How Coca-Cola Almost Killed Themselves

Did you know that in 1985 Coca-Cola made one of the biggest mistakes in history?

Coca-Cola is about a secret recipe of ingredients that blends into one of the best known drinks across the world, so you can understand why all of their customers went crazy when they changed the recipe.

In the April of 1985, after four years of development and testing, they released a new, sweeter version of the drink. As soon as the drink hit the shelves, customers began boycotting the company and hoarding crates of the original recipe drinks.

What went wrong? Well, whilst spending so much money making and testing the drink to 190,000 people, they forgot to ask people how they'd feel about losing the taste that they had loved for so long.

Groups of people formed clubs that served out the original formula and refused to buy the new recipe drinks in protest against the change, forcing Coca-Cola to bring back the original. This is why the drink's description includes: Coke original formula.

Weeks after the company announced that the old recipe was gone, and would be nothing more than a dusty piece of paper somewhere (a scrappy piece of paper at that, so I've heard), they brought it back - outselling the new recipe almost instantly and rescuing their sales.

What should be learnt from this? Change is good, but fixing something that isn't broken can lead to heartache. Keeping in touch with your customers is one of the biggest priorities of any business, and in this case Coca-Cola got it desperately wrong.