Crispin Mwanyumba’s blog-post regarding Coca-Cola’s new release of the “Coca-Cola Life” caught my attention, and I find myself agreeing with some of his analysis. Crispin points out that he applauds Coca-Cola for making an effort to try to change Coca-cola’s brand image: the new Coca-Cola Life is a healthier drink in comparison to the traditional Coca-Cola as it contains less calories and promises all natural sugar (replacing artificial sugars). Despite this effort, he describes that this strategy may be ineffective as it is hard to change Coca-cola’s position in the consumer’s mind, and that there are already many competitors in the ‘healthy drinks’ market.
As consumers become more and more health-orientated, they have substituted into more natural drinks such as juice and smoothies, resulting in huge decline in sales for soft drinks. In order to approach this fall in sales, Coco-cola has released quite a few drinks in order to encourage people to drink coke: Coca-Cola Zero, Coca-Cola Diet… and now the Coca-Cola Life. ‘Life’ has a different color for its bottle and can packaging: it’s green. Crispin states that this color change may affect demand as consumers mostly only associate Coco-Cola with red. This may be true: once the representative color is changed, consumers may not even notice this new drink as it no longer seem to be a highly recognized product. However, I do think it’s all about the physical position of the product on the shelf: if ‘Life is placed right beside all the other Coca-Cola products, I see no concern that consumers may ‘miss’ out this drink. This new ‘green’ color may also help consumers to see that Coca-Cola has taken action to increase its natural approach. Moreover both Coca-Cola Zero and Diet are not packaged in the original red color yet there were still a lot of sales, thus color of the can/bottle can be seen as not that big of an issue.
However, besides that point, I agree with Crispin’s view on difficulty in changing Coca-Cola’s position in the industry. Coca-Cola’s position has been well established in our minds since we were young: it is a soft drink, and although it tastes awesomely refreshing, it contains a lot of sugar and is an unhealthy choice. Releasing ‘Life’ will not change our minds by a lot, especially after Coca-Cola Zero’s negative media feedback. If we wanted a healthier drink, Coca-Cola would never make the top of the list: there are simply so many other drinks for us to choose from. In my point of view, I think if Coco-Cola really wishes to boost revenue from ‘healthy’ drinks, it should start a brand new drink which is stripped of any ‘Coca-Cola’ name on it. To climb up the healthy drinks ladder, Coca-Cola needs to start on a fresh page and climb the ladder without any past Coca-Cola (negative) images dragging it down.
Related Article:
1. http://www.bidnessetc.com/21356-coca-cola-ko-pepsico-pep-news-us-soda-sales-decline/