The marketing was a total hit where they tried it (including in my area), but it tasted terrible. It might have been conceptually a little "out there" for the early/mid 90s, but lots of people were talking about it, and my friends and I really wanted it to be great. I really think the problem was that it just sucked.
Somewhere i read or heard la croix taste described as ‘
if you were standing at one end oF a long hallway and someone walks out of a room at the other end and whispers ‘orange’ toward you’
This is very pleasant to me. The dense/scifi level of flavoring in the more syrup forward soft drinks isnt interesting and refreshing its become oppressive and tiresome.
Another marketing company that deploys product as an afterthought?
How many companies have signaled jumping the shark by renaming and rebranding, as if any product issue can be fixed with messaging? Comcast -> Xfinity. Radio Shack -> The Shack. Sci Fi channel -> SyFy...
As a consumer, I'm insulted when the vendor thinks I'm so shallow. As an employee of such a vendor, it's a sign of thrash and a warning signal to look at leadership.
I agree, if you have a good product people will flock to you, although if everyone basically has the same thing like say sneakers (Nike!) that are essentially the same across all vendors a brand can set you apart even though your product isn't really any better than the competition
Indeed, I made the same link. However, even at its largest, obey did not have a broad-enough appeal as what Coca-Cola execs would've wanted. Also, the ties with a mainstream brand would be off-putting to the core OBEY customer.
Two things having the same artist doesn't mean they have the same mainstream potential. As I understand it, the "OBEY" thing was distinctly anti-authoritarian. For it to become mainstream would be for it to become the subject of it's own mockery.
> If this launched today, I could see it gaining traction.
Well, the marketing guys back then thought it could have been a hit backe then and I can see why. If you were around in the nineties, there were quite a few products geared to that cultural stream of the subvertising movement.
I was a young teen when it first came out -- in retrospect, I think it's cool, but at the time, everybody I knew felt like it was baldly pandering to our demographic / 'disaffected slackers' in general, and looked upon it with mild disdain
I was asked to review a book of beers that were being made, including one which is on one, called 'The Lost and Found: an American Craft Beer Craft Beer Designer' this one.
The book is very detailed and a piece that I would not suggest anything I knew of. It was produced by a small team of professional brewers including a wine writer's producer.
Yes! A sugary drink that has no nutritional value - which is shit for the human body - is a great product! // sarcasm [1]
Jesus, the twisted logic of this current system that encourages excluding-enclosures (proprietary 'recipes') is so damaging to humans as well as to the planet.
I think I was into my second year in middle school in Italy when this came out... so it’s far from my experience in both time and space. And yet it triggers an inexplainable sense of nostalgia in me for the nineteen-nineties, grunge, early-New Economy, pre-9/11 world. Somehow it also makes me think of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, both because it features a protagonist who is hyper-sensitive to branding to the point of allergy, and functions as a funereal eulogy to the era.
Yes, for some reason reading/looking at this made me super nostalgic as well! Just want to sit in a couch in the mid 90's and listen to CD's and watch Beavis and Butthead and read stuff in magazines instead of on the internet.
Just to clarify, the design is 100% post-war-modernist, not brutalist. Not surprising for those parts, what with Scandinavia going all-in on modernism back in the day (afaik).
When I saw the can design I immediately thought that it looks like the art style of "David Boring" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boring), turns out it was really Daniel Clowes who designed it. "Ghost world" is one of my favorite stories & movies as well, but I didn't hear about O.K. soda before. Fascinating!
While I really like the art style and dark touch I think it was probably too niche or too off-putting for most people.
Fellow Clowes afficionado here. That's exactly what I thought too when I looked at the art!
Just a couple of days ago, I discovered Clowes work in the movie 'Paul'. I thought the art work looked very much like that of Clowes' and paused the screen to observe it closely and noticed that it was signed 'Pussey'(after Dan Pussey, the timid cartoonist character in Clowes' universe), which confirmed it for me :) https://imgur.com/a/HbCLB5c
I just called this number to try it out. It's a phone sex line now. There are supposedly hot girls for guys to talk to, but I didn't investigate the veracity of this claim.
In the 80's I once met a guy who claimed to own the phone number on the "HOW'S MY DRIVING? CALL 1 (800) EAT-SHIT" bumper stickers, a parody of all those trucker's bumper stickers with real 800 numbers to report them to their masters.
Not sure how he monetized it, but he had some scheme going on, and paid for it by selling the bumper stickers. Probably he sold more to all the careless drivers who called and wanted one too, than actual shit eaters.
