A couple of months ago, the Coca-Cola company announced it was dropping quite a few of its niche products, including Tab. You may have reacted the way I did, with surprise that Tab was still being produced in 2020. Introduced in 1963, it was not the first diet soda, but became the best-known. Earlier diet sodas were developed for diabetics, but exposed a market for low-calorie soda for dieters. Coca-Cola decided to dip into that pool, albeit gingerly.
For the name, Coke executives had one directive: Even though its taste was engineered to mimic Coke’s, it couldn’t be called Diet Coke. Because most early diet sodas didn’t taste that great, strategists warned against associating their brands with drinks that might taint their tremendous value.
So an early IBM mainframe computer generated more than 600 candidates with the parameters that the name be three or four letters and not offensive in any foreign language.
Tabb, which was eventually shortened to Tab, eventually won the battle of market testing. Stylized as “TaB,” it was introduced to the world in a series of ads with the tagline “How can just one calorie taste so good?”
Tab became the best-selling diet soda of the 1970s and '80s. Read the story of the diet soda that held on for 57 years, and what killed it, at The Conversation. -via Digg
(Image credit: Jerry "Woody")
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