Photo: DeusXFlorida
Coke has a new ad that declares that only two people know Coke’s secret formula, and if something happened to one of them, the formula would be lost forever. It then goes on to talk, facetiously, about all the terrible things that would happen to the world if something bad happened to one of the two men and the formula was lost forever.
Perhaps I’m just losing my sense of humor, but every time I see the ad I get aggravated.
First, and this is not so important; if two people know the formula, then if something happened to one of them, the formula would not be lost. So what they don’t say, but must mean, is that there are two people who each know half the formula, and nobody who knows the whole formula.
More fundamentally, there is no way in the world that only two people know Coke’s secret formula. If that were really the case, then the shareholders should be filing suit against management. Are firms allowed to just blatantly lie in their advertising? Not that it matters, but I find it strange that a firm would knowingly say something like this when it is completely untrue.
Steven Levitt is co-author of "Freakonomics", and a regular contributor to the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times.
Earthquake, tsunami,
>> I find it strange that a firm would knowingly say something like this when it is completely untrue.<<
ReplyDeleteSooooooooooo naive, Steve.