7/29/2019 Pepsi vs Coke Survey

1/2

A Comparison of Pepsi to Coke Drinkers AmongCollege Students

Robert Donham, Tori Nelson

Background InformationDuring the past couple of decades the drink of choice among college students hasundoubtedly been cola drinks. For many years Coca Cola has been the cola giant but inthe past ten years or so Pepsi Cola has made a challenge to the throne. This greatadvance by Pepsi is mostly attributed to their huge marketing program that has beenimplemented over the past 10 years or so. Our survey took random samples of male andfemale college students who prefer Pepsi to Coke. This experiment will test ourhypothesis that more men prefer Pepsi to women that prefer Pepsi because the marketingthat Pepsi has pushed is more focused on a young male crowd.

MethodsTwo surveyors were used to randomly select college students and record their preferenceson Pepsi and Coke as well as their correlating sex. Sixty-two students were surveyed andthose who did not like either were omitted. This left us with fifty-three students whoparticipated in our survey.

AnalysesThe descriptive statistics that we did in our study included the proportions of males wholike Pepsi, the proportion of males who like Coke, the proportion of females who likePepsi, the proportion of females who like Coke, and the proportion of total students wholike Pepsi and Coke. This was followed by a 95% confidence interval comparing the two

proportions of males who prefer Pepsi to the females who prefer Pepsi.

Results

Table 1: The number of men and women who preferred either Pepsi or Coke.

Sex of student Liked Pepsi Liked Coke Total

Male =28 17 11 28

Female=25 14 11 25

7/29/2019 Pepsi vs Coke Survey

2/2

Table 2: The Proportionality tests of the Data contained in table 1.Proportion of men whoprefer:

Pepsi.607

Coke.393

Proportion of women whoprefer: .56 .44

Proportion of students whoprefer: .585 .415

95% confidence betweenmen and womenproportions.

(-.1339, .2471)

Table 1 shows the numbers and Descriptive analysis of the people that were polled andtable 2 shows the statistical analysis of the students preference to one drink or the other.Table 2 shows that the proportion of Pepsi drinkers among males is higher than that of

Pepsi drinkers among females, as our hypothesis suggested, but if we look a little closerwe see by the confidence interval test that there is no significant difference between thetwo proportions because it crossed zero.

Discussion

In our initial analysis we said that young men, namely college age males were moreprone to drink Pepsi than young females because Pepsis new marketing scheme to catchup with coke is focused more on a young male crowd. While using beautiful women likeCindy Crawford and Britney spears, and having great male basketball stars like ShaquilONeil to promote their drink Pepsi has done little to bring in the young female crowd.

This did not matter in our example though, there was no significant difference betweenthe two, and so this leads us to some different conclusions. One explanation is thatmaybe the young women of todays generation are also intrigued by the same role modelsand beauty that young men are. Perhaps the preference is an acquired taste that youprefer because that is what you were raised drinking and are now somewhat addicted. Onthe other hand maybe people just prefer the taste of one drink to another, but if this is thecase then why do so many people fail the blind taste tests. Whatever the case may bePepsi has definitely advanced to the top of the cola arena and maybe we should leave themarketing hypotheses to the experts.