Coke needed to hide the change in the recipe.  REAL coke used sugar.
Around '83 - '85 sugar prices were going through the roof.  While the
flavor of coke with sugar is close to the flavor of coke with cheaper corn
syrup, it is not exact.  Consumers would have noticed the difference and
screamed bloody murder.  Coke hid the difference by switching to the the
pepsi flavor of new coke.  Then they let us suffer for about 6 to 12 months
depending on what market you lived in.  Enter the Corn Syrup recipe now
known as "Classic Coke", convienently not "Coke" .  Not quite Coke but hey,
much better than the pepsi they were selling us.  I live around Detroit,
Michigan, I went to Windsor, Canada, and bought a case of bottles that read
'Original Formula' not 'original taste' or 'original flavor'.  And the
Original Formula lists SUGAR on the bottle, as did the bottles of REAL COKE
that I still had then.  I do not think coke seriously concidered staying
with new coke, it was to far from real coke.

I doubt anyone at cocacola will confirm this.

While we are the subject of using the customer.  Do you remember when
Cocacola introduced the plastic bottle?
20 oz in plastic for less cost than 16.9 oz in glass ????  Hmmmmm. 'hey I
get more coke for less money'
Then Cocacola says 'well the demographics so the consumer prefers the
plastic bottle over the glass, lets stop selling it the glass bottles'.
Then when there was no choice they raised the price of the plastic higher
then what the glass bottles were.