Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [12]
When the company’s marketing department finally toted up the results, Pepsi executives were pleased, if slightly perplexed. More than half of the volunteers claimed to prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coke. Hallelujah, right? So by all accounts, Pepsi should be trouncing Coke all across the world. But it wasn’t. It made no sense.
In his 2005 best-seller, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell offers a partial interpretation. The Pepsi Challenge was a “Sip Test,” or what’s known in the soda industry as a “Central Location Test,” or CLT. He cites a former Pepsi new-product development executive, Carol Dollard, who explains the difference between taking a sip of a soft drink out of a cup and downing the entire can. In a sip test, people tend to like the sweeter product—in this case Pepsi—but when they drink an entire can of the stuff, there always lurks the possibility of blood sugar–overkill. That, according to Gladwell, is why Pepsi prevailed in the taste test, but Coke continued to lead the market.10
But in 2003, Dr. Read Montague, the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, decided to probe the test results more deeply. Twenty-eight years after the original Pepsi Challenge, he revised the study, this time using fMRI to measure the brains of his sixty-seven study subjects. First, he asked the volunteers whether they preferred Coke, Pepsi, or had no preference whatsoever. The results matched the findings of the original experiment almost exactly; more than half of the test subjects reported a marked preference for Pepsi. Their brains did, too. While taking a sip of Pepsi, this entirely new set of volunteers registered a flurry of activity in the ventral putamen, a region of the brain that’s stimulated when we find tastes appealing.
Interesting, but not all that dramatic—until a fascinating finding showed up in the second stage of the experiment.
This time around, Dr. Montague decided to let the test subjects know whether they were sampling Pepsi or Coke before they tasted it. The result: 75 percent of the respondents claimed to prefer Coke. What’s more, Montague also observed a change in the location of their brain activity. In addition to the ventral putamen, blood flows were now registering in the medial prefrontal cortex, a portion of the brain responsible, among other duties, for higher thinking and discernment. All this indicated to Dr. Montague that two areas in the brain were engaged in a mute tug-of-war between rational and emotional thinking. And during that mini-second of grappling and indecision, the emotions rose up like mutinous soldiers to override respondents’ rational preference for Pepsi. And that’s the moment Coke won.11
All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola—its history, logo, color, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand—beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally—think Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters—will win every single time.
That Dr. Montague’s study had proven a conclusive scientific link between branding and the brain took the scientific community by surprise…and you can bet advertisers began paying attention, too. A newborn but intriguing