Coke – Product Management Confabulation

May 2, 2022

Product Managers Give Clear Drinks A Try

The products may look like water, but they taste like something else
Image Credit: Marco Verch Professional Photographer

Think about your favorite non-water drink right now. What color is it? When you pour it into a glass, it looks the way that it should – you can recognize it. In fact, when you drink it, it probably tastes the way that it looks. What if all of this could be changed. What if your favorite drink suddenly became clear? No, the taste would not be changed at all, it would just all of sudden look like water. Would you still want it? Some product managers are betting that you would say yes.

It Looks Like Water, But It’s Not…

Leave it to product managers in Japan to change their product development definition and come up with dramatic new ways to present drinks to their customers. Japanese product managers are increasingly producing products that look like water but taste like other drinks. The bet is that consumers want the taste of Coke or beer in a healthier-looking clear liquid. The latest wave of water-like drinks hints at the contortions product managers must go through to satisfy consumer demands for flavorful drinks that are also good for you and, oh by the way, inoffensive-looking.

What product managers understand is that the need for drinks that people can enjoy without any hesitation is one of the reasons behind the growing demand for clear-color beverages in Japan. Product managers are adding new flavors and new products as consumer tastes shift beyond traditional drinks like soda. Flavored, bottled water sales have more than doubled in both the U.S. and Japan in the past five years which would look good on anyone’s product manager resume. Americans alone now drink some 2.4 billion liters of flavored water annually. These products are perceived as “modern, healthy, cool sort of beverages” and this is what the clear beverage product managers are trying to tap into.

Convenience stores in Japan are starting to stock more drinks like “All-Free All-Time” from Suntory’s beer-making unit. To make it, the product managers at Suntory drained the color from its nonalcoholic beer, added lime flavoring and increased the carbonation. The label of its clear-plastic bottle is decorated with a sheaf of barley and the slogan “beer taste” in order to let customers know what they are getting. In the past, Suntory hoped the amber-colored nonalcoholic beer it introduced would catch on with office workers, who could drink it at their desks and in meetings. However, the color and the can deterred people who said their colleagues might think they were drinking on the job.

The Future Of Clear Beverages

In Japan, product managers are under heavy pressure to generate sales in a mature and highly segmented market. Product managers have to introduce nearly 100 new drinks a year here. Last year, the product managers at Suntory started selling a clear beverage that is meant to taste like tea with milk. The drink, which is made with real tea leaves, sold well, so Suntory followed it up with a peach-tea-flavored water this year.

Their success has caught the attention of product managers at Asahi Group soft-drinks unit, which in May started selling a 60-calorie latte espresso-water called Clear Latte. Their product managers also launched clear “matcha” green tea. This drink was not easy to create – it took 170 prototypes of the zero-caffeine, zero-fat coffee to get the taste right. Asahi’s product managers didn’t want the drink to taste too sweet—people might think it wasn’t healthy—and it wanted to keep the calorie count down. Somewhat interestingly, the result tastes like a cup of watered-down, cold coffee.

The product has been a success – Asahi sold 400,000 cases, with 24 bottles per case, in the three weeks after Clear Latte was introduced. This means that they have already reached 30% of Asahi’s annual 1.5 million-cases target. Meanwhile, in the U.S., clear drinks became a fad in the early 1990s with brands such as Clearly Canadian soft drinks; Miller Clear, a transparent beer; and Crystal Pepsi, the colorless cola that was launched with fanfare before sales fizzled. By 1994, the trend was largely over in the U.S., and many of the products disappeared from store shelves amid shrinking sales. However, PepsiCo recently reintroduced Crystal Pepsi for a limited time. Coca-Cola Co.’s Japan unit launched “Coca-Cola Clear” in June, a zero-calorie version flavored with lemon.

What All Of This Means For You

The market for beverages has always been a highly competitive one. Beverage product managers have to keep changing their product manager job description and coming up with innovations in order to allow their products to remain popular. The new push by customers for more healthy drinks has placed beverage product managers under increased pressure to come up with ways to present their existing products as being more “healthy”. In Japan, beverage product managers think that they may have come up with a way to accomplish this: they are making their drinks clear.

