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In lugnet.events.brickfest, Kevin Salm wrote:
> 3. Has anyone at Lego heard of Coca-Cola?? They tried to change their
> formula, lost huge amounts of money, and SWITCHED BACK to the original
> formula. It seems any lesson taught there has not been learned by anyone
> at TLC.
This isn't necessarily true, but it's got some good parallels. Popular wisdom
holds that Coca-Cola pretended to change their formula to be more "Pepsi-like,"
then staged giant well-publicized "protests" against themselves. They got a
couple months of huge publicity about how great the original formula tasted, and
how foul the Pepsi taste was.
After a suitable period, they brought back "Classic" Coke, which was similar to
the original formula but with several ingredients replaced with cheaper
substitutes, most notably replacing sucrose with fructose. If you have some old
original-formula Cokes and can compare the taste with the new "Classic" Cokes,
the quality difference is immediately obvious. "New Coke" was a ruse to
disguise the formula change and get massive publicity as a side benefit.
(The popularity of this story has generated enough negative PR that Coke has
started mixing small amounts of sucrose back into the formula so that they can
include "fructose and/or sucrose" on the ingredients list.)
Whether or not New Coke was a brilliant marketing ploy or just the world's
luckiest mistake, Classic Coke's comeback against Pepsi in 1986 was nothing
short of unbelievable, and I can easily imagine some Lego marketeer thinking
it'd be clever to try and duplicate it. Destroy the most basic-utility Lego
colors, replace them with Mega Bloks versions, and wait for the fans to freak
out. Pray for at least a couple of good anti-New-Lego protest rallies in the
spirit of 1985, get a bunch of publicity about the greatness of original Lego
was and the foulness of Mega Bloks. After a prudent delay, some prominent exec
steps forward and admits that they underestimated humanity's deep and abiding
emotional attachment to classic Lego; classic colors are brought back, the world
rejoices, Lego sales rebound, Mega Bloks is crushed, marketing gets a high-five,
and carte blanche is issued to degrade quality in all other areas because
everyone's too busy focusing on the color to notice.
This theory is more than a little far-fetched, since the last decade tends to
refute the idea that this level of thought goes into their corporate decisions.
But it's a lot more attractive to me than the only alternative theory, which is
that Lego actively hates its fans and acts purely out of a malicious desire to
cause pain and suffering in its customer base. Either way, the New Coke
precedent shows that it's in the best interest of ourselves and the company to
go nuts and be as vocal as possible in our protest of the changes. Especially
if we remember to sneak in frequent interjections about how much Mega Bloks
suck.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: General session Q&A
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| (...) Had I beed at BF PDX, I would have wanted to ask the following questions: 1. How many staffers lost or will will lose their jobs as a result of this color chage fiasco?? I know if I were KKK, I would discharge the entire marketing team, the (...) (20 years ago, 16-Feb-04, to lugnet.events.brickfest)
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