When I was reading through Ma Xin’s blogs, I thought that his ethical post about the Vitamin Water was interesting. I agreed to his point and also found it unethical to state a product healthy while it being as bad as other sugary product, in your case, Coke. It makes sense to me for companies trying to cover their product’s weakness, but have they considered their consumers’ feelings? They use the term “Vitamin Water” to make people think that it’s only a bottle of water that contains vitamins while tasting really good. But in the real case, each serving contains 125g of calories and 32.5g of sugar in total, which is equivalent to a half slice of cheese pizza. I was actually surprised about this.
This asymmetric information brings benefits to the company, but harms the people who purchase this product, as they expected it to be a healthy product. But the asymmetric information may not necessarily be caused by hidden information from the company, but is more likely from the lack of professional knowledge of customers (which in this case: consumers don’t read the nutrition facts).
I think that the government should take more responsibility and make more strict legislation. A possible way for government to do is to require all food companies write down the significant weakness of their products in the obvious place. It’s hard to implement, but it has applied to some products such as cigarettes.