Barack Obama and the Pepsi Challenge (A sip is not the same as the whole thing)

am thinker ^ | 9/6/12 | p skurkiss

[bestintxas]

Barack Obama reminds me of the New Coke and the Pepsi Challenge as described in Malcolm Gladwell's national bestseller Blink (2005).

This story starts in the 1980s, when Pepsi was making serious inroads in the market for cola soft drinks in spite of the fact that Coke had a far greater distribution presence, spent a $100 million more than Pepsi in advertising, and was a true iconic American brand.

Pepsi capitalized on its up-trend by aggressively running TV commercials pitting Coke and Pepsi in a head-to-head taste test in what was then called the Pepsi Challenge. In it, dedicated Coke drinkers were shown taking a couple of sips of two unmarked cola drinks and asked which one they preferred. By a significant majority, they picked Pepsi over Coke.

Coca-Cola's management couldn't believe these results, which seemed to confirm the current market trend. And so they privately conducted their own taste tests. To their chagrin, they found that over and over, something like 57% of Coke drinkers did indeed prefer Pepsi.

Panic ensued, which prompted a re-design of Coke into New Coke.

Behind the scenes, Coke was reformulated to be more like Pepsi -- that is, sweeter and lighter. As Gladwell writes:

Immediately Coke's market researchers noticed an improvement

[bestintxas]

Excellent analog to what voters are aware of.

[KarlInOhio]

This brings us to politics. In an analogous way, Pepsi is like Obama. In 2008, voters were really only getting a sip of him. Back then, Barack seemed enjoyable, nice, youthful, and even refreshing. And so in that November's taste test, America voted Obama in as president.

Some of us turned the can around and read the ingredient list:

Warning! This product contains Marxism, socialism, fascism, old school Chicago politics, trillions of dollars of debt and arsenic. Michelle added as a bittering agent. Freedom content: 0%.

[Senator_Blutarski]

This appears to be caused by the release of CO2. In the process of becoming stale he has increase the greenhouse gases.

[Blagden Alley]

Or, to quote David Ogilvie from the 60’s:

“Nothing kills a bad product like good advertizing.”

At that time, a number of products were selling at some level by word of mouth and a hotshot manager tried to take them national and advertised them. The bad ones died.