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We are a B2B operation rather than a B2C business but we often get involved in issues that drift over the line a little. What often puzzles us as reputational marketeers is how often loyal B2C customers are treated like laboratory rats. Something works well enough but, for some unfathomable reason, somebody has to change it …

This posting from one of our team is presented as an example of the type of unhappiness that will increasingly be expressed in public as the new social media allows the ‘loyal’ consumer a platform for their frustration. We decided not to name-and-shame: others will not be so considerate.

Last Thursday, I opened the first of six cartons of our regular brand of soya milk  with the new carton design offering the prospect of the ‘best taste ever’.  That should have been a warning, but it was lost to me in our weekly mountain of assorted groceries.

For the first time in years I was prompted to look at the ingredients and nutritional information on the carton.  This was more of a twenty-first century consumer reflex action than a serious attempt at understanding.

I hadn’t committed the previous ingredients and nutritional information to memory. Neither am I in the habit of keeping spent cartons of milk. The bin men had just been and gone. So I didn’t have anything to compare the new formula with.

But I do remember being impressed when we settled on this brand years ago that it was free enough of ‘bad’ additives. I believe in moderation in all things, including E-numbers, so ‘free enough’ was fine. 

I was sure it had added calcium and maybe a few vitamins and a bit of sugar to mimic the natural sweetness of milk. It might have been fruit sugar at that.  The important thing was that we liked it.

But I didn’t much like this new-and-improved version.

What gave the new stuff a gravy-like texture and a taste closer to evaporated milk than fresh milk? Maybe it was maltodextrin, a starchy gluten-free glucose syrup that can be made of a natural carbohydrate like potato, corn or wheat.

Was it there before? I didn’t know what colour maltodextrin is – or even if it really was the offending ingredient. But the ‘new’ formulation was also yellower, so something is also giving it that new hue that Dulux might call ‘buttermilk’.

Just to be sure it wasn’t just me being an old fogey set in her ways, I got my son (18) and daughter (14) to have a taste.  They didn’t like it any more than I did. I was annoyed and wanted to get to the bottom of it so next morning I called them up.

The thicker texture and colour, I was told, is because they had decided to use the whole soya bean instead of protein extracts to enhance the nutrient content.  They tested the new formula not only on existing consumers, but also consumers of competitive brands and people who don’t drink soya milk.  This motley crew apparently gave the new formula the thumbs up. 

But the nice lady I spoke to did admit that they were getting a ‘mixed’ response from people who’d been drinking their soya milk for years – in other words, their loyal following.  It seems our views were not given any more weight than those of the man in the street.

Wearing my marketing hat, I can guess what happened. The whole thing was a technically proficient exercise in gauging the market for a new product line.

But it wasn’t a new product, it was a successful old product that many people bought in quantity on a regular basis.

Do I mind? Yes,  Ido.

In a world beset by uncertainty, one of the things that a brand behind a staple product can offer is permanence.  When you have your corn flakes in the morning, you expect it to be the same as the cornflakes you had yesterday.  Companies should keep that in mind when they decide to innovate.  

Coca Cola made the classic mistake of confusing the laboratory test with public perception in 1985. Let Wikipedia take up the story:

On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola, amid much publicity, attempted to change the formula of the drink with “New Coke”. Follow-up taste tests revealed that most consumers preferred the taste of New Coke to both Coke and Pepsi, but Coca-Cola management was unprepared for the public’s nostalgia for the old drink, leading to a backlash. The company gave in to protests and returned to the old formula under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985

Coke eventually managed to make a virtue of a mistake with Coke Classic. From a cynical sales point of view, of course, I can see why they bothered with Diet Coke, even though there was Tab, but why Coke Zero when they had Caffeine-free Diet Coke?

Again wearing my marketing hat, I know it’s all about claiming market share – spreading different brightly coloured beach towels over as much beach as they can cover.  But a bit of permanence is a good thing that people might just pay good money for. Leave the nasty surprises to the bankers!

Should the soya milk producer in question mind? Probably.

My family and I are obviously just one point of view. Some old users will actually like the new version, and new consumers will be won over.  But they’ve lost a 6-8 carton a week customer, and from what I was told this isn’t an isolated case.  

We’ve already been experimenting with other brands and think we’ve found a new one we can settle on … until some clever product development manager, aided and abetted by his marketing colleagues, decides to ignore their core customers yet again.