big advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a
citrusy flavor burst, unlike the more raisiny-vanilla taste of
Coke. But that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an
entire can, and that is another reason Coke suffered by
comparison. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip
test. Does this mean that the Pepsi Challenge was a fraud? Not
at all. It just means that we have two different reactions to
colas. We have one reaction after taking a sip, and we have
another reaction after drinking a whole can. In order to make
sense of people’s cola judgments, we need to first decide which
of those two reactions most interests us.
Then there’s the issue of what is called sensation
transference. This is a concept coined by one of the great
figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man named Louis
Cheskin, who was born in Ukraine at the turn of the century
and immigrated to the United States as a child. Cheskin was
convinced that when people give an assessment of something
they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without
realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they
have about the packaging of the product to the product itself.
To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don’t
make a distinction — on an unconscious level — between the