Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

FOREWORD: CHALLENGING COCA-COLA Imagine that you are sitting in the boardroom of a major global drinks company, charged with producing a new product that will rival the position of Coca-Cola as the world’s second most popular cold non-alcoholic drink.fn1 What do you say? How would you respond? Well, the first thing I would say, unless I were in a particularly mischievous mood, is something like this: ‘We need to produce a drink that tastes nicer than Coke, that costs less than Coke, and that comes in a really big bottle so people get great value for money.’ What I’m fairly sure nobody would say is this: ‘Hey, let’s try marketing a really expensive drink, that comes in a tiny can … and that tastes kind of disgusting.’ Yet that is exactly what one company did. And by doing so they launched a soft drinks brand that would indeed go on to be a worthy rival to Coca-Cola: that drink was Red Bull. When I say that Red Bull ‘tastes kind of disgusting’, this is not a subjective opinion.fn2 No, that was the opinion of a wide cross-section of the public. Before Red Bull launched outside of Thailand, where it had originated, it’s widely rumoured that the licensee approached a research agency to see what the international consumer reaction would be to the drink’s taste; the agency, a specialist in researching the flavouring of carbonated drinks, had never seen a worse reaction to any proposed new product. Normally in consumer trials of new drinks, unenthusiastic respondents might phrase ...