RC Cola - Why It Failed

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, the joke of the soft drink industry, that is the correct perception, coke and pepsi are the two professional players involved in this intense one on one and rc is the kid who shoots hoops thinking he is part of it, no It's completely wrong, but I think rc deserves a little more admiration. rc is not a kid playing hoops, he is more like a professional player who tore his ACL years ago and has never been the same. Oh, rc is the rose derrick of the

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industry. Do you know what I fear? my metaphor is getting too deep here it will make more sense in a minute the beginning of rc cola takes place in the early 1900s and centers on a very busy guy called claude hatcher he had two jobs he was a qualified pharmacist and at the same time, He was part owner of a wholesale grocery business, the other owner was his father, they started it with two other guys but they were bought out of their shares after just a couple of years, so Claude had a lot going on as a grocery wholesaler. , they were basically the middleman between the manufacturers and the stores, so they made a lot of deals with both ends.

Well, one day Claude was talking to a representative of the Coca-Cola company named Columbus Roberts. The mission that day was to buy a large quantity of Coca-Cola from it and then sell it to the various grocery stores they dealt with, as I'm sure we've all experienced, when you buy a large quantity of something you usually get a discount which is part of what makes this business model work so well for anything. I guess the reason coke was so popular is that this rep didn't budge and wouldn't give Claude any kind of discount for the large amount he was looking to purchase.

The argument became quite heated and in the end he swore that he would never do it. buy anything from coke ever again he said from this moment on he would make his own let's face it this sounds like an empty threat what are you going to do put everything on hold lock yourself in your basement and create your own competing soda that will somehow had a chance against such a ridiculously strong brand I shouldn't laugh because that's exactly what happened. It came up with this formula for a ginger ale that must have been pretty tasty because a lot of people bought them.

It was so successful that after a couple of years. Claude and his father made the decision to abandon their wholesale business in favor of producing this ginger ale full time, which was their business for the next few years and things were going well, but I think there was a very obvious way to continue growing this business and take things to the next level, let me ask you in the soft drink market today or over a hundred years ago which is the best selling product: cola or ginger ale. I hope everyone said queue, but my second question is which is more competitive.

The point here is that cola is where the real money is, but because of that it's more competitive, so they tried it smart, even in 1910 you couldn't compete directly with coke, you had to have an angle, their angle was Offering cherry cola, they called it cherro cola, as far as I know, cherry cola didn't exist yet, I'm sure they didn't officially start selling it until 1985, so I think they found their angle here. Cherro cola soon became their main product and they quickly surpassed it. their ginger ale sales and actually renamed the company over the next decade.

They had some unfortunate problems with sugar. World War I made it expensive and scarce, so they made their own refinery to make sure they had plenty, but soon. After the war sugar prices went down and now they had all this sugar that was almost worthless despite their problems making it, they had no problem selling it, they were starting to be a threat to Coca-Cola so they didn't. HE. how i feel about this and what i can only see as an attempt to hamper competition coca-cola sued cherokola claiming that the names were too similar and that they shouldn't be able to use the word cola in their name since you know that was His Coca-Cola won the lawsuit and in 1923 Cherukola was forced to drop cola from its name.

Now they would just use Cherro and that wasn't good, it's not the name people recognized and it didn't sound the same. The name change caused sales to plummet as they now had trouble manufacturing and selling it, decided it was no longer worth it, and soon discontinued it entirely. I may have given up at this point, so I have to admire the resilience they already had. They built their business around a ginger ale and then around a cola and now they needed a third product to see that level of success and they did it this time with a fruit flavored drink called Knee High which now became the core of their business in the The company's new name got them through the next decade and then things got tough again.

Two main things: the great depression and, unfortunately, the death of Claude Hatcher, who is just the backbone of the founder of the company, the innovative leader, but there is a silver lining to that. who replaced him hillary mott rose to the occasion he was promoted from vice president of sales and figured out which product needed to be discontinued and which ones to keep he began to produce them more efficiently not only did he surpass them but the company was now better than ever and looking to expand It's kind of funny because after everything that happened they found themselves in exactly the same position they were in over 20 years earlier, successfully making a glue-free product, but trying to find their way into that glue market. potentially lucrative in 1934, They tried it again when they introduced the royal crown.

His plan this time was to use all of his knee-deep profits to promote the royal crown. They were the first to do a taste test and would announce the results. Evidently they came back saying that people preferred them. Coca Cola or Pepsi paid for the endorsement of some of the most important celebrities of the time. Their big break came in 1944 when it was ruled that they could now use the word cola, so they did, they changed the name of the soft drink to RC Cola and 15 years later it became the new name of the company, the 1960s were the best decade they ever had and the only time it looked like they had a real chance of catching up with Coke or Pepsi, you know?

