Coke and Pepsi

So I recently finished "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell. Great book. I highly recommend it. I am going to read his other book "Tipping Point" soon hopefully.

I won't go into to much detail about the book, mainly because I won't do it justice. I do want to talk about one of the stories he uses to develop his argument.

The story highlights the battle between Coca Cola and Pepsi. Historically, Coke had always been the Cola of choice. However, in 1985, Pepsi began closing the gap. Specifically, Pepsi was performing very well in "blind taste tests". Naturally, management at Coke freaked out and developed a strategy to respond, which led to the reformulated "New Coke", which was . New Coke performed much better than its predecessor in blind taste tests against Pepsi.

Although New Coke performed better in Blind Taste Tests, it did not experience the same success upon its commercial release. In fact it was a complete failure. Little was sold, and Coca Cola Classic remained the "Coke" of choice.

Coke management eventually arrived at the painful conclusion that although Pepsi was better in a Blind Taste Test, consumers didn't necessarily prefer Pepsi after they finished a whole can of it. Pepsi tasted better during the first sip, since it was more sweet and sugary, but that was to intense for most people to drink a whole can and still prefer it over Coke.

And this is where I think this theory can apply to many things. Being involved in leadership at my church, developing strategies for bringing people into community is very interesting to me. I think it is easy to become overly concerned with performing well in Blind Taste Test's. If we become to overly concerned with performing well on the first sip, we risk losing out on people who are looking to drink over and over, but can't stomach the whole can.

I am not sure what this looks like implemented in the church setting, but I think it starts by trying to avoid focusing on making things sugary and sweet to bring a lot of people in for just a quick sip. Rather, a long term approach should be the focus, where the first sip represents a part of the experience, not the whole experience, with intentions of developing a community that satisfies people in the beginning, middle, and end of the experience.