• Brandweek, Friday, January 30, 2009 11:15 AM

I've never liked the taste of Diet Coke. But when I read Brandweek's headline this morning: -- "Diet Coke Brings Back 'Just for the Taste of It'"-- I can honestly say that I felt some warm and fuzzy synapses firing in my brain right around the medial prefrontal cortex, just like a story I was re-reading yesterday suggested I might.

The 2003 piece by Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine looks at a study that purportedly proved that perceived brand image shapes influence. In short, people preferred the taste of Pepsi in a taste test until they were told which of the samples were Coke. That's when the Mean Joe Greene Effect kicked in.

The "Just for the taste of it" rolled out with the brand's launch in 1982, and it's making its initial return as part of the soft drink's partnership with Heart Truth. Diet Coke and Heidi Klum are taking on women's heart disease in an extensive ad campaign that launched earlier this week, Kenneth Hein reports.

"The tagline still has a lot of equity, not just in that it's great tasting, but also that it's tasteful and sophisticated," says Coke's Susan Stribling. She said future ads would star other arbiters of style and good taste like Klum.

As much as I like the tagline -- and can hear the jingle in the recesses of some other part of my brain (Brits voted it the "catchiest advertising jingle," after all) -- I can't say I'm tempted to even hold a can of the stuff, no less drink it. Maybe I just have an affinity for 1982, when I was still in short pants .

Read the whole story at Brandweek »