Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

i’d like to buy the world a coke, but i’m stuck for which of the fouteen varieties of coca cola on the market today.

fourteen.

somehow, i knew there were a bunch, since they’ve been trying all the combinatorics – adding lemon or vanilla, taking out sugar or caffiene. but i had no idea they’d already exceeded the number they could potentially cram into a “all the cokes variety 12-pack”. maybe a special-edition 14-pack…

the list, from coke’s website includes the following:

Coca-Cola (Coke Classic)
Coke II (C2)
cherry Coke
vanilla Coke
Coca Cola with lime
Coca Cola Zero

Diet Coke
Diet Coke with Lemon
Diet Coke with lime
diet vanilla Coke
Diet Coke Sweetened with Splenda
diet cherry Coke

caffeine free Coca-Cola
caffeine free Coke II (C2)
caffeine free Diet Coke

i wonder… where’s “new coke”?

anyhoo, i started thinking on this topic when my parents came home from the store with caffeine free coke classic, which i never knew existed. neither did my mother, who picked up the case of coke, thinking it was her usual caffeine free diet coke based on the nearly identical packaging.

i wanted to find photos of the two to compare side by side, and discovered that there were fourteen varieties of coke.

the multi-gazillion-dollar marketing and branding behemoth, though, doesn’t seem to have a very consistent or compelling web presence. their product shots are all over the place in size, staging, orientation, etc. compare this, for example, to apple’s press resources. i’d compare coke to pepsi’s site, but pepsi’s site doesn’t seem to have press resources like decent product shots. oh well.

here’s the lineup, minus caffeine free coke 2, which i don’t think is out in the world yet:

growing up in atlanta, i became accustomed to the local way of referring to any kind of carbonated soft drink where, unlike most places where it’s “a pop” or “a soda”, one asked for “a coke” – you then specified what you wanted, from sprite to dr. pepper. now, when i ask for a coke, i have to specify which coke i’m after.

i’m glad to see they’re still ahead of their competition, though. Pepsi only has twelve varieties of pepsi.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 5:58 pm and is filed under random stuff. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.