4 ms·

I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually conce

• neolog 5y ago
  > It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name. People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.
  • dcow 5y ago
    What would be an appropriate name? To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable. Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.
    • boibombeiro 5y ago
      A fantasy name like most soft drinks
      • dcow 5y ago
        Fantasy names are a psychologically manipulative marketing tactic deployed to cause you to associate the thing you are consuming with something unrelated to the thing you are consuming so as to divert your attention from the thing you are consuming to some other (presumably more exciting) topic thereby increasing likelihood that you consume the product. Or they're a brand identity entirely divorced from the actual nature of the product which would also require you to look at the label into order to discern the healthiness of said product.
        • specialist 5y ago
          > Fantasy names are a psychologically manipulative marketing tactic... "Sprite" is psychologically manipulative but "VitaminWater" isn't? OMG, pick a side.
          • dcow 5y ago
            My side is that it’s absurd to hold Coke responsible for not choosing a name that might be misleading to somebody. And that I find the VitaminWater trial absurd. My point about fantasy names is exactly that they’re not any different from VitaminWater so what gives? It’s rhetorical. Marketing is all manipulative tactics born out of a desire to push more product not help people be healthy. Assuming Coke is somehow responsible for our health is skirting personal responsibility and passing the blame no different than the “fast food makes you fat let’s tell McDonalds what type of oil to use but not the restaurant down the street which is twice as unhealthy” mentality. It’s downright irresponsible to operate under the assumption that a company’s marketing department is going to give you an unbiased wholesome view of reality. I don't see how pretending Coke is some angel of healthy drink knowledge and herald of good diets that fell from grace with vitaminwater because they neglected to mention in the title “oh btw there’s some sugar” so must be punished is anything other than blissful ignorance at best. My visceral reaction to the absurdity of the trial is derived from what I perceive as lazy inconsistency in how we approach the ethics of advertising. Cherry picking VitaminWater, a drink where the facts are spelled out explicitly on the label on every bottle, of all things, feels more like an effort to dodge responsibility by attacking big soda than a true attempt to ask whether we should be allowing corporate propaganda to influence certain aspects of society. I really don't want the courts having an opinion on what makes a healthy diet. And I don’t want companies doing so either. It’s not a disagreement that we shouldn't try to stop manipulative marketing. It’s that I don't want any company anywhere trying to tell me what is healthy and what isn't when there is money to be made based on the message they present. Essentially I believe all marketing is manipulative and we should do away with all of it of we truly want to build a smarter society.
• squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. That isn't the definition of a reasonable consumer. Reasonable people don't have infinite time to second guess everything that people trusted to give them health information are saying. If they imply it's healthy and they're trusted to tell you whether it's healthy or not (i.e. they're trusted to publish nutritional information on their bottle), then a reasonable person should be able to trust the implication. We've all got too much to do to assume that someone is both misleading and telling the truth at the same time. As for names, the could have called it Nigglepuff Drink. Nigglepuff Drink does not imply any untrue health claims and it is not associated with any f&b products.
  • dcow 5y ago
    You've trusted Coca Cola to give you health advice? No offense but that's patently insane. Your doctor gives you health advice not a sugared soft-drink company with a motive to withhold any negative information about its products from you so you'll continue to consume them. I assume you trust Google to give you privacy advice, no? I don't know what a reasonable consumer is then. The first thing I usually do when reaching for a new drink is glance at the nutrition label to make sure I'm not consuming 55 grams of sugar. It takes less than 10 seconds. I learned this from my mom, who was generally concerned as a parent about making sure her children were eating healthy. It's not rocket science. I personally don't understand how Vitamin == Healthy. Maybe I'm N == 1, but the claim "has vitamins" which is what "vitamin" in the name implies to me is not, in fact, false. The leap from "has vitamins" to "is healthy to drink with abandon" is the problem here. Maybe if you could prove that the company knew the drink was unhealthy and deliberately fabricated the name so as to mislead their consumer base into making unhealthy choices, you might have a case? But by this argument any instance of a name where somebody could plausibly make that type of jump must be regulated. If I was taught that fish are healthy because they have healthy fats then I could reasonably make the association that fish stix are healthy. Couldn't I?
    • notyourwork 5y ago
      You cannot be serious with this line of thinking.
• worik 5y ago
  Vitamin Sugar water. Yes. That is what it should be called. Obviously.