Clear drinks are seen by customers as being a healthier-looking clear liquid. The enormous rise in favored water drinks has shown that clear liquids will sell well with customers. In order to create a clear beverage, the original beverage has to be processed in order to remove its color. This can help selling non-alcohol drinks because the colored versions may make people think that beer is being drunk at work. In Japan, beverage product managers have to introduce over 100 new products every year. The success of clear beverages in Japan has caused more firms to enter the market. Both Pepsi and Coke are trying clear versions of their soda products.

The big question that beverage product managers are going to have to deal with is if the idea of a clear beverage is a fad or if it will be long lasting. If the product managers are able to find ways to promote the health benefits of their clear beverages, then they may be able to find ways to get them to stay around. Product managers will need to closely monitor their customers and their feedback on the new clear beverages.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills

Question For You: Do you think that product managers will have to worry about clear beverages being confused with water?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The post Product Managers Give Clear Drinks A Try appeared first on The Accidental Product Manager.

January 13, 2020

Coke Product Managers Seek New Tastes

Coke product managers are searching for new drinks to create
Image Credit: Mikhail Esteves

Ah, to be a product manager at Coke-Cola. Would that not be the best job ever? Coke is a huge company, it has a very large market share, and every customer that you might ever want to capture has already heard about about your product. What more could a product manager ask for? Coke has been focused on creating sugary drinks even as the rest of the world started to shift its drinking habits to water and healthier options. Coke’s sales were starting to stall and this called for a change in their product development definition. What could their product managers do to turn things around?

The Search For New Drinks

The Coke product managers realized that they had a problem on their hands. For a long time there have been different types of drink products that have been popular in other parts of the world that Coke would not have considered offering. However, that has all changed. As an example of what is now possible, the Coke product managers in India have created a new product. The drink is based on chunky mango juice and is called “Maaza Chunky”. Creating new products like this is something that can be put onto a product manager resume.

Last year alone, Coke launched 500 new products. This was a 25% increase over the number of products that the company had launched the previous year. These new launches are starting to help Coke sell more product by volume. They have introduced a number of new products internationally including: salty lemon tonic water in France and Belgium, a sesame and walnut drink in China, whey shakes in Brazil, and cucumber flavored Sprite in Russia. Not every product that they introduce will be a success. This is why the Coke product managers are being careful to not fully commit to any new product until they see that it can be popular. They also have to be willing to remove the products that just don’t seem to be working.

If the Coke product managers are going to be successful in finding new products that will meet the needs of the market, then they are going to have to speed things up and get more new products out in front of customers. Currently Coke makes more than half of its revenue from its international operations. This is the part that it wants to spend more time and money on research and development of new drinks. Taking India as an example, it used to take over a year to get a new product from the labs onto the shelves, now this has been reduced to only four months.

What Coke Will Do In The Future

The Coke product managers have spread the word throughout the company. The firm is to go out and create new products and new businesses that are better turned to the needs of their local markets. What the Coke product managers need to keep in mind is that if they focus too much on their new brands, they may run into problems. Over at Pepsi they’ve recently relearned this lesson when they focused too much on a new fruit juice product that they had created called “Izze Fusions”. The result was that when they shifted advertising money and shelf space to the new brand, sales of their core legacy brands all fell.

A bright spot for the Coke product managers has always been Japan. In Japan, Coke has always been able to bring new products to market quicker and more frequently than it has been able to so elsewhere. As examples of what they have been able to do in Japan Coke has recently launched their first alcoholic drink and a laxative version of Sprite. This has been in contrast to the other international Coke business units which tend to rely more on products that have been developed for the American market.

The hope is that a new drink product developed for one country can be transformed into a hit in another country. The Coke product managers like to call this concept “lift and ship”. An example of doing this occurred when Coke launched Coca-Cola Plus Coffee in Australia. The product was such a hit there that they then went ahead and made small changes to it before launching it in Turkey and Vietnam. As a note of caution for Coke’s product managers, the same type of product was launched in both Europe and the U.S., where it didn’t do well, and ended up getting pulled.

What All Of This Means For You

Being a product manager at Coke would seem to be a great job to have. The company is big, their products are well known, and everyone likes them. However, as customer’s tastes have been shifting over time, Coke has seen its sales start to decrease and this has started to put pressure on the Coke product managers to look at their product manager job description and come up with new product ideas.

