old Coke still on store shelves, but most of it was the new drink. That amounts to a lot of bubbles in a business in which every percentage-point increase in the market share adds $280 million in retail sales on a yearly basis. Coke claims its surveys show that 120 million Americans have tried the drink if only out of curiosity, and 75% of those say they will buy the new Coke again.

Archrival Pepsi has countered with its own survey showing that its sales were up 14% from those in the same month last year, its best gain ever. In a newspaper ad aimed at “all new Pepsi drinkers,” the company claimed that “nearly half of those who have tried the new Coke say it’s time to switch from Coke, and the overwhelming majority say they’ll switch to Pepsi.” Roger Enrico, president of Pepsi-Cola USA, said his surveys show that 60% of new Coke drinkers see it as “weaker in flavor delivery.” But hold on, countercountered Coke. Pepsi’s sales figures are distorted because they include Pepsi’s entire array of soft drinks, notably Diet Pepsi and the new lemon-flavored Slice. Reliable figures will not be available until July or August.

Coke’s change has indisputably put new zest into the $28 billion U.S. soft- drink business. Declares a Coke executive: “All of a sudden, a product that might have been taken for granted is alive.” Concurs Dyson: “It generates electricity. We are having fun, trying to draw attention to make it all bubbling and effervescent. Let’s face it, it is hype. It is the nature of the product.” Even tiny Royal Crown has been drawn into the battle. “Does it leave you feeling flat?” an RC ad asks of new Coke. “Pick yourself up, there is a cola to turn to. RC Cola.”

It is all getting a little too serious for Dyson. “I have seen people engaged in heavy discussions on television about the new taste. People have to loosen up a bit.” And it is all happening, quite by design, just when the summer season is about to begin and roughly 2 billion gal. of cola will be sipped, chugged or spilled. Dyson is convinced that his company has done the right thing at a time when Americans are “predisposed to change.” Says he: “When the dust settles, we will be successful, and, well, I’m sorry, Coke is better.” American consumers, of course, will have the final say.