The Coca-Cola Company - Fanta

"In a competitive global market like ours, there’s a lot at stake when we’re making a change to our product line up. With Affinnova, we ended up with a much stronger set of concepts than we would have otherwise, and this has significantly impacted how we approach product development."
- Rob Cartwright, 
Senior Research Manager, 
The Coca-Cola Company

Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia. USA
Target Market: UK and France
Optimization and Measurement: Product Refresh
www.fanta.com

Refreshing A Global Brand with New Flavor

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A potential product reformulation required the brand team at Coca-Cola’s Fanta to reposition the soft drink so that it effectively communicated the new flavor and maximized consumer preference in two countries.

CHALLENGE

Coca-Cola is committed to serving consumers what they want to drink, where they want to drink it, across different cultures. In 2010, the company had been developing reformulations of leading brands to meet consumer demand for less sugar and more natural flavor. Coca-Cola’s Fanta brand was exploring how to best message this new formulation in the UK and France, but the attributes they wanted to explore amounted to hundreds of thousands of possible concept configurations. For an established global brand, there was significant risk should the final concept not be spot-on.

SOLUTION

Affinnova’s IDDEA II solution offered a phased approach using evolutionary optimization technology to identify top concepts, followed by measurement of those concepts against each other and several in-market benchmarks — all done directly with Fanta’s target consumer segments. In the optimization phase, the Fanta team honed in on top concepts out of a space of 36 potential concept variants in over 250,000 unique concept configurations. In measurement, top concepts and benchmarks were assessed for attitudes such as believability and product differentiation.

SUCCESS

Four top concepts emerged from the optimization, and the measurement phase showed that messaging from any one of the four top concepts would result in a significant competitive advantage over the market leader. Furthermore, the top concepts also outperformed the company’s best internal concept. The results gave clear answers as to which concepts should be moved to taste validation with consumers, as well as which sub-segments of consumers would more likely prefer each configuration.