Savvier Second Opinion · No. 6
Coca-Cola’s New Font Looks Like Marlboro.
Did Nobody Catch That?
Second Opinion is a regular series from Savvier, the AI platform for marketing teams. Each week we take something in culture, put it through Savvier’s marketing workflows, and share what comes back.
The Situation
Coca-Cola · Global visual identity refresh · July 2026
Earlier this summer, Coca-Cola refreshed its global visual identity. New packaging, new layout, and a new supporting typeface called “Better With”: a bold slab serif that now appears across everything from cans to billboards. Most of the refresh was well received. And then the internet noticed the font.
The “Better With” typeface, printed large in red on white, looks a lot like Marlboro. Within 48 hours the resemblance was the only thing anyone was talking about. Creative Bloq published a side-by-side comparison of the two typefaces. Fortune ran a piece connecting it to the “fridge cigarette” meme that Gen Z had already been using for Diet Coke. Within a week, fan-made mock-ups of Diet Coke cans with Marlboro branding were everywhere.
FIG. 01 · The “Better With” typeface at scale · Source: Brody Associates / Coca-Cola
FIG. 02 · The mock-up that went viral · Source: lorenzolasagn via X
The fonts aren’t identical. But to most people the resemblance is immediate: bold, blocky, red on white.
Which raises a question. A global visual identity refresh at Coca-Cola’s scale goes through layers of review, testing, and approval. These are not the kind of teams that typically miss something like this. Either the resemblance was caught and someone decided it wasn’t close enough to matter, or it somehow got through. Either way, the new font made people think of cigarettes.
We ran the packaging through two Savvier workflows: one to diagnose where the resemblance comes from, and one to find out how different audiences reacted to it.
The Breakdown
Method · Two Savvier workflows
Savvier has 60+ workflows designed by leading marketing experts, and each one works like a recipe for a specific marketing task. We ran two here. Visual Feedback, to diagnose where the Marlboro resemblance comes from. And Brand Perception Analysis, to find out how different audiences reacted to it.
Workflow 01
Visual Feedback
The diagnosis
Visual Feedback takes a piece of work, holds it up against the brand’s own visual identity, and tells you where the gaps are. We gave it the “Better With” typeface and asked one question: where does the Marlboro resemblance come from? The assessment below comes from Savvier’s creative director agent, in their own words.
FIG. 03 · The Better With type specimen · Source: Brody Associates
Priority 01
It’s the letter endings, not the shapes
Take “The two fonts aren’t the same. Different designers, different decades, different intent. But they’re both bold and blocky with flat, heavy endings on every letter, and that’s a specific combination. Plenty of fonts in this family exist that don’t trigger the association. What pushes “Better With” closer to Marlboro is how blunt and squared-off those endings are. The tops of the letters are slightly rounded, which softens it. But the bottoms are where the eye tends to go first, and that seems to be where the resemblance comes from.”
Reco “The resemblance is strongest in the Compressed weight, and it’s strongest when the type is big. Test that weight on its own, at billboard and transit scale, in red on white. If it triggers the association without the Coca-Cola script next to it, that weight shouldn’t appear in those contexts. The script has to be the thing people see first, not the slab serif.”
Priority 02
Scale is the trigger
Take “On a can, it works. The Spencerian script (the cursive Coca-Cola wordmark) is the biggest thing there, the slab serif sits underneath it, and it’s clear what you’re looking at. At billboard scale the relationship flips. The slab serif fills the frame. The script gets small. And now you’re looking at a bold, blocky font, big and red on white, which is how most people have seen Marlboro for as long as they can remember. That’s where it becomes a concern. The font doesn’t just look like Marlboro in the abstract. It looks like Marlboro in the specific context where people are most used to seeing Marlboro: large, on a wall, from a distance.”
Reco “A supporting typeface has to work the same way everywhere. If it reads as Coca-Cola on a can and as Marlboro on a billboard, that suggests the issue is with the typeface itself, not just how it’s being used. Replace it with something that carries the same warmth and weight at every size without looking like someone else’s brand.”
“On a can it works as a food-and-beverage typeface. At billboard scale, in red on white, it looks like a Marlboro ad. A supporting font that communicates something different depending on how big you print it may need rethinking.”
Overall Assessment · Visual Feedback
Workflow 02
Brand Perception Analysis
What people thought
Brand Perception Analysis sources real customer voices from social media, reviews, and forums, then maps how different audiences perceive a brand decision. We ran it on the typeface reaction and asked: who saw Marlboro, who didn’t, and why?
The Over-40 Reaction
“The people in charge of this are clearly under 40”
Consumers over 40 tended to see Marlboro right away and assumed it was a mistake. For this group, the Marlboro typeface was a fixture of billboards, magazine ads, and point-of-sale displays for decades. The association is immediate.
“Any person over 40 realizes that this is the Marlboro font. The people in charge of this are clearly under 40.”
via Unilad
“Coca Cola was the gold standard of branding that leaves a legacy. And then Coca Cola suddenly popped out with Marlboro’s typeface.”
via Yahoo
“Sure, you’ve made mistakes. But did you change Coca-Cola’s brand identity to look like one of the most recognizable cigarette brands ever created?”
via Yahoo
The Under-30 Reaction
“They just leaned into the fact that soda is the new cigarettes”
Younger consumers had a very different reaction. Gen Z had already been calling Diet Coke a “fridge cigarette” as a running joke well before the rebrand. When the font arrived, many of them saw the Marlboro resemblance as deliberate rather than accidental.
“Love that they just leaned into the fact that soda is the new cigarettes by just straight up doing the Marlboro font.”
@driftedtekk via Gizmodo
“Is Coca Cola rebranding like that because we all started calling em fridge cigarettes???”
via Yahoo
“The younger generations been calling zero cal sodas ‘fridge cigs’ for a minute so this actually makes sense.”
via Unilad
“Coca-Cola switching to a Marlboro font lookalike is the most self-aware thing a sugar company has ever done.”
via Creative Bloq
The Key Finding
Same font, two very different reactions, split by age
For the audience Coca-Cola is growing toward, the typeface comes across as self-aware. For the audience that still buys most of the product, it comes across as careless. Over-40s tend to see a mistake. Under-30s tend to see a brand that’s in on the joke. And scale seems to amplify the split: the audience that sees Marlboro is the audience that sees it on billboards. The audience that sees a meme is the audience that sees it on a can in their hand.
FIG. 04 · The new packaging system
The Takeaway
Whether this is a problem depends on who’s looking at it and how big it is. The resemblance gets stronger the larger the typeface appears, and the people most likely to notice are the ones who grew up seeing Marlboro on billboards.
Coca-Cola famously set out to be as ubiquitous as water, and it’s come close. So when you’re Coke, you’re not designing for one audience. You’re designing for all of them, at every size, everywhere. A typeface that works for some of those people at some of those sizes may not be enough.
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