>> 1. Is the sort of thing ever outsourced to, for example, India? Or wherever else is a common place for call centres if it’s no longer there
I don't know if there are call centers full of phone sex workers. You'd have the same background noise you get when calling any call center. And the workers would have to get paid when nothing was happening.
Do you remember the vending machines around that time on MIT campus that had games built in: some LEDs that would blink after you purchased a coke, and if you won, you got a free coke!
I think there also were some musical coke machines, too.
(I was also visiting while in high school!)
When I worked at the CMU CS department, my office was right down the hall from the Internet Coke Machine, and you could "finger coke@cmua" to see how many sodas of what kind there were, and what their temperature was.
Japanese language require IME to type, which converts sound written in hiragana to kanji: i.e. you type soba → get “そば” → IME suggests you “蕎麦”. Basically a stretch of modern phone keyboard correction but existed since the 80s.
Nice side effect to it is while there are predetermined sets of conversions coming with IME, it also handles some arbitrary mapping for convenience, i.e. かお(face) → ( ´∀｀) or きょう(today) → 2020/04/08.
iOS Japanese keyboard gives me following for literally number 1: 1 １ ① 一 ⅰ Ⅰ 1K ⒈ ⑴
I drank this regularly in Junior High. It basically tasted like "Swamp Water" (all the available sodas at a fountain mixed together) with a slight awkward vanilla or black liquorice tone. I remember it tasting especially bad if it wasn't cold.
Blast from the past, not sure why it is on HN, I did a double take. Didn't know I was in a "Test Market". Ok Soda and ORBITZ were the only flash in the pan sodas I remember from that generation.
Same here. I actually still had an unopened can and a stack of labels I had peeled off bottles when I moved out of my parents' house and ended up chucking them all in the trash. I kind of wish I still had the can to just stick on a shelf, the cans were pretty cool looking.
How come we don’t hear more about gen x? It is always millennials are lazy or millennials are killing this or millennials are destroying that. Even when gen z does this ok boomer thing, it is the millennials who are blamed of being disrespectful (my understanding is very few of us are doing the ok boomer thing — we are in our thirties now!)
Preface: generational reasoning is always stupid. The differences in group are greater than the differences out.
That said a) as a gen xer we used to hear all the same things about gen x as we do now about millennials. Its largely time gated. b) gen x is a much more transitional generation, there weren’t as many defining moments and c) its a smaller cohort. Millennials were the largest birth cohort since the baby boom.
Because the media is currently largely staffed by gen X people on the higher levels. As this transitions, intergenerational moaning in the media will shift from targeting millennials to gen x and gen z; as boomers get less relevant even more ire will turn against gen x. Moaning about people who have the nerve to be too young or old is a time honoured tradition; we’ve been at it for millennia and it’s not going anywhere.
> Pirko told host Noah Adams that OK tastes “a little bit like going to a fountain and mixing a little bit of Coke with a little root beer and Dr. Pepper and maybe throwing in some orange.”
This is consistent with my memory of the taste. I think I only had one or two cans in my life. The taste was adequate, but not truly compelling.
That's correct, and the "weird taste" relative to other sodas was (is? Been a while since I've been to India, and I noticed it was losing market share badly last time I was there...) cardamom. Cardamom is put to good use throughout Indian cuisine (chai, sag dishes, etc.), making Thums Up really much more complementary than traditional western sodas.
There was a way to use a coke soda fountain to make something that tasted shockingly like Baja Blast. It involved Sprit and Blue Poweraid from what I remember. There may have been one more ingredient.
When I saw marketed at Gen X, the first thing I thought of was at that time, one of the conventional bits of wisdom about Gen X was that we were resistant to being marketed at. I'm not sure that I buy that—Gen X bought into a lot of lame stuff marketed at them, but this seemed exactly the sort of marketing campaign which would support the conventional wisdom.
The stuff sure delivers on its promise! I used to live near you too, since I got it at the place on Binnen Oranjestraat, near Relax and Small World Catering (a really great place with nice people, too).
They featured the work of Clowes and Burns! Very cool.
Just a couple of days ago, I discovered Clowes work in the movie 'Paul'. I thought the art work looked very much like that of Clowes' and paused the screen to observe it closely and noticed that it was signed 'Pussey'(after Dan Pussey, the timid cartoonist character in Clowes' universe), which confirmed it for me :) https://imgur.com/a/HbCLB5c
Yes, two of my favorite comic artists from the 90s. I was clearly in the target for this soda, although I have never been into soda. Maybe that was the error.
I find the contrasts between Gen X and Millennial stereotypes quite striking. You can see it in the media, which was often simply a dramatized perversion of generational self-reflection to sell media.
