RobertR
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Dec 19, 1998
- Messages
- 10,675
Here's some food for thought (pun intended): Most people seem to have a preference between Oreo's and Hydrox, and (among the peanut butter lovers) between Skippy and Jif. To my knowledge, there is no raging debate as to whether discernable differences between these products actually exist, and no one seems to have proposed that any such difference is just a massive marketing ploy. Yet, I wonder how many people could distingish correctly 24 out of 24 times. My guess is that one would get confused on at least some of the trials, and make a mistake. (Let's assume one could efectively wash one's mouth out betwen trials.)Interesting analogy, Larry. I think it points out the difference between how cookies, peanut butter, and high end stereo components are marketed.
Imagine some company comes out with a new “gourmet chocolate wafer-with-filling cookie”. This cookie is claimed to have all sorts of fantabulous taste qualities, qualities that are said to set it FAR above a mere Oreo or Hydrox. The magazine ads for this cookie are a model of glossy beckoning, clearly associating its buyers with good taste and refinement. There are even magazines devoted to describing cookie differences, and the writers for those magazines are very good at writing page after page of glorious prose, describing the subjective differences between cookies. Naturally, such a glorious tasting cookie doesn’t come cheap. You want the best, you gotta pay for the best, well above what you pay for an “ordinary” cookie.
But there’s a problem. Someone has gone to the trouble of chemically analyzing these gourmet cookies, and found very small differences between them and “ordinary” cookies. Furthermore, double blind taste tests are conducted, and people can’t reliably distinguish them from an Oreo. The gourmet cookie writers immediately denounce these results, claiming that “mere science” can’t explain the taste of a cookie, science is sometimes wrong, tasting cookies under test condition is too “stressful”, tasting the difference takes a long time, etc.
Now the analogy is more accurate