It's a diet soda that I would call puny. to today's industry but used to be big, it was introduced by RC Cola in 1962, making it the first mass-produced diet soda. I think we can say that, because of its head start, it was the best-selling diet soda during the 1960s and the fourth best-selling soft drink overall behind Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and RC-Cola, so let's think about Coca-Cola. -Cola and Pepsi are one and two, obviously, but three and four were both RC-Cola and diet sodas were becoming huge, so you can only expect them to grow. In October 1969, it all came to an end when the US government banned the use of the artificial sweetener called cyclamate, which is what was used in diet and basically all diet sodas at the time.

To be clear, I am not a scientist. no way, so don't trust what I say here, but it seems like this was banned under strange circumstances. The main reason was a study that concluded that when administered to rats it causes bladder cancer. That study has been criticized ever since, I guess they gave them ridiculously high doses and there have been studies done since that say it's perfectly fine for humans. Sugar companies may have been involved. The general consensus is that this product appears to be harmless; It is still banned in the US, but is allowed in most of the rest of the world.

The world, including all of Europe again, I don't know, seems incomplete but of course don't trust me when it comes to forming your stance on cyclamate either way, it doesn't matter when it comes to diet, right, the fact is government. banded were no longer able to produce their hit product and even when they tried to alter it using different sweeteners, the public is scared, they don't want anything to do with diet soda right now, not only was that exact product not allowed in the entire industry. indeed it disappeared and they got scared twice now they put too many eggs in one basket and look what happened, they put everything on cheryl cola and then took it away, then they put too much on the right diet and again they took it away completely.

They had a very human response when they decided to diversify, but this was also bad, it was too much diversity, they started acquiring some juice companies, tile companies, like tiles that you install on the floor, picture frames, lamps, Arby's, they bought Arby's, they were no longer a soft drink. company in the 1980s, that part of their business accounted for only about half of their revenue, in my opinion, if you want to catch up with Coca-Cola or Pepsi, the only way you have a chance is if you invest every dollar possible in doing so in market research advertising. product innovation, but now half of their attention was elsewhere and that simply made things impossible.

I think we can say that it was this decision that took them out of the race. Coca-Cola and Pepsi took such a lead that it was just over. I don't see any of that. This point is being too significant in the rivalry between Coca-Cola and RC because let's face it, RC gave up, but here are the highlights of what followed in 1984, after 80 years of existing as their own company, they were acquired by the shady character named Victor Posner. Known for his hostile takeovers and had a reputation for sucking the life out of companies for his personal gain, he cut costs wherever he could and this resulted in rc falling even further if anyone had any hope that they would ever catch up to Coca-Cola in this age. he would have crushed them in 1993, Posner had a whole mess of legal problems that led him to resign from the company that owned RC.

The company was now called tri-arc and the new owners put more attention on the cola, but what can be done at At this point, Triarch bought Snapple and grouped it with rc and a few other drinks and then in 2000 sold them all those drinks to Cadbury Schweppes. They quickly sold the international rc rights to a Canadian company called Cot. There were a few more changes that led to the US. The rights to rc cola are held by dr pepper, so today if you buy it in the US it comes from dr pepper, otherwise it comes from cot.

I think we can agree nowadays, not many people care about rc cola and that's fine, but I feel like it too. it gets a lot of disrespect and i don't agree with that a dr pepper machine yes well now i can taste it it was a mirage an rc cola machine yes coke won the fight anyone would agree with that but i would say yes. Lots of luck along the way in the 1920s. I don't know what happened with that court decision that caused Cerro Cola to change its name, but 20 years later there was a different decision, so I would say Coca-Cola was very lucky to get it. ruling in the first place, could you imagine if RC hadn't had that setback in the 1960s when the government banned cyclamate?

That was a controversial decision that again killed their most promising product and chased them away from the industry. What if that hadn't happened in In the 1980s, the company was hostilely acquired by an owner who ignored the brand. What if that hadn't happened? What if all three hadn't happened? Most of it was bad luck and out of his control. I would say if they had a little better luck we would probably have three main queues today or maybe they would have knocked out one of them, who knows, my point is rc put up a good fight, let's show them some respect, let me know in the comments, do you have a little more respect? for rc cola because that was my mission too, have you ever tried it?

It's been so insignificant for the last 40 50 years that you may have overlooked it finally, so does my Derrick Rose metaphor make a little more sense now? I would like to hear it. what you have to say thanks for watching