Happy Birthday, New Coke (°March 23, 1985)

Tuesday April 23rd of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company launched New Coke. This still remains one of the major cases in the marketing literature. It often ranks first in all-time lists of marketing fails (such as on marketwired, or in Matt Haig's book Brand Failures). Apart from the obvious failure (for the short version, see below; for the longer version, see Wikipedia), I think it is also a good demonstration of the intangible part of brand value, which I will explain below.

How credibility spoiled this mini-lecture on statistics

In a recent reply to one of our commentaries (Smits et al., 2015), Domenic Cicchetti gave an interesting mini-lecture on effect sizes, power, and sample sizes. You'll find it here. Though interesting in itself, it is a pity that the full scope of his contribution will largely remain unnoticed given a series of credibility issues with the text itself and his position as the "statistics editor" of Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Given that some of my recent research deals with the credibility of online word-of-mouth communication, and because I feel a bit misunderstood as the author of two earlier commentaries to this journal, I will elaborate these credibility issues.