Happy Birthday, New Coke (°March 23, 1985)

Tuesday April 23rd of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company launched New Coke. This still remains one of the major cases in the marketing literature. It often ranks first in all-time lists of marketing fails (such as on marketwired, or in Matt Haig's book Brand Failures). Apart from the obvious failure (for the short version, see below; for the longer version, see Wikipedia), I think it is also a good demonstration of the intangible part of brand value, which I will explain below.

Brand personality vs image

Brand personality is often assessed in a way that does not match the way psychologists deal with the personality concept. In psychology, it is the person himself/herself that fills in a lengthy questionnaire which is then coded and results in a typology on the big five personality dimensions. In market research, brand personality is measured more often from a perceived point-of-view. Customers, or potential customers, are asked to fill in questionnaires about a brand. It is clear that the latter approach is more likely to result in an assessment of perceived brand personality or brand image, even if measures have been developed to try to focus on personality. 

In a recent presentation I elaborated on this issue. Included is a case study on how it has been applied to the study of Belgian financial banks. This case study was the subject of Jules De Bruycker's master thesis at Lessius University college, jointly supervised by me and Wim Lagae.

Link to slideshare

We are currently developing the proposed toolkit to easily assess the tension between brand personality (what the corporation thinks of its own personality) and brand image (what others think of it).