The Coke product managers have realized that they need to take a look at what types of drinks are popular in international local locations and tap into these. The India branch of Coke has used this to create a mango flavored drink. Coke increased the number of products that they launched last year to over 500. They need to understand that not every product will be a success and if they don’t work out, then they need to be pulled. The key to launching new products is to be able to do it very quickly. The Coke product managers need to be careful and not focus too much on only their new products. Coke’s operations in Japan have always been a bright spot for new product introductions. The Coke product managers would like to be able to introduce a new product, have it be a success, and then take that product to other international markets.

The good news is that the Coke product managers have gotten the news – customer tastes are changing and they need to change what they are offering. There are no easy answers to these questions. Using their international arms to create new locally-based drinks is a great idea. Now the Coke product managers are just going to have to keep their eyes open and see where their next big hit shows up!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills

Question For You: How should the Coke product managers determine if a local drink product would work in other countries?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Who doesn’t love a good sandwich? When lunch time rolls around (or perhaps dinner), there is something about grabbing a meal that you can hold in your hand that can be oh so satisfying. When it comes time for us to have a sandwich there are a lot of different options for us: we can make our own or we can go out and buy one. If we decide to go out and get a sandwich, then where should we go? Restaurants that make sandwiches are pretty easy to set up and so there are a lot of them out there. The product managers at one such restaurant, Potbelly’s, are struggling to come up with ways to change their product development definition in order to make their sandwich different from all the others.

The post Coke Product Managers Seek New Tastes appeared first on The Accidental Product Manager.

July 8, 2019

Can Coke Product Managers Make Their New Alcoholic Drink A Success?

Chu-Hai is big in Japan. Can Coke join the crowd?
Image Credit: Tim

So for just a moment, picture yourself as a product manager for one of the most iconic products out there: Coke-Cola. You’ve done a great job – Coke is one of the most popular drinks available and no matter what country you go to, it is very well known. The company makes an enormous amount of money from your soft drink product every year and in all honesty, traditionally you’ve only had one real competitor – Pepsi. However, in the past few years, things have started to become a bit more challenging for you. More and more of your customers are staring to reject the sugary beverage that you are offering them and instead they are choosing to drink water and sports drinks. What’s a product manager to do?

New Plans For Coke

One thing that you need to realize is that Coke-Cola, the company, is a large international company. They have operations in just about every country. What Coke has decided to do about the slowing sales of their premier product is to change their product development definition and do an experiment in a most unusual place: Japan. In Japan, Coke-Cola plans on introducing a new beverage: a fizzy alcoholic drink. This should look interesting on some someone’s product manager resume. Although you might think that this is something that they have probably tried before, the truth is that this is a first for the company. In the past, the company has owned a wine subsidiary that they had acquired as a part of another purchase. However, the company had never done that much with this resource.

What makes this proposed new drink so revolutionary is that it represents a first for the product managers at Coka-Cola. This will be the first alcoholic offering created by the company. The product managers are well aware that they are venturing into new territory with this new product. That’s why they are telling the world that it is going to be an “experiment”. The product is going to be a canned drink that contains alcohol. This type of product already exists in Japan. These products are called “chu-hai”.

Chu-hai is sold in Japan as a canned alcoholic drink. Traditional chu-hai is made with a Japanese distilled beverage that is less than 45% alcohol by volume and carbonated water flavored with lemon. Some modern commercial varieties use vodka in place of the distilled beverage. The flavors available have recently multiplied, including lime, grapefruit, apple, orange, pineapple, grape, peach, strawberry cream, cream soda, and kiwi. For the chu-hai sold in bars and restaurants, the alcohol content can be quite low, allowing those with a low tolerance for alcohol to drink safely. Canned chūhai, however, can have alcohol levels as high as 9% (18 proof) and is often sold in convenience stores and vending machines.

Will This New Plan Work?

Although this will be a new venture for Coke, the Japan unit of the company has often been a leader in introducing new varieties of drinks. Coke’s Japan branch has sold a number of drinks that the company has not made available elsewhere including coffees, teas, and even a laxative version of Coke. The product managers at Coke realize that their customer’s tastes are changing and that they are going to have to change what they offer in order to keep sales going. These changes are some of the reasons that the product managers at Coke have been willing to expand into new market segments including coffee and smoothies. The goal is to find a way to deal with diminishing soda sales.

