The early 1980s were an anxiety-inducing age for administrators and stakeholders of the Coca Cola Company. The old and venerated Coke was steadily, but surely, losing its sales to Pepsi despite the fact that Coke spent a colossal sum on marketing and was actually more widely available. This was the genesis of the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. Religious Coke consumers were asked to sip from two glasses, one marked Q, the other M. At that point, 57% would claim that they preferred M and to Coke’s utter dismay, M would turn out to be Pepsi.
Such an edge, in favour of Pepsi was reason enough for Coke to start fretting about the future of their product and so, they decided to modify their fabled, patent ‘secret formula’, rumoured to be unchanged since the company’s inception. This revolutionary ‘New Coke’ was sweeter, now mirroring the taste of Pepsi. September 1984 was the fateful date the New Coke was brought into play in the ‘Pepsi Challenge’. To the management’s delectation, Coke emerged victorious with a thumping 8% edge over Pepsi. The then CEO of Coca Cola proudly declared the launch of the New Coke, referring to this as “the surest move the company’s ever made”.
He could not have been more wrong as history bore witness to the swift and unmitigated capsizing of the New Coke in the market. Coca Cola drinkers rose in protest to the New Coke and seeing no other alternative, the company had to bring back their old recipe. Should you find yourself confused by the outcome, you needn’t worry. The logic here was sound. The consumers were asked their preferences in the plainest, most straightforward manner and there was indeed damning evidence that Pepsi (and later, New Coke) was favoured, then just why did the New Coke fail so fabulously?
The hiccup here was the Pepsi Challenge itself. Recall that earlier, consumers were asked to take only a sip of both the beverages. Researcher Carol Dollard provides an explanation to this, “If you only test in a sip test, consumers will like sweeter products.” Truth is, when it comes to drinking the whole can or bottle, such a sweet taste actually becomes quite nauseating. To put it bluntly, Pepsi’s inherent constitution was such that it would thrive in a sip test. The sip test merely narrowed the window for decision making, thus, forcing the consumers to make a ‘thin-slice’ decision.
Have you ever encountered a problem and somehow (you don’t really know how), the answer suddenly popped up in your head, without you having consciously thought about it? Consider that metaphorically, the problem, with all its intricacies, is a ‘pie’, and your brain, a knife. It cuts up only that sliver of the pie it believes is relevant and then computes an answer given that thin slice. More often than not, the solution thus obtained turns out to be correct. We normally just chalk up such an incident as ‘a gut feeling’. But, this is actually a highly researched topic in the field of consumer psychology. All this heavy duty computation that involves comprehending a problem, breaking it down and understanding its key elements, analysing those elements to reach a conclusion, happens incognito within your unconscious. This is what researchers’ term as ‘thin-slicing’.
Believe it or not, we, employ this method to make judgements on an almost daily basis. In fact, this whole process is so mundane that we hardly take notice of it anymore. All humans (and thus all consumers by extension) are old hands at thin slicing. Let’s consider the World Wide Web - an element of our daily lives that we are heavily exposed to and reliant on. Research by Powell and Thompson shows that consumers form evaluative judgments about a website’s usefulness, effectiveness and trustworthiness in a matter of mere seconds after their exposure to the website. This evaluation is not only on point, but also a general response that was observed among 80% of the test subjects.
In a matter of a few seconds, the unconscious brain decides what aspects of the website are key to analysing it, does the analysis and supplies the consciousness with an accurate overview of the website. What’s even more astounding is that this doesn’t even involve any sort of interpersonal interaction! And this is just one of the gazillion occasions when consumers employ thin-slicing methods to make evaluations of products.
The initial impression that one has of the study pertaining to thin-slicing, is that it leads to ‘emotional or irrational’ decisions. But there is enough academic evidence to prove that it is prudent! It is thinking – thinking at much quicker pace that happens covertly within that segment of the brain which is shrouded in mystery for now, as opposed to the conscious, deliberate sort of analysing that we normally term as ‘thinking’.
Consumer psychology is an ever-shifting arena and we have no possible way of keeping track of what influences the changes occurring within it. But, by understanding how consumers make a majority of their decisions, one can come very close to understanding their purchases and thus predicting their response to a given product. And thin-slicing research is the first bold step in this direction.
To quote Malcolm Gladwell, “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”
Krisha Gandhi
REFERENCES
1. Blink – The power of thinking without thinking – Malcolm Gladwell
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