Last week, Coke announced that it’s cutting a bunch of different products, one of the most significant being Tab diet soda. In honor of the soda I have never once sipped, here’s how Tab got to this point:
What Tab got right: Tab got its moniker the same way Elon Musk and Grimes’s baby probably did. After Coca-Cola’s 1963 market research found consumers preferred shorter brand names, Coke programmed its IBM computer to print all possible three- or four-letter word combinations using vowel sounds. Tab was chosen from 300,000 results, per Ad Age.
What Tab got wrong:
- The brand’s core messaging was based on making women anxious about staying thin for their men as the Vietnam war raged on.
- That messaging worked for postwar America’s dieting, mostly female consumers. But by the ’90s, when Tab released a clear version of the product to little success, it had clearly fallen flat.
My takeaway: It can be hard to know when the right time for a loud rebrand is—but Tab’s ultimate demise proves that treading water for decades isn’t a viable plan.
