Emotions in Marketing

The famous Coke v/s Pepsi story

While making a buying decision, we tend to be extremely calculative in our mind as we think about factors such as cost, quality of product etc. But is it possible that along with these calculative factors, our buying decisions get significantly influenced by our emotions? The answer is a straight yes. In fact, if you ask me, I would place emotional factors above the calculative factors, without any doubt. In order to understand this better, let’s go back to 1975 when Pepsi had launched one of the biggest marketing campaigns till date, called “The Pepsi Challenge”.

Coke was dominating the soft-drink market when this campaign by Pepsi was launched. The idea of this campaign was a blind taste test between Coke and Pepsi. As par of this, people were asked to take a sip of both the drinks without knowing which one they are tasting and then give their judgement as to which taste they preferred. Despite clear-cut dominance by Coke in the market, the results of this campaign stunned everyone as Pepsi came out to be the winner of this campaign. A very legitimate explanation for this was that Pepsi was sweeter than Coke, and when you are to take just a sip and give a decision, there are huge chances that you will end up preferring what’s sweeter over anything else.

This slowly went on to become one of the most discussed topics. The effect of this campaign was so strong the Coca-Cola company decided to respond to this by modifying their formula and making it sweeter, basically being more like Pepsi.

But was it really a marketing blunder? Let’s understand the consequences of this a little more in order to come to a conclusion.

The people did not like this decision of Coke changing its formula as they thought that they were being forced to give up the taste, which many considered to be sacred. There were protests on the streets and around 400,000 people wrote letters demanding the old Coke to come back. Due to this Coca-Cola decided to keep two kinds of Coke in the market, the New Coke and the Coke Classic (the older one).

As a result, the conversations changed from Pepsi vs Coke to New Coke vs Coke Classic. Pepsi could not ride upon the momentum it gained due to “The Pepsi Challenge” and I personally feel that Coke got even more stronger as people got an experience of what it was like to be kept away from the Coke Classic.

Now tell me something, even after Pepsi winning the blind taste test challenge and getting traction it always wanted to get, why did people want to go back to Coke? The dominance of the Coke was shattered as a result of this campaign and yet, people needed a reason to go back to Coke because of their emotional connect with the brand. The people saw their childhood memories through Coca-Cola — its history, color, design & fragrance. The inarguable and strong emotional Coke-ness of the brand beat their rational preference for the taste of Pepsi.

At the end of the day, we are all emotional fools here, aren’t we? How much ever we prevent them, the emotions find a way in influencing our decisions in one way or the other. Owing to this very reason, a brand that engages the public emotionally is going to win every time, without any doubt.

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