The Gen X generation seems to be characterized as generally depressed with a bored attitude of *its ok, i'll get over it". The primary theme there is some form of muted (apathetic) emotional resiliency, where mute suggests a primary characterization that is unintentionally not primarily communicated. These sort of characterizations suggest something that is not fragile, but not something that is socially exciting.
Millennial generation on the other hand appears to be characterized by maximum inclusion and interconnectedness, which are great... until people are cut off, which is characterized for its stark fragility.
Those are stereotypes and are prone to being wildly inaccurate with respect to any particular group or subculture, but still its interesting to compare those two demographics by solely looking at the representative media. During Gen X grunge, gangster rap, and country music were wildly popular. The really big deal in my area was Nine Inch Nails which was horribly depressing. Shows like Roseanne, Married with Children, and Beavis and Butthead were all the rage which mostly featured primary characters sitting on a couch complaining and getting over it. Also remember the Simpsons were far more depressing in their first few seasons during that period of time.
Media also reflects the stereotypes for the Millennial generation as well. The popular shows of the late 90s and early 2000s were things like Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City, Grey's Anatomy, and 30 Rock. These were all friends spending time with each other being happy, and aside from 30 Rock, none of those people ever seemed to go to work. Work is boring and depressing. The biggest things in music during the early years of the Millennial generation were most pop bands that graduated from boy bands or young attractive female pop singers. The theme was be beautiful, happy, and connected, but the moment you weren't connected the rest of it seemed to fall apart.
Comparing the two generations it seems Gen Xers are living an emotional coma enjoying all that numbs them to, while Millennials are living with bipolar disorder.
Another example of the myth of the omnipotence of marketing messages.
Marketing only works when the product works. Coke works because most peoples first experience is good, not only good, but in many cases magical (kids who've never had caffeine, especially combined in a tasty high sugar drink). Coke advertising just has to trigger memories of the happiness of that original taste association, and the marketing director looks like a genius.
Then he tries to make his own products, and the feathers on his gawdy wings start to smoke.
I was working in college radio and writing for The Onion back when OK Cola came out. I think the money that went into this makes most sense framed as a type of generational panic combined with technological transformation. The early Gen Xers were entering the workforce with a set of behaviors / values that felt unfamiliar & perhaps threatening to Boomers. Boomers began to feel uncool, out of touch and no longer culturally adept in the way they always had previously. This is nothing new, but I think it might be particularly wrenching when it finally happens to a demographically large and dominant cohort. Millennials, let me know how it works out.
More importantly rapid changes in technology caused corporations to lose control of media distribution for the first time. Widespread availability of personal computers / microchips caused media creation and distribution costs plummet in publishing, music, and film production/distribution. New insurgents like Fantagraphics, hip hop, college radio, indie rock, The Onion, The Stranger, Might, indie record labels and indie movies could route around large corporations to find an audience and build a business. Capital was still needed, but was orders of magnitude less than it had been for prior generations.
The resulting panic was deepest in the industries connected to entertainment, including those that depended on it for marketing. It seems absurd, but consumer brands convinced themselves that not only would Xers reject traditional media & advertising - they’d reject the previous generations products as well. There was sincere worry that millions of kids would stop drinking Coke & Miller Lite. Ad agencies helped fuel this panic as it brought with it an opportunity to pry large accounts away from incumbents.
This period didn’t last long, but it did birth a number of experiments like OK Cola, most of which were conceived as experiments and strategic contingency plans. For a brief and shining moment, there was some decent money and cultural cachet showered upon a bunch of smirking early 20s Xers whose only qualifications were helming a late night college radio program. It was wonderful to see Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns and other generation-defining artists get some well-earned money if not recognition.
> OK Soda's concept was that the youth market was already aware that they were being manipulated by mass-media marketing, so this advertising campaign would just be more transparent about it.
The Pepsi company isn't that much better. (with regard to strong-arming, don't have much to say about assassinations)
Quite a few bars around here have had to choose to not carry any drinks from either Coca-Cola or Pepsi, just to be able to serve some new, more local, sodas
Well. Ultimately it does. In larger European cities very few fancier restaurants/bars cater Pepsi/Coca Cola. Those brands are gradually being seen more and more as low-end McSodas. The winners are Club Mate/Fritz Cola and a whole bunch of local brands.
I would say that in Prague all the hip places have them, they are also quite popular in Sofia (this is what I had on New Year's Eve as I was on antibiotics), though there are still a few nice bars with Pepsi/Coke. I would presume that this is the case in most of the Eastern EU. The small towns and classic pubs usually got Kofola/Derby or some other cheap local alternative. Btw the manufacturing price of soda is almost negligible.