In order to keep their customers, the Coke product managers want to start to send a different message to their customers. Specifically, what they would like to be able to tell them is that Coke has a beverage that will go with their every occasion and that Coke is not all about soft drinks. The people who watch the beverage market have believed for a long time that the walls between non-alcoholic and alcoholic drinks would eventually come tumbling down. The reason for this is that more stores and websites that sell drinks have been selling both types of drinks.

As an example of another company that has been exploring the offering of different types of drinks, beer maker Anheuser-Bush has been selling a number of non-alcoholic drinks; however, the majority of them have been sold outside of the United States. Clearly Coke-Cola has made the decision to enter into the selling of Alcoholic drinks. This should be considered to be a trial run as the company determines how its product offerings are received by its customer base. If the product offering in Japan takes off and becomes popular, then there is a very good chance that we could see the Coke product managers take this idea and start to roll it out in other countries over time.

What All Of This Means For You

Coke-Cola is a well known brand name. Everyone knows that they offer one of the most popular soft drinks. However, as their customer’s tastes start to change and sales of soft drinks start to decrease, the product managers at Coke have taken a look at their product manager job description and decided that it is time to start to experiment with offering different types of beverages. In their Japan unit they are now planning on rolling out a brand new product: a fizzy alcoholic drink.

The introduction of a beverage with alcohol in it is going to be a first for Coke. The company did own a winery at one point in time, but they have never offered alcohol based drinks in a can before. Because this is so new for Coke, the company is billing it as being an “experiment”. In Japan, products like this are already being offered by other companies. These products are called “chu-hai”. Traditional chūhai is made with a Japanese distilled beverage that is less than 45% alcohol by volume and carbonated water flavored with lemon. Canned chu-hai can have alcohol contents as high as 9% (18 proof). Soda sales have started to slip and this is why the Coke product managers are willing to investigate new types of product offerings. Coke would like to let their customers know that Coke has a beverage for every occasion. If this product turns out to be successful in Japan, then there is a very good chance that Coke could introduce it into other countries.

The product managers at Coke have been riding high for a long time. Their product is one of the most successful soft drink products on the market. However, as customer tastes start to change, sales of sugary soft drinks are starting to decease. In order to make up for the losses that they are seeing, the product managers are willing to try out new types of products in places like Japan. If it turns out that their customers like fizzy alcoholic drinks, then perhaps we’ll be seeing them on store shelves near us soon!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills

Question For You: Offering an alcoholic drink is a big departure for Coke, do you think that is a good idea for them?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As I’m sure that we all know by now, Amazon is a very large company that does a lot of different things: they ship books and products, offer cloud computing resources, and even run an internet based television channel. The product managers at Amazon are under an enormous amount of pressure to always be looking for ways for the company to keep on growing. This is why they have expanded in to such diverse areas as grocery stores. However, now the Amazon product managers are taking a closer look at how they run their business and they’ve decided that it’s time for some of the firms that they have been relying on to go away. Now Amazon is getting ready to update their product development definition in order to take on UPS and start its own delivery business.

The post Can Coke Product Managers Make Their New Alcoholic Drink A Success? appeared first on The Accidental Product Manager.

June 25, 2018

Product Managers Know How Valuable A Product Name Is

Coke product managers are fighting for the rights to “zero”
Image Credit: Daniel Go

As a product manager, you know just how important the name of your product is. We spend a great deal of time trying to come up with the right name that will match the product development definition for each of the products that we manage. Our goal is always to create a name that will capture what the product does, be memorable, and in this confusing age of the internet be unique enough that we can brand it. That’s why it can be very important for us to take the time to watch other product managers when they try to create a valuable product name. At Coke-Cola, their product managers are struggling to show that they own the rights to a very popular name: “zero”.

The Problem With “Zero”

Over at Coke-Cola they seem to have fallen in love with the word “zero” as a part of a product name. They currently have a diet soda named “Coke Zero” as well as “Sprite Zero” and “Powerade Zero”. However, as you might have guessed, this is causing a bit of a branding problem for Coke-Cola. They don’t own the rights to the name “Zero” and so that is allowing the competition to create their own “Zero” named products. A good example of this is Dr. Pepper’s “Diet Rite Pure Zero” product. Product naming confusion never looks good on a product manager resume!

