The Economy is not OK (Soda)

"There is no great secret to OKness"

The problem with the economy is that it is not OK.  What is an OK economy like?  Well, a long time ago, in 1993 to be precise, there was a time when the economy was OK.  It was so OK that people tried to drink OK.  What I'm talking about is OK Soda, probably one of the worst ideas for a product ever.

Back in 1993, The Coca Cola Company decided it was going to become the official company of Gen X, and came up with the idea of trying to sell what you get when you mix up all the soft drinks in the 7-11 machine into one drink, because that's what the kids do. They spent a lot of money on this, and a lot on market research, and what they discovered from this was that people don't really like people from the marketing department.  It also appears from this interview that the marketing department discovered that they didn't like people right back...

A large part of the audience- potential audience for the product is - I hate to say this - but it's- they're already sort of already truly wasted. I mean, their lethargy probably can't be penetrated by any commercial message.

... So they decided that what they needed was more advertising.  Rather than make the cola they were going to sell any good, Coke decided to put everything on an advertising campaign, and what they were going to advertise was their advertising's dislike of advertising.  The cans came with a 1-800 number you could call to listen to people's paid actors' sarcasm about OK Soda, and leave sarcastic messages yourself.  They even purposely described OK Soda as fairly awful, and advertised the heck out of it, as such.  Coke thought the youth would identify with this as Coke decided the youth were fairly awful as well...

The OK campaign was fine-tuned during a year of field study that confirmed Coke's impression that the current crop of teens suffer, along with their twentysomething elders, from an acute sense of diminished expectations. Like many other researchers, Coke saw that teens were concerned about violence, aids and getting jobs, all of which heightened their typical adolescent anxieties. "Economic prosperity is less available than it was for their parents. Even traditional rites of passage, such as sex, are fraught with life-or-death consequences," says Lanahan
     -Time Magazine from 1994

Wait a minute, no, this is economic prosperity.  '93 was when America was coming out of recession, there was the peace dividend, the tech boom was getting under way, and NAFTA was about to be signed.  And if there was any doubt, you could tell the economy was OK because the economy was making OK Soda. 

Let me just point out that when Coca Cola is putting money into selling soda based over the angst of the possibility of catching the HIV, investors are not lacking confidence.  There are many investments better than aids Cola.  There are many many investments better than aids Cola.  If investors are so keen on investing that they invest in aids Cola, think of all the better ideas they presumably invested in first. 

Economic growth requires successful new technologies and products, and the willingness to invest in them.  OK Soda wasn't one, but successful innovation comes with a lot of failure, and OK Soda was an awful lot of failure.  The point is that the Coca Cola company was really trying and a lot of other companies were too, and that included trying ideas like Pixar and Walmart, which were much better ideas.

Right now, companies are sitting on cash, investors aren't taking enough risk, and there aren't enough innovations.  If there were more dumb ideas, that would probably mean there were more ideas, and that would mean there were more successful ideas.  OK Soda is also evidence of another part of an OK economy, competition.  Although Coke was already the dominant cola maker, there's a strong competitor, Pepsi Co, which keeps Coke innovating and keeps Coke from charging whatever it wants.  Under-investment isn't just bad in itself, it's a sign that there isn't enough of this, and cause.

But the most OK thing about OK Soda is there isn't any OK Soda anymore.  It was a terrible product and, like terrible products should, it was discontinued.  It was not deemed structural integral to our economy and bailed out. Coke made a bad investment, Coke lost money, and that's OK. 

When you look back on it, OK Soda was actually kind of sweet.  Corporate America decided that what kids needed was a hug in the form of slogans like "Please wake up every morning knowing that things are going to be OK" on the back of their soda cans.  And, to be fair to Coke, not all products are unpopular or unprofitable just because they are cynical and dumb, like Coke's other 90's invention, Dasani brand bottled municipal water.  OK Soda's better.  Also, I drink an awful lot of Coca Cola, so either their thinking isn't bad or at least it's better than mine.

We really really need to get back to the OK Economy.  Don't take my word for it..

OK Soda emphatically rejects anything that is not OK, and fully supports anything that is.
     -Article II of the OK Soda Manifesto, The Coca Cola Company

PS- Here's the OK Soda Personality Inventory.