Failure is inevitable if you are doing anything remotely new. Failure is also fairly certain if you keep doing what you’ve always done in a fast changing world.
It’s a human tendency to hope for the best and try to avoid failure at all costs. So when we are asked to embrace failure as positive learning it’s no wonder most of us feel like we want to run away and hide.
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. Henry Ford
One of my favourite (?!) learning from failure stories is from Coca-Cola.
In 1985 in response to its declining market share and the increasing popularity of its key rival Pepsi, Coca-Cola launched New Coke.
Do you remember the ‘Pepsi Challenge’?
At the time Pepsi’s advertising campaigns were based around asking the public if they could taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke. They could – and they preferred the taste of Pepsi.
In response Coke developed a new sweeter tasting formula. After conducting over 200.000 taste tests, which according to the taste testers not only tasted better than the old Coke, but also tasted better than Pepsi, New Coke was ready for launch.
However on 23 April 1985 when New Coke was launched and old Coke was taken out of circulation it was a disaster. Customers were horrified that their Coke had been changed. Some people likened the change in Coke to trampling the American flag. A black market for old Coke emerged, at a market value of $30 a case. On July 11, Coca-Cola withdrew New Coke and reinstated old Coke.
So what happened?
We did not understand the deep emotions of so many of our customers for Coca-Cola said company President Donald R. Keough.
The development of New Coke was all about taste and overlooked the importance of the relationship customers had with the brand. Until the launch of New Coke, Coca-Colas’ brand had been about its ‘original’ status. For example in 1942, magazine adverts in the United States declared: ‘The only thing like Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola itself. It’s the real thing.’
If you tell the world you have the ‘real thing’ you cannot then just come up with a ‘new real thing’. To make matters worse, since 1982, Coke’s strap line had been ‘Coke is it’. Now it was telling customers that actually coke wasn’t it, but New Coke was now ‘it’ instead.
Coca-Cola were fighting a taste battle with Pepsi in response to Pepsi’s marketing campaign. What Coca-Cola overlooked was that the battle was not about taste, and they underestimated the value of brand loyalty and the heritage of Coca-Cola.
Ironically, through the brand failure of New Coke, loyalty to ‘the real thing’ intensified and Coke recovered its market position with old Coke, repositioned as Coke Classic. Some conspiracy theorists say the whole campaign had been planned in order to reaffirm public loyalty for Coca-Cola. But whether it was planned or not, the fail of New Coke affirmed the value of the brand and with that insight Coke went onto retake its leading market position.
New Coke was a public failure. There was no running away or hiding. However Coke learned an important lesson about its brand value and its customers.
How many less public failures are happening in your organisation that no one ever learns from? How many times do they secretly get repeated wasting time and money?
If you’d like some help in creating an organisational culture that encourages and supports learning from failure so that your organisation can grow and your people are happier then drop us a line.
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