The Discontinued Soda That Was Oddly Marketed Towards Hopeless Gen Xers

It's not uncommon for popular brands to appeal to customers of the current generation. This generational marketing, wherein the message and pitch are deliberately targeted at a specific age group, is important for any company to expand its reach and, hopefully, increase its profits. In fact, in the 1990s, Coca-Cola tried appealing to the Gen-X crowd with a little-known product called OK Soda. While its distinct wrapping and advertisements, filled with sarcastic anti-corporate messages, seemed well-targeted on paper, the attempt ultimately failed, and the soda was discontinued shortly after. 

In 1993, Coca-Cola sought to create a new line of beverages to appeal to the Gen-Xers of the time. To do so, the soda giant hired longtime associate Sergio Zyman, who had helped boost Diet Coke's popularity and was the creative mind behind Coke's now-defunct Fruitopia line. In short, after combing through market research, Zyman saw that the phrase "OK" was the most recognized in multiple languages around the world.  With that knowledge and Coke's already instilled popularity, he moved forward by simply naming Coke's new product, "OK Cola." According to various descriptions in the soda's ads, OK Cola's flavor was "citrussy" mixed with "spices" (via YouTube). The product featured wrap-around art by alternative artists Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns, along with cynical and witty advertisements, including a matching slogan, "Things are going to be OK," which conveys its sarcastically hopeless tone. 

Unfortunately, OK Cola was discontinued in 1995, just a year after a soft launch in 1994 to test markets, despite a heavy marketing campaign that included an entire phone hotline dedicated to the brand. While that may, and arguably is, a pretty big blunder, this wasn't Coke's most spectacular failure — that was New Coke (and boy did people in the '80s overreact to it). During the 1980s, Coke sought to revamp its flavor and inadvertently tested its fan base's loyalty. The backlash of New Coke (also a Zyman brainchild) caused its long-time customers to protest, clog up Coke's phone lines with complaints, and they even poured cans of New Coke into sewer gutters. Looking back, even Coca-Cola admits it with a sense of humor as one of the largest mistakes in marketing history.

So, what caused OK Cola's complete flop? Nothing is clear, leaving everyone to assume that it simply didn't generate enough profit to warrant its public release. Considering other factors, such as its flavor, it was apparently not great and tasted like fizzy tree sap, which would place it firmly in the category of Coke flavors you'd never find in our fridge. It's also probably fair to admit that selling disillusionment can be a difficult task, especially to an entire generation known for its skepticism. However, it's also worth noting that, given today's equally burned-out generation, a re-release of OK Cola may be a hit. They just might want to do something about how it tasted.