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The One-Year-After Test – Is this the ultimate method of evaluation?

Those with long memories may remember something called The Pepsi Challenge. Effectively this was a blind test to see whether consumers preferred the taste of traditional Coca-Cola or the fiercely competitive upstart – Pepsi Cola.

So damaging was this to Coca Cola that on the strength of overwhelming evidence that Pepsi was preferred, they abandoned their secret but ageing formula and launched New Coke as a direct rival to the Pepsi product. What happened then is now part of marketing folklore. Coca Cola’s customers didn’t like the new taste and forced the Company to reintroduce it as Classic Cola!

The point of this story is that Coca Cola discovered the difference between short-term and long-term evaluation. The Pepsi Challenge was a sip test. This means you took a small sip of each drink and pronounced upon it; unsurprisingly people opted for the sweeter-tasting drink. But if you gave the same customer a dozen cans to drink over a weekend, the results were very different, and the traditional Coca Cola was preferred. Yet they gambled the whole Company on the short-term assessment.

 

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