The Public History of a Campaign
That Failed
(With apologies to Mark Twain...)
After the US television series, Max
Headroom may be most widely known as the spokeshead for
Coca-Cola's second "New Coke" advertising campaign, the
one with the slogan "Catch the Wave" - or, in Max-speak,
C-C-Catch the Wave. TV ads, print ads, posters, t-shirts,
buttons, mugs... Max was coking it up everywhere for a
time, and the campaign and memorabilia were generally
well received.
But New Coke continued to be a failure
even after Max's strenuous efforts, and the failure
probably contributed to the sharp end of Max's run as
icon.
New Coke: A Short History
In 1982, Coca-Cola launched its first
diet soda under the flagship name; Diet
Coke shot to the
top of the popularity charts and remains there today.
However, Diet Coke was not merely regular Coke with the
sugar replaced by an artificial sweetener - it was a
completely reformulated cola with a flavor very close
to that of Pepsi. This was a shrewd move by Coke, since
Pepsi had been steadily gaining ground on their market
share for decades. The new taste clearly appealed to a
lot of cola drinkers and was not judged harshly because
no one really expected a "diet coke" to taste like, well,
Coke.
Three years later, in an attempt to
capture yet more of the "sugared cola" market, in which
Pepsi was still gaining, Coca-Cola released what they
called "reformulated" Coke and what everyone else called
"New Coke." It was the same
flavor formulation as Diet Coke, only with a sugar
sweetener (high fructose corn syrup and sugar).
The debate over New Coke isn't worth
rehashing here. However, Coke had made the mistake of
messing with an American icon and ignoring tradition
and image. Sure, New Coke had flattened the competition
in a huge series of taste tests, but in the end, Coca-Cola
discovered that a product like Coke is more than taste.
New Coke was announced, with great
fanfare, on 23 April 1985. The outcry against it was
both immediate and enormous. Less than three months
later, on 11 July 1985, Coke announced that the old
version, now dubbed "Coke Classic,"
was returning to the shelves.
[Sidelight 1:
The return of Coke was
famously given headline billing across the media. ABC
had Peter Jennings cut into "General Hospital" to
announce the news as a breaking story. The story
headlined two networks that evening and was the second
story on the third - and on a very "hot" news day on which
many major events of real newsworthiness occurred.]
[Sidelight 2:
It was claimed then and
now that the entire "New Coke" fiasco was a cleverly
planned media stunt with two purposes: first, to get
loads of free advertising and attention, and second, to
permit Coke to switch from cane sugar to corn syrup in
the production without anyone noticing by being able
to taste the two versions back to back. Both claims are
probably bogus; see
Snopes for a full discussion and debunking.]
Most people think Coke Classic replaced
New Coke, but the new formulation remained in production
and on the shelves as plain old Coca-Cola. By 1986,
though, (New) Coke had fallen to a 3% market share...
and Classic Coke had reached higher sales than (Old) Coke
had seen for years! New Coke was finally renamed
Coke II in 1990, and continued
to be manufactured in Chicago until 2002 (or 2004). It
was finally dropped from the US line, but is reportedly
still be manufactured and sold in some overseas locations.
So, in horrifying preview, you see
that Max Headroom was brought in to try and save a
terminally wounded and already-failed product. That he
failed in both the short and long run is no surprise.
New Coke, New Face
In trying to sustain their decision
to create and sell New Coke, Coca-Cola sought to position
the soda for a young market - precisely the market in
which they had long been losing ground to Pepsi. They
looked for a spokesperson that would appear to this
young audience, and came up with... Max.
(As a further example of Coke's
continuing schizophrenia over their products, Classic
Coke had its own ad campaign, "Red, White and You" that
competed in many ways for the same audience.)
The Ad Campaign
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Origins & Development
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The Commercials
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Marketing Collateral
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...Good to the Last Drop
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