Coke Banks on Consumer Ignorance

Let me preface this by saying I'm a Coke fan. I've sacrificed more than my fair share of healthy teeth to my favorite drink. But today I saw something that I hadn't noticed before. In the "cold drink" machine at the radio studio I noticed that the one time 20 ounce coke is called the .5 liter coke.

.5 liter. It sounds big. I mean think of those huge 2 liter bottles. One-fourth of that amount should be huge. In fact, they even put the .5 liter in big print to give that impression. I knew from the size of the bottle that it shrunk, regardless of the packaging. How much smaller? Around 20 percent, going from 20 ounces to 16.9.

I think Coke is probably right, most won't notice. They won't notice because they are too busy, regardless of confusion about the metric system. I'm not picking on Coke either, I'm sure they are not the only ones taking this approach. It is just an interesting example of marketing at work and spinning a potentially bad thing (smaller bottles), into a good one.