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Brian Martell's 2006 Coffee Articles: Coffee Colas © 2006 Brian Martell Cold coffee drinks have been around for more than a decade, with the greatest penetration being in Europe and in Asia. These drinks are predominantly sweetened and canned (or bottled, but bottles are rare) with some of them containing dairy or dairy like ingredients. Coca Cola, having spent millions on market research and on marketing itself have recently introduced a product known as Blāk. Trying to capture the lucrative boomer market for upscale cold non alcoholic beverages, Coke is trying to appeal to a new demographic that will take to the fusion of cola and coffee. Essentially, Blāk is a lightly carbonated cola beverage with real coffee essence added and a reduced caloric value than traditional Coke. Interesting enough the new product will be on the heels of the failed Vanilla Coke which tried to appeal to the Generation X crowd and younger, but was perceived as a perversion of the “real thing”. Blāk, on the other hand is being marketed not in the shadow of its famous parent (the only reference to Coca Cola on the can will be on the back in fine print), but rather as a stand alone product line, similar to the visual if not structural division given Saturn from GM. In this regard, Big Red is banking on creating a whole new market segment, the carbonated coffee cola. To say the marketing approach to bringing Blāk to the consumer is culturally geared would be to say a fellow named Dylan wrote a few songs. Relying in part on information technology denizens to spread the word, Coke has developed a cutting edge web site for Blāk that invites the html crowd to critique the site as well as use some of the tools therein to create their own work of techno art.
Now if we take the brains of Coca Cola and apply all the economic resources available to a company that is the largest by far world wide in its industry, you would think that all the careful research would guarantee a home run on this new product. History, however, tells us a different story. Besides the aforementioned demise of Vanilla Coke, those who remember the fiasco brought on by “New Coke” and the hording that took place of the “Old Coke” that led to the branding of “Coke Classic”. Now it is impossible to get the “New Coke” and cans are no longer identified with “Classic” anymore as this is a little redundant. Some have contended that this was a marketing coup designed to create a crisis and generate a lot of free ink (both good and bad) for Coke. Either way, it underlines the point that market research is not a hard science and must be tested before it can be determined it will have broad appeal; and even then, it is really hit and miss. Where Coke deserves the cudos is in its constant push to develop new products. Sticking your neck out might let you win the race, but you may just as easily have it chopped off as well. So will a coffee flavoured cola beverage survive the demands of a fickle mass market? Coffee purists may differ on opinion, but it must be noted that with a few exceptions, the only coffee flavoured beverage that still holds mass appeal is, well…coffee. Nestlé’s has had success with Coffee Crisp over the years, the Italians have done well with Tiramsu desserts, and Khalua / Tia Maria are also popular liqueurs, but beyond these, the greatest demand for coffee flavoured beverages is our industry’s “real thing”. It seems coffee is not as transmutable as say chocolate which has been successful in more formats than can be counted; but this is not to say that a coffee cola is doomed for marketing trash heap either. The real test of this new product will be how well people like it (you can push a product only so far, but if it is a dog, it will stay a dog no matter how much you try to dress it up). For foodservice and vending, it may be another product to offer where diversity is being requested by the customer. The Coffee industry however will look upon this as yet another possibility to introduce non coffee drinkers to the wonderful taste that billions world wide have come to rely on.
Questions or comments? Reach Brian at Brian@heritage-coffee.com |
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