New Coke!! a big failure in 1985

How can this happen to coke?? Mind-boggling as it seems.

Coke in 1985 launched a sweeter version of the soft drink named 'New Coke' withdrawing its traditional 99 years old formula. Why would a firm with well captured market do that??

Coke's market share had dropped significantly due to its competitor Pepsi and it's own product range(diet Coke, Fanta) by 1984. It became the major threat for the top management. Two years into taste tests and research, working with the secrecy of a military operation, time and money put in the research could not measure or reveal the depth of emotions to original coca cola. It underestimated the power of its original brand.

Coke focused on product, not on the brand. Management can't be blamed on this because when the rival(Pepsi) deteriorates your product by being product centric and comparing products(Its taste, sweetness etc) in its ad campaigns, one always tries to back the product with changes in it. Though the way coke went about it was wrong. They didn't even try to know consumer inputs, though they were not that stupid to go for this option but circumstances(didn't have the choice to curb market share dropping) made them do this. Probably that was also the reason that no one was fired for this disaster. Finally, coke had to stop its 'New Coke' and it brought back the classic coke. Clearly this was the case of product management and not new product(Brand) development.

Consequently an unexpected(not serious) thing happened. For all the money coke put in research didn't go for a toss. Consumers realized how good their classic coke was in its absence in the market, so when it came back it got an overwhelming response. A few critics say that it was an intentional move by coke to publicize its product, but I don't see any point for anyone to do something like this intentionally.