Coke-Cola has tried to get trademark protection for the word “zero” before. Canada recently rejected Coke-Cola’s request for a trademark to the common word “zero”. One of the reasons that their request was rejected was because their main rival, Pepsi, had opposed the move. Likewise, back in 2008 Coke-Cola had tried to trademark “zero” in the U.K., only to have this request rejected. Once again, part of the reason for the rejection was because of issues raised by Pepsi. It’s now time for the Coke-Cola product managers to make yet another attempt at getting a trademark for the word “zero”. This time they’ll be trying to get it in the U.S. They have tried to do this before back in 2007. However, back then the Dr. Pepper – Snapple group objected and their request was turned down.

The reason that the Coke-Cola product managers are going after a trademark for the word “zero” so hard is that if they were to be successful, then they could more easily sue imitators. If they are once again unsuccessful in getting a trademark, then they may end up looking at a lot of competitors and the result of this could be that their brand becomes diluted.

What Coke Is Going To Do About “Zero”

Getting a trademark for the word “zero” has become more and more important to Coke-Cola over time. Their Coke Zero product has been selling very well lately. This is important to Coke-Cola because the overall diet drink market has been decreasing for the past few years. There are many different reasons for this decline; however, one of the biggest is that consumers have started trying to avoid artificial sweeteners. Some studies have linked artificial sweeteners to different types of cancer, but government studies have shown them to be safe.

Where things start to get a bit weird is that consumers have started to avoid drinks that are labeled as being “diet”. However, the same avoidance has not yet hit drinks that are labeled “zero”. This is a bit odd simply because the zero drinks often contain the same artificial sweeteners that the diet drinks contain. In the past year, sales of Coke-Cola’s Coke Zero product increased by 6% while at the same time sales of Diet Coke fell by 6%.

Coke has been marketing its Diet Coke product towards women. However, its Coke Zero product has been marketed more heavily towards men. The Coke Zero product is sweetened with two different sweeteners in order to give it a different taste from Diet Coke. Getting a trademark on a single word can be very hard to do. In their filings, Dr. Pepper pointed out that there are currently 32 different products whose name contains the word “zero”.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we’d all like our products to have names that jump into our customer’s minds when they think about our products. Our product manager job description tells us to spend a great deal of time trying to come up with names that clearly communicate what our products do and why a consumer would want to buy them. Over at Coke-Cola they have several successful products with the word “zero” in their name and now they’d like to be able to trademark “zero”.

Coke-Cola has three different popular products that contain the word “zero” in their name. The problem that they are now running into is that they don’t own the trademark to the word “zero”. They have been turned down for trademark protection for the word “zero” in Canada, the U.K., and the USA. Their rivals, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, have pushed back against Coke-Cola’s attempt to get a trademark for the word “zero”. Coke is now once again trying to get a U.S. trademark for this word. If successful, they will be able to sue imitators, if not then their brands may get diluted. Zero drinks are still selling well even as diet drinks start to lose market share. There is not that much difference between zero drinks and diet drinks. It may turn out to be very difficult to get a trademark on a single word because it is already used in a number of other products.

The Coke-Cola product managers need to try to get a trademark for the word “zero”. The products that they have that use this word are just too valuable to not try. However, it sure looks like their chances of being successful are fairly slim. What this means is that they will need to have a back-up plan for what they should do if they are not successful in getting a trademark. They will need to make sure that we all think of “Coke Zero” when we heard the product name “zero”.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills

Question For You: What can Coke-Cola do to get customers to associated “zero” with their products and not other products?

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The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When we think about all of the exciting product manager jobs that are out there, one of the ones that always seems to come to mind are the people who are in charge of the big soft drink products. One of the largest is Pepsi and those product managers must be working hard every day to try to keep the market share that they have and win even more. However, it turns out that the company, Pepsi, has a bit of a split personality when it comes to their product development definition. They have a very successful beverage half but they also have a very successful chip half. What are those Pepsi chip product managers up to?

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