The Pepsi Challenge; AKA When Instinct Lets Us Down
Snap judgements. We all make them all the time. It’s how we’ve evolved and survived as a species. We know by instinct when we like or dislike something, whether it’s safe or dangerous, if it feels right or wrong.
That impulse lets us down pretty regularly too. We naturally make mistakes in life and mostly we learn from them. When those impulse decisions let us down the results can be truly catastrophic rather than a “learning experience”. Which leads us conveniently to The Pepsi Challenge.
Way back in 1975 a war was breaking out in the soft drinks market. A young contender was looking to dethrone the king. That upstart was a rival brand of cola to the mighty Coca Cola. There was a problem for the good (?) people at Coke; Pepsi were winning this battle.
Coca Cola had a somewhat chequered history. Outside of a few South American cartels there’s not many companies that threw quite as much cocaine into their product as Coke did that are still in business today. They’d dominated the soft drinks markets for decades and were always at the top of the cola tree. Their (now cocaine free) recipe was a closely guarded secret and those that knew about it had to sign lifelong NDA’s. Then one day, a company with a ‘new’ brand of cola started to make serious inroads into Coke’s profits. That company was Pepsi.
