I was kind of surprised there wasn’t much on the internets about New Coke’s 25th anniversary the other day. The one story I saw was ESPN Page 2: “New Coke: the gift that keeps on giving analogies.”
Key funny:
They set out to provide Pepsi in a red can. They ended up giving us so much more. Twenty-five years ago Friday, the product and brand management masterminds at Coca-Cola introduced New Coke — a cola-formula-changing misstep so profound, so epochal, so mind-numbingly misguided that it quickly transcended the realm of mere marketing blunder and became something else entirely: a lasting, pitch-perfect, near-Shakespearean metaphor for colossal, foolhardy failure poured from a 12-ounce can of corporate hubris, sipped through a straw of not leaving well enough alone.
For that, I’m so very, very grateful.
It was twenty-five years ago today that Coca-Cola revealed “
