Drink as if it was in 1985: Coca-Cola is reliving a new coke for Stranger Things 3

Strange things Season 3 will arrive on Netflix on July 4th, and it will take place in 1985. As a detail of the period, the show will refer to New Coke, a disastrous 1980s Coca-Cola effort to update its name. . . For those who are not old enough to remember, New Coke has faced a brutal reaction from consumers and a very public rise on the part of society.

But to commemorate New Coke's new pop culture, Coca-Cola will sell 500,000 New Coke cans as Strange things connection. They will go on sale online Thursday, May 23rd at 5:00 pm EDT. The resurrected drink will also be available at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta on certain days starting June 3rd. The cans Strange things promotional designs, and the company even redid its original New Coke advertisement to add a Strange things torsion. The announcement will be broadcast in cinemas.

Marketing links and product placements are common in major pop culture entities. And normally, a soft drink would do very little to deserve such a large investment in a television show. But of course, New Coke is not a regular non-alcoholic drink; This was important information for about three months in the market at that time.

Coca-Cola launched New Coke with fanfare in 1985. In the blind tasting tests, consumers showed a preference for a sweeter and crisper drink, such as Pepsi or Diet Coke, with a sweetness. longer and longer than ordinary Coca-Cola. While many consumers expressed a preference for the Coca-Cola brand, blind tests revealed that they actually preferred the taste of Pepsi. As a result, Coca-Cola has developed a new coke-based formula, essentially sweet diet coke with HFCS rather than aspartame. This was put on the market replacing the old Coke, rather than a new variant next door. The new formula used by the same can design, just with a "New" banner.

Although he has passed taste tests and even limited testing as a fountain, his introduction to the general public buying coke has proved disastrous. Not so much from the sales point of view – it has been accepted and preferred in most of the US – but from a public relations perspective. Southern coke drinkers viewed reformulation with hostility, as if an essential part of their identity had been considered inadequate and replaced without their consent. They complained about the new formula and asked Coca-Cola to return to the original version.

Even in the era of feedback loops before the Internet, in the face of this noisy reaction – accompanied by complaints from bottling companies about how Coca-Cola was pricing the syrup of the new formula – the company was giving way . The original formula was sold side by side with the new formula, the new one retaining the name of Coca-Cola and the old being "Coca Cola Classic". In 1992, the new formula was renamed Coke II and in 2009, the company finally stopped putting the word "Classic" on the old formula bottles.

As a longtime Diet Coke fan (though Vanilla Coke Zero is my true love), it's perhaps one of the most exciting promotional links I have ever seen. I've never had New Coke, although I'm well aware of its reputation, and the opportunity to finally try a can scares me. I've always had the ambition to drink a can of New Coke, and I'm delighted to finally have the opportunity.

Image by Netflix / The Coca-Cola Company