Tuesday, May 29, 2007
News Weekend reading you may have missed
Posted by Andisheh Nouraee on Tue, May 29, 2007 at 6:43 PM
The lead business story in Sunday's New York Times was Andrew Martin's two-liter feature on the relative decline of the Coca-Cola Company over the past decade. It's the sort of in-depth, critical feature that the AJC has the proximity, access and institutional knowledge to pull off, but for some reason doesn't.
Martin contends that Coca-Cola has fallen behind rival Pepsi because of stodgy, unimaginative leadership.
Instead, lashed to a product and a corporate culture that is older than many of its most well-known marketing pitches, Coke has found itself outmaneuvered, at least in the United States, by a host of more creative competitors, like PepsiCo. As those rivals have diversified and taken risks, Coke, the beverage industry’s Goliath, has struggled to reinvent itself.
The story's most surprising revelation wasn't about Coke, per se. Rather, it is this bit about McDonald's consumers.
McDonald’s installed the coolers during the last year in about two dozen restaurants, mostly in Kansas and Missouri, after it realized that a growing number of customers were buying their Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets and then heading elsewhere for drinks. Besides the coolers, the test-market McDonald’s are also offering free “flavor shots†that allow customers to personalize drinks.
People who eat Frankenchicken are actually snobbish about what they drink? Is he kidding?
Comments (1)
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I actually thought the l-o-o-n-n-g NYT article was overly harsh. Yes, Coke's not the dominant brand/company that it once was. But it's still the most popular in most places, and — as the article reports — its share price and profitiibility have gone up under Idsel(l?). The point is a bit oblique for a two-page-plus article. I suppose it does balance out the fawning coverage of the AJC though, which has been so gee-whiz about the new World of Coke that it's juist unable to muster anything interesting.
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