Save Tab Soda is working to change executives’ minds about nixing the original zero-calorie soda
A uniform slab of brutalist concrete, Coca-Cola’s word headquarters soars 29 stories into the sky from Atlanta’s downtown business district.
Even with the omicron variant having scrambled many companies’ plans for employees to return to the office, the roughly 4,200 people employed by Coke can be found in and around this city—living, working and, as often as not, driving on Interstate 85, which bisects Atlanta from north to south.
So if a senior executive for Coke were to be heading toward Coca-Cola Plaza, odds are good he’d be on this road—and potentially in for a big surprise.
If Adam Burbach and his comrades have their way, Coke commuters will soon be cruising past a billboard whose message is aimed squarely at them: Bring back Tab cola. Please.
In case you missed the news during the pandemic’s early, angst-ridden months, Coke announced in October 2020 that it was pulling the plug on Tab after 57 years. Now, the grassroots organization Save Tab Soda is “strategizing around how we can convince Cola-Cola to change their mind,” Burbach said.
Foremost among those strategies is billboard space on I-85, an effort for which the group has already amassed $4,000 via an online fundraiser.
“We’ve been working with a couple of outdoor advertising companies,” Burbach explained. “We want to have different messages, some focused on consumers and some that are focused directly toward Coca-Cola executives.”
The day Tab died
That’s a hard-hearted bunch, in the view of Tab fans. In a statement issued nearly 16 months ago, the company brass explained that Tab (along with similarly doomed brands including Delaware Punch and Northern Neck Ginger Ale) was among “products that are losing relevance and therefore should exit the portfolio.”
The housecleaning, Coke explained, was part of a larger effort to “prioritize category-leading brands with the greatest potential for growth and scale.”
Put another way: It was another bit of portfolio trimming that lots of companies did when Covid first tightened its grip on the supply chain.
Regardless of the times, however, Tab’s death marked the end of an era.
A diet soda pioneer
Coke’s R&D gurus cooked up Tab in 1963 to compete with Royal Crown’s Diet Rite, which had revolutionized the soft-drink category by delivering on a promise previously thought impossible: a cola with no calories. Sweetened with saccharine and sold in an eye-popping magenta can, Tab was a big deal—until Coca-Cola one-upped itself by introducing Diet Coke in 1982.
In the decades to follow, Tab, its sales and distribution steadily slipping, became a kind of ghost brand—rarely spotted by most people but eagerly sought out by believers.
Burbach is one of them. As a child of the 1980s, Burbach tried Tab and, despite its somewhat notorious aftertaste, found that he really liked it. Tab’s availability was always a shaky bet: Distributors held sway over which markets got Tab. So Burbach was accustomed to having to hunt for his favorite drink. But when it disappeared for good, he was bereft.
“I sought out some Facebook groups and saw people in a panic, like, ‘It’s really going away! We’ve got to do something!’” he said.
So Burbach took action. He started by buying the Save Tab Soda domain name. Then, he worked to consolidate Tab’s various Facebook fan groups into what eventually became a nonprofit organization. (To date, Burbach’s group has amassed 4,060 signatures on its petition to resurrect Tab.)
A business case for Tab
As Adweek previously reported, Tab fanatics are nothing new. What sets Save Tab Soda apart from devotees merely making a populist plea is that this group is making a business case.
As Burbach argues, a $268 billion company like Coke needn’t dump money into developing new beverages—especially when it has a proven one already in its stable. (Still, Tab accounted for only 1% of sales volume in the years before its demise.) And at a time when pricey branding consultants preach about the importance of authenticity, Tab has it in spades.
But Burbach’s most cogent argument might be Tab’s value as gauged by the aftermarket.
In the first half of 2020, when finding Tab was nearly impossible for many consumers, Burbach noticed a handful of bottlers selling it on Amazon, where it often fetched staggering prices.
“We think that if Coca-Cola were to look at a different type of distribution model, Amazon direct-to-consumer could take off, especially if there was a little bit of advertising behind it,” he said.
Beloved brands and hard economics
Judging from the language in its October 2020 statement, Coke has clearly decided that its resources are best allocated among a smaller number of brands with higher growth potential. So the real issue may not be whether a new distribution channel and a few advertising dollars can sell Tab—but simply whether there’s a sufficient benefit to selling any of it.
As Gartner VP analyst Chris Ross explained, companies the size of Coke invariably undertake what he calls a “brand rationalization process,” balancing the costs of production against likely returns. In this process—which the pandemic seems to have accelerated—the smaller brands simply lose out.
“It’s just math, right?” Ross said. “What’s the cost to keep that brand going? Because it’s not zero.”
Surviving a ‘candemic’
In theory, Coke could sell Tab to another company and possibly make a few dollars off of it, but there’s not much benefit to putting a brand directly into a competitor’s hands, Ross said.
What’s more, with aluminum cans so hard to come by (“candemic” is the industry term), there’s no guarantee another company would want to buy Tab.
At a time when supply chain issues are putting a strain on manufacturing, Ross concludes, “resources become more precious, [and so] those resources go to the flagship brands. Companies are really focusing on the core [brands] in a lot of cases.”
What’s headquarters say?
It’s not that Coca-Cola has anything against Tab as such. Indeed, at the end of 2020, it hailed the beverage as a trailblazer—and even a martyr.
“If not for Tab, we wouldn’t have Diet Coke or Coke Zero Sugar. Tab did its job,” Diet Coke group director Kerri Kopp said at the time. But “in order to continue to innovate and give consumers the choices they want today, we have to make decisions like this one as part of our portfolio rationalization work.”
Which wouldn’t seem to bode well for Save Tab Cola, whatever the cogency of its arguments.
Even so, it’s hard to tell what Coke brass is thinking of the current effort to resurrect Tab. A company spokesperson told Adweek that “the Coca-Cola Company is aware of the Save Tab group” and its efforts.
She added: “We appreciate the passionate legion of Tab lovers who have reached out and embraced the brand for nearly six decades.”
But that’s about all Coke is saying. For now.
At least until that billboard goes up.
