Coke or Pepsi? in Japan

One of the eternal questions is “Coke or Pepsi?”, which is also one question from this survey from iShare on cola. I was going to joke that tomorrow I will be doing “Boxers or briefs?”, but then I remembered that I’d already done that one!

Demographics

Between the 29th of August and the 1st of September 2008 464 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private online survey. 54.7% of the sample were male, 14.2% in their twenties, 47.4% in their thirties, 28.2% in their forties, and 10.1% in their teens or aged fifty or older.

I’m a Diet Coke person myself, which in Japan actually contains a little bit of sugar. I can cope with Diet Pepsi, but the full sugar efforts are disgusting. The Diet Coke with added vitamins is pretty awful too. How about you?

Research results

Q1: Talking about cola, are you Coca Cola or Pepsi? (Sample size=464)

Coca Cola	80.2%
Pepsi	16.4%
Other	3.4%

There was just 1.5 percentage points between men and women for Coke, but a bigger preference differential for Coke between younger and older people, with youth favouring Coke.

Q2: How often do you drink cola? (Sample size=464)

	All	Male N=254	Female N=210
Almost every day	3.4%	3.9%	2.9%
Several times per week	7.8%	12.6%	1.9%
Several times a month	23.7%	28.0%	18.6%
Don’t really drink much	61.9%	54.7%	70.5%
Never drunk cola	3.2%	0.8%	6.2%

Those in their thirties were the heaviest drinkers, but only by a small amount.

Q2SQ: When buying cola, how do you choose which to buy? (Sample size=449, multiple answer)

	All	Male N=254	Female N=210
Taste	43.2%	43.7%	42.6%
Calories	35.4%	35.3%	35.5%
Price	27.8%	30.6%	24.4%
Maker	16.9%	17.5%	16.2%
Free gift	10.9%	8.7%	13.7%
Volume	7.1%	7.9%	6.1%
New product	2.2%	2.8%	1.5%
Other	5.8%	5.6%	6.1%

The breakdown by brand from Q1 was not noted in full, but the highlights were that for Coke heads, taste scored 39.4%, calories 32.0%, and price 30.0%. For Pepsi-ites, taste was 61.3%, calories 54.7%, and price 20.0%.