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Comment by msg | Hacker News Reader

Read Dan Ariely's chapter 1 in Predictably Irrational. It is about relativity and the decoy effect. If you have a choice between A and B, then adding a third choice that looks like a defective version of A (the decoy) tends to nudge people to pick A over B.

As he explains it, choosing between two options in a vacuum is hard. You have to list pros and cons and weigh them carefully. We prefer to create yardsticks and say "better" and "worse". When you add the defective option you create a no-brainer yardstick in the mind of the chooser.

Doesn't this sound suspiciously like New Coke? I don't believe that the marketers didn't know this stuff, or that they were caught by surprise by what played out next.

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I dunno. I was under the impression that New Coke was an unmitigated disaster. Coca-Cola Classic (then just "Coca-Cola") was already the dominant soda when it was introduced, and I don't think they picked up any market share in the months/years after the introduction of New Coke. But they did spend a ton of advertising money on the new soda which failed spectacularly.

New Coke was fantastic for Coca-Cola. Coke was on the decline while Pepsi was on the rise. New Coke was an attempt to reinvigorate the brand and get people drinking more Coke again. It succeeded accidentally, as people decided they liked Coke as it had been, leading to a resurgence of sales.

Snopes thinks New Coke was beneficial to Coke, though purely accidentally:

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp

Actually reminds me more of trying to split the vote in politics (or maybe just The Wire)

But I get your point on the decoy. Although that's an awful big game to play with a few months worth of Coke sales if they knew it in advance.

I've read recently that it was cover for the switch from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup as a sweetener - when they switched "back" to HFCS, most people never noticed they hadn't actually switched back to the same thing. It's plausible, but as I'm not sure of the timing (I never looked at ingredients back then) I don't know if it's true.

Debunked by Snopes. Coca-Cola already had HFCS five years before New Coke. Here's the link, and also follow the "Cokelore" link at the top for the whole category.

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp

Man, I shoulda known better than to lend credence to that. This is what comes of failing to examine one's assumptions.

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