Many people got angry about this fun Coke can. (Read: 1 2 3)
Why? Because it looked like a Diet Coke can. You didn’t realize that you were drinking the wrong thing until it was too late.
There are a few interesting lessons from this:
- Testing is important. You need an outside perspective and a fresh look to catch things that your internal team missed.
- Complexity is a problem. With hundreds of products, The Coca-Cola Company has so many possible points of confusion that it’s probably very hard to avoid things like this.
- Who’s in the middle? When you have lots of products, you need someone in the middle who can take a high-level view. Someone who can catch things missed by people who are deep-focused on a specific product.
- People are way too easily annoyed and probably need some rum in their Coke.
