If someone from the Coca-Cola Co. is reading this, can you please answer this question: What is the difference between Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero?
During a recent shopping trip, our grocery store was almost out of two-liter bottles of Diet Coke but had plenty of Coca-Cola Zero. Our household doesn’t function without a steady supply of diet name-brand cola, so we stocked up on the latter, hoping we weren’t buying the calorie-free equivalent of New Coke.
Now that I’ve consumed copious amounts of Diet Coke and Coca-Cola Zero, I’m convinced that there is no difference–at least in terms of the product itself.
The Coca-Cola Website is trying its best to differentiate the two in terms of brand. “He who is most chill wins,” declares the splash page of the Coca-Cola Zero microsite, which has pages devoted to Chillosophy (“Trying = Failure,” don’tcha know?), Chilltop (where you can view the Zero commercial, an apparently hip remake of the 1971 “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” spot), and Formula Zero (where the nutritional label is revealed to be the same as that of Diet Coke). Meanwhile, the Diet Coke page declares that it has “Bounce…Tingle…Sparkle.”
No wonder Zero declares that “Trying = Failure.” Despite all Coca-Cola’s efforts, I still can’t tell you how the two products differ.
For me as a consumer, it doesn’t make much difference. I used to buy either Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi, depending on which was on sale. Now I can choose from Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, and Zero, depending on which is on sale–though I doubt that’s why Coca-Cola is spending big bucks to create the Zero brand.
