Get your gray cans of Diet Coke while you can, because soon all the cans are going to be red, changing your life forever and resulting in at least one horrific situation in which one takes a swig of what they assume is delicious chemically-flavored diet soda only to be assaulted by its full-sugar sibling. There’s only one reaction to this and it’s :( :( :(.
So why is your Coke suddenly changing color? According to BuzzFeed, it’s due to a new strategy that seeks to unify all coke products into one visual identity (which sounds like the most 2016 marketing line ever written). And since red’s always been Coke’s color, they’ve decided to transform the cans you know and love into new and exciting entities. Testing begins in Mexico this May and, based on how things go, the U.S. should expect their Cokes to change color sometime next year.
Original Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Coke, and stevia-sweetened Coca-Cola Life now will all have a prominent red disc on their labels — a color that many have learned to associate with full-sugar Coke. The colors previously used to mark the other variants (black, silver, and green, respectively) will now appear only as secondary border colors.
The company’s hope is that this will not only make Coke more popular (Diet Coke suffered a more than five percent drop in sales last year, which is a @#$*@ travesty), but somehow provide consumers with “more choices,” although they’re not adding any new lines. Perhaps the idea is that if it’s all red, you might try something different? I probably wouldn’t–I drink Diet Coke for the taste/the fact that I’m clumsy and it doesn’t stick when spilled–but maybe there are people out there who just needed a new color to be convinced to try Coke Zero or Coke Life (which is sweetened by Stevia).
No word on whether Diet Coke will be completely replaced by the name Coca-Cola Light (which it’s apparently already known by), but in a world where Crystal Pepsi can make a comeback and McDonald’s offers unlimited fries, anything is possible.