Wouldn't free markets also have this issue? What stops coca cola to stop catering to establishments who carry their competitors? They've got the mindshare because they have spent a few billion in marketing, so you have to carry what the public want. Now the choice is either coca cola or anything else. How will free market solve this problem?
Your fundamentals are broken. First of all, free markets didn't create this problem in the first place. So you can't just blame them for it nor do they have to be able to fix it to prove their overall validity.
Second, you are buying a bag of goods here.
> They've got the mindshare because they have spent a few billion in marketing
Is this so? I would doubt that. Also, as an aside, are you talking about America? Here in Europe it's different…
> so you have to carry what the public want
No you don't. You have to carry what your market wants. Sales of MS Office on the Mac have schown that "the public" wants it. But what does a Linux distro have to carry? Vim and Emacs.
It depends on your market…
> Now the choice is either coca cola or anything else. How will free market solve this problem?
It's called disruption. Examples of disruptors are Linux netbooks, Afri Cola, maybe Tesla if they succeed, and many others.
We can go more into depth with this discussion if you want.
> First of all, free markets didn't create this problem in the first place. So you can't just blame them for it nor do they have to be able to fix it to prove their overall validity.
Didn't blame anything on anything. I asked a question.
>Is this so? I would doubt that. Also, as an aside, are you talking about America? Here in Europe it's different…
I live in Europe and there is plenty of mindshare captured by these companies. Also soft drinks like these are not in the european culture, you can just take a look at relative market sizes.
> No you don't. You have to carry what your market wants.
Seriously? you are going to make a snide comment about my colloquial use of the term public instead of market? Real mature.
> It's called disruption. Examples of disruptors are Linux netbooks, Afri Cola, maybe Tesla if they succeed, and many others.
All of these things you have listed have existed for decades and barely hold 10% of their respective market. And please don't give the example of linux. Linux cannot be compared with other products which don't get free programming contributions and community support. Linux is nothing like its competitors.
The article cites examples from 30 years ago of a local manager(s), working for a Coca-Cola bottler (not Coca-Cola), directing a hit on union members (the article itself is from almost 20 years ago). That's terrible but Colombia went through a de facto civil war and was (is?) a violent place in the best of times. I do think you may be overstating Coca-Cola's involvement.
How long are people going to milk this Colombia episode to tell people not to drink Coca-Cola projects? I attended a few left-wing protests in the early millennium where activists also brought along banners and t-shirts for their own pet causes, and the "Coca-Cola kills Colombian union activists!" already felt done to death. At this point, it is just as tiresome as using the 40-year-old infant-formula episode to advocate avoiding Nestle products, and it will turn off more people than you'll attract to your cause.
1. That was just an extreme example. The common example is squeezing small businesses to strengthen their monopoly.
2. Was the matter resolved to the satisfaction of the union? Were the culprits or the people responsible acknowledged by the company to stand trial? Did the company compensate the families of those killed?
3. How are employment conditions in Coca-Cola today? In Columbia and elsewhere in the world?
If (2) and (3) had satisfactory answers, I promise I'd drop the matter from here on out and stick to (1).
Dunno. Political killings are kind of a big deal to me. Should I buy the argument that Coca-Cola was a different corporation back then, young and impetuous and we should not hold them responsible, because they are a changed person, err, corporation?
Certainly - because you're an independent and autonomous individual, and that's why your personal and unique choice of "Coca Cola", which was not at all engineered by corporate marketing.
Assuming you're in the US - at least try one of these regional drinks (simple search here - I'm no expert):
I mean, it seems likely to me that every global mega-corporation has probably employed a murderer at some point in time. It's just a numbers game.
If the board has a meeting and decides to murder someone, that's a problem. If some random employee decides to murder someone, it's probably not the company's fault.
1. This sounds like the "but every large world state has committed some form of ethnic cleansing or genocide, so XYZ" type argument. Perhaps that's true; and it's certainly true indirectly, in the sense that wars and killings and executions benefit dominant economic entities. But the conclusion isn't to to just ho-hum excuse it.
2. I suspect most regional soft drink makers don't kill people. So, let's buy their stuff.
3. Of course the board won't take that decision. That's what unofficial fixer positions at contractors are for. Or - the decision is taken independently by a Barney-Stinson-type manager:
The art on the cans is pretty cool.
I love that there was a Usenet mailing list for this:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.fan.ok-soda/WQuelBjd8s8/...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.fan.ok-soda/9Kxv...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.fan.ok-soda/1_E_...
(Not sure if Google Reader links are stable.)