Decoding Coca-Cola: A Biography of a Global Brand 9781138495449, 9781351024020

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Decoding Coca-Cola

This collection of essays delves into the Coke brand to identify and decode its DNA. Unlike other accounts, these essays adopt a global approach to under­ stand this global brand. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, Decoding Coca-Cola critically interrogates the Coke brand as well its constituent parts. By examining those who have been responsible for creating the images of Coke as well as the audiences that have consumed them, these essays offer a unique and revealing insight into the Coke brand and ask whether Coca-Cola has always had the same meaning. Looking into the core meaning, values, and emotions underpinning the Coca-Cola brand, it provides a unique insight into how global brands are created and positioned. This critical examination of one of the world’s most recognisable brands will be an essential resource for scholars researching and teaching in the fields of marketing, advertising, and communication. Its unique interdisciplinary approach also makes it accessible to scholars working in other humanities fields, including history, media studies, communication studies, and cultural studies. Robert Crawford is a Professor of Advertising and Associate Dean of Research & Innovation in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. His research has focused on the growth and development of the advertising, marketing, and public relations industries across Australia, Oceania, and Southeast Asia. Linda Brennan is a Professor of Advertising in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests are the use and abuse of advertising and social marketing for social change. Susie Khamis is Senior Lecturer in Public Communication at School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research areas are branding, representations of cultural diversity, and consumer cultures.

Routledge Studies in Marketing This series welcomes proposals for original research projects that are either single or multi-authored or an edited collection from both established and emerging scholars working on any aspect of marketing theory and practice and provides an outlet for studies dealing with elements of marketing theory, thought, pedagogy and practice. It aims to reflect the evolving role of marketing and bring together the most innovative work across all aspects of the marketing ‘mix’ – from product development, consumer behaviour, marketing analysis, branding, and customer relationships, to sustainability, ethics and the new opportunities and challenges presented by digital and online marketing. Strategic Marketing of Higher Education in Africa Edited by Emmanuel Mogaji, Felix Maringe and Robert Ebo Hinson Food Advertising and Childhood Obesity Examining Food Type, Brand Mascot Physique, Health Message and Media Fariba Esmaeilpour and Mitra Shabani Nashtaee Understanding the Higher Education Market in Africa Edited by Emmanuel Mogaji, Felix Maringe and Robert Ebo Hinson Internal Marketing Theories, Perspectives and Stakeholders David M. Brown Stakeholder Involvement in Social Marketing Challenges and Approaches to Engagement Edited by Kathy Knox, Krzysztof Kubacki and Sharyn Rundle-Thiele Decoding Coca-Cola A Biography of a Global Brand Edited by Robert Crawford, Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Marketing/book-series/RMKT

Decoding Coca-Cola A Biography of a Global Brand

Edited by Robert Crawford, Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Robert Crawford, Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis individual chapters, the contributors The right of Robert Crawford, Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-138-49544-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-02402-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of tables List of contributors Introduction: Unpacking Coke

vii ix 1

ROBERT CRAWFORD, LINDA BRENNAN AND SUSIE KHAMIS

1 Coke and The Coca-Cola Company

11

MARK PENDERGRAST AND ROBERT CRAWFORD

2 Coke and the Hilltop

33

JOANNA K. LOVE

3 Coke and the Super Bowl

47

SUSIE KHAMIS

4 Coke and the media

59

ROBERT CRAWFORD

5 Coke and gender

77

PAULINE MACLARAN

6 Coke and the digital age

89

TAO DENG, DARADIREK EKACHAI AND JEAN M. GROW

7 Coke and design

111

YARON MERON

8 Coke and sustainability

125

PETER JONES AND DAPHNE COMFORT

9 Coke and the environment SIMON LOCKREY, KARLI VERGHESE, SOPHIE LANGLEY AND LINDA BRENNAN

140

vi Contents 10 Coke and the Cold War

157

LAUREEN KUO

11 Coke and America

172

VANDER CASAQUI AND ADRIANA LIMA DE OLIVEIRA

12 Coke and the beach

184

PHILIP HAYWARD

13 Coke and the kids

198

VIVIANE RIEGEL AND JOANA PELLERANO

14 Coke and health

207

ELLA CHORAZY

15 Coke and the competitor

226

ANDREW MCCOWAN

Index

234

Tables

6.1 Breakdown of Coca-Cola Instagram post demographics by country 6.2 Degree of dress and physical presentation between men and women 6.3 Comparing the regional portrayal of women and men against the global account 6.4 Comparing the portrayals of women and men between masculine and feminine countries 14.1 Artificial sweeteners used in Coca-Cola products

