Coca-Cola is ditching the Coke Zero brand in Australia in favour of a new sugar-free variant called Coca-Cola No Sugar.
The new Coke product features branding more closely aligned with the classic Coca-Cola packaging, as well as a black banner that emphasises the drink’s zero sugar content.
It will be the second time in 14 months that Coca-Cola has relaunched its sugar-free version in Australia, following the global rollout of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, and associated packaging, in April.
It comes amid continuing decline for fizzy drinks, as consumers cut back on their consumption of sugar. In the US alone, average soda consumption has fallen to 38.5 gallons per person per year, putting it behind bottled water for the first time.
Despite the brand overhaul, the new drink replicates the reformulated Coke Zero in that it provides as similar a flavour to classic Coca-Cola as possible.
“We think it’s the closest we have ever come to the classic taste of Coca-Cola,” the company’s president in Australia, Roberto Mercadé, was quoted as saying.
“We wanted the experience of drinking Coca-Cola No Sugar to be as close as possible to ‘the real thing’. That’s no small task when you consider the original has been cherished by consumers for more than a century.”
Analysis: ‘a bold move’
This is potentially a bold move from Coca-Cola in Australia. We know that the company places enormous emphasis on the harmony of its brand portfolio. That’s why, given consumer confusion around the differences between Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Coca-Cola Life, it invested heavily in a one-brand campaign that brought all of the core range together in its adverts. But clearly that wasn’t enough; having rolled out the new packaging for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar last April, it is now abandoning the brand completely and launching Coca-Cola No Sugar. It’s a subtle change, but one that – coupled with the new packaging design – it presumably thinks will win over consumers.
Soda sales are continuing to slump: last year, they reached a 30-year low in the US and have fallen consistently in Australia for a decade. Both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo posted declines in their diet soda portfolios in 2016. For several years now, consumers have taken note of the level of sugar in food and drink products, with fat shrugging off its reputation as public enemy number one. That label has switched to sugar instead. And, with almost two-thirds of Australians overweight or obese, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the pressure is falling on manufacturers to reformulate and repackage.
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