Let's examine the subject of 'Corporate Identity and Branding', which has become popular in our age, by introducing technology and medical devices into the business through two world giants, Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Let's see if there really is a counterpart to what is called a brand.
Pepsi's Challenge
In 1975, Pepsi executives launched an experiment known as 'Pepsi's Challenge', accompanied by an intense advertising campaign. This was a very simple experiment. Pepsi officials set up stands in supermarkets and shopping malls around the world, asking people to taste two easy-to-eat ones that did not have a brand or logo on them, and asked them to choose. As you can imagine, one of these glasses had Coca-Cola and the other had Pepsi. If the result came out as Pepsi imagined, it would be a blow to Coca-Cola dominance in the American soft drink industry, which is estimated to total $68 billion.
Company officials were very happy when they received the research results. More than half of the volunteers participating in the test preferred Pepsi. According to the results of this experiment, Pepsi all over the world had to beat Coca-Cola. But the result was not like that. This test made no sense.
A Scientific Eye
In 2003, Dr. Read Montague decided to take this test under an in-depth review. 28 years after the failure of Pepsi's famous Challenge, he repeats this experiment on 67 subjects. But this time, during the experiment, he studied the brain activity of the subjects with an fMRI machine (a magnetic device that can see blood flow in the brain in real time). Activity was observed in the front score, which is the region of the human brain that is stimulated if an attractive taste is taken.
In the first phase of the experiment, the results were the same as 28 years ago.
The Second Phase
In the second phase, things got complicated.
In the second stage, a taste test was conducted even though people knew which brand of cola in which glass. At this stage, 75% of people preferred Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, a shift in people's brain activity was also observed. In addition to the preliminary score, activity was observed in the mid-prefontal cortex, which took over the brain's deep thinking and discriminating tasks.
What does all this mean? Activity in two separate regions in the brain. One is taste and the other is reflection and decision making. A conflict between rational and data and thinking and emotional thinking. This is where Coca-Cola wins.
Brands and Brain
When you start to taste and decide, associations about Coca-Cola (brand, logo, color, advertising campaigns, etc.) take action and make an emotional decision. Because emotions are a means of encoding value elements.
With this scientific connection between branding and the brain, we can clearly see that; people are not rational about purchasing, they are emotional. What you need to do is to surround your brand with a human feeling.
