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In this edition of The Bottom Line, Evan Davis and guests examine how companies appeal to consumer taste for instant gratification.

Hello and welcome to the bottom line.

Now, selling sugar to children, alcohol to adults, much of our economies devoted to providing instant pleasure to consumers rather than long-term satisfaction.

So today we ask how companies appeal to our taste for immediate gratification and how far they should hold back when they do so.

And also, the Pepsi versus Coke phenomenon, the psychology of competition in business.

Well, we have the President of Pepsi UK with us and two other guests as well, and let's take a few minutes to meet them.

And Richard Evans, you are the President of Pepsi in the UK, and it's a lot more than soft drinks, isn't it?

Yes, we've clearly got Brown Pepsi, but also part of the PepsiCo family that you may not

realise is part of that is Walker's Crisps, Tropicana, Quaker Oaks from Scotland, and right in the

far east of England is Capella juice made at our Boxford farm just outside Ipswich.

Right. So you've got manufacturing operations within your business as well as

marketing operations. Yeah, there's about 13 sites, so it's marketing, distribution and manufacturing.

And what's the relationship you have to the global Pepsi Corporation? Do UK operations like

Walker's Crisps have a big part to play in the global corporation? Or are they mostly just local

products? No, we play a big part. So we've got a very large R&D centre up in Leicester, which is known as our potato centre of excellence. So anything connected with the potato, where you can tell you how to grow it, how to harvest it, how to cut it, and season it, anything you can imagine we know about. And they also do some of the beverages as well.

Right. Okay. Well, also with us is Rita Clifton, frequent guest on this program, chairman of the branding consultancy, interbrand. Your company's a bit of a barometer sometimes, I think, Rita, for what's going on in the economy more widely. What's the state of business confidence at the moment? Well, I'm going to hold on to a piece of wood while I'm saying this,

but certainly, from our experience, business confidence is still holding up. It's very interesting how different companies

respond to what's happening, particularly in the Eurozone. I mean, there is a part of last year

where people definitely press the pause button. But all I can say at the moment is that people are still thinking about the future

and also thinking about how to compete.

Because, of course, there are real opportunities as well as real challenges right in this current climate.

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