Abstract

"'Let Your Taste Decide:' The Pepsi Challenge, Choice Experiments and the Making of a Neoclassical Self"

Eli Cook, University of Haifa (elicook@gmail.com)

This paper uses the Pepsi Challenge as a window into the rise of consumer choice experiments and the broader ideological shift toward consumer sovereignty in the late twentieth century. Beginning in Dallas in 1975 and spreading nationwide, the Challenge invited millions of Americans to “let your taste decide.” Behind its cheery slogan lay a deeper story about how marketers, armed with behavioral science and experimental design, became powerful "choice architects" who learned how to shape people’s behavior by constructing carefully curated forms of structured choice.
In removing brand names, the Pepsi Challenge was essentially wiping away society and the pressures, identities, emotions and collective memories that shape taste. When you entered the brandless void of the Challenge, you did so as an isolated individual with no past, relying only on your own seemingly innate and personal taste buds. The campaign taught Americans to see themselves as free, individualist and sovereign choosers whose "true" preferences could be revealed to them only in the controlled confines of a choice experiment. The Pepsi Challenge thus stands as a striking example of how the neoclassical idea of the sovereign consumer was popularized through choice experiments.
Yet what appeared to be a neutral experiment in taste was, in fact, a powerful tool of persuasion that helped construct the very preferences it claimed to objectively measure. As the utter failure of New Coke reveals, the enormous success of the Pepsi Challenge did not lie in the ability of choice experiments to accurately predict what people inherently preferred (Coke ran thousands of taste tests before changing its recipe) but rather in its ability to construct a new, “neoclassical self.” Long before the digital age, the seemingly hackneyed Challenge thus offers us an early glimpse into how corporate choice architects have succeeded in not only shaping our consumer habits, but our very subjectivity. No wonder Steve Jobs hired the architect of the Pepsi Challenge to be Apple's CEO.