97 99 101 105 214

Contributors

Linda Brennan, Professor of Advertising, RMIT University, Australia Vander Casaqui, Professor of Social Communication, Universidade Metodista de São Paulo, Brazil Ella Chorazy, Lecturer in Professional Communication, RMIT University, Australia Daphne Comfort, BEPS Researcher, University of Gloucestershire, UK Robert Crawford, Professor of Advertising, RMIT University, Australia Tao Deng, Assistant Professor of Communication, Marquette University, USA Daradirek Ekachai, Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, Mar­ quette University, USA Jean M. Grow, Professor of Strategic Communication, Marquette University, USA Philip Hayward, Adjunct Professor, School of Communication, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Peter Jones, Emeritus Professor, University of Gloucestershire, UK Susie Khamis, Senior Lecturer in Public Communication, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Laureen Kuo, Assistant Professor of History, Fu Jen Catholic University Sophie Langley, HDR Student, RMIT University, Australia Adriana Lima de Oliveira, PhD Student, Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Brazil Simon Lockrey, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, RMIT University, Australia Joanna K. Love, Associate Professor of Music, University of Richmond, USA

x

Contributors

Pauline MacLaran, Professor of Marketing & Consumer Research, Royal Holloway University of London, UK Andrew McCowan, Lecturer in Public Communication, University of Technology Sydney, Australia Yaron Meron, Honorary Research Associate, RMIT University, Australia Joana Pellerano, Researcher, Centro Universitário Senac, Brazil Mark Pendergrast, Independent Scholar, USA Viviane Riegel, Researcher, Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Brazil Karli Verghese, Associate Professor & Principal Research Fellow, RMIT University, Australia

Introduction: Unpacking Coke Robert Crawford, Linda Brennan and Susie Khamis

In 2019, the brand consultancy Interbrand ranked the world’s most important brands. Based on the perception of the brand across the world, the value that the brand adds to the company, and the brand’s future plans, Interbrand posi­ tioned Coke as the fifth most important brand in the world. Despite declining sales over the last five years, Coke’s worth was estimated at US$63.4 million, a figure that outranked Disney, McDonald’s, and Facebook (Khan, 2019). The salience of Coke is testament to the degree to which Coca-Cola has success­ fully constructed, cultivated, and sustained its brand for over 135 years. Its longevity and durability also tell further stories about the complex and multi­ faceted processes that underpin branding. Identifying these different and often obscured processes, and examining the nature of their contribution to the Coke brand, is the aim of this unique collection. As an interdisciplinary collection, the following chapters not only adopt multiple approaches; they also traverse time and space.

Histories and heritage As one of the world’s most recognised brands, Coca-Cola has inevitably attracted attention from researchers hoping to identify the secret to its success. Historical accounts assume that these secrets are to be found in the growth and development of the Coca-Cola Company. Subtitled The Inside Story of How Coca-Cola Became the Best-Known Brand in the World, Frederick Allen’s Secret Formula contends that the firm’s success lay in ‘the idea of Coca-Cola’ (1994, p. 17). Coca-Cola, he asserts, is ‘more than a soft drink – more than a car­ bonated beverage with definable characteristics … Coke has always been greater than the sum of its parts, from the very beginning’ (p. 17). Mark Pendergrast’s history of the Coca-Cola Company, For God, Country and Coca­ Cola, offers a more comprehensive account of the firm. While he concurs with Allen, Pendergrast identifies a broader framework for understanding the Coca-Cola Company’s relationship with its brand: ‘Coke has achieved the status of a substitute modern religion that promotes a particular, satisfying, allinclusive worldview espousing perennial values such as love, peace, happiness, and universal brotherhood’ (2013, p. 472).

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More recent accounts of the Coca-Cola Company have sought to challenge the image created by the firm’s marketing team. Michael Blanding’s evocatively titled The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink seeks to expose the less salubrious side of the firm’s activities, which can be connected to ‘drought, disease, exploitation and murder’ (2011, p. 4). Mark Thomas’s Belching out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola (2008) follows a similar path. In The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company, Constance Hays focuses on internal fissures, documenting the Coca-Cola Company’s perennial battle with its bottlers and its efforts to ‘bring everything about Coca-Cola under the supreme control of Atlanta and transform the company’ (2005, p. xii). Other accounts of Coca-Cola have examined the activities of the Coca-Cola Company as part of a larger narrative. Conceding that ‘The Coca-Cola Com­ pany is not a template for every corporation’, Humphry McQueen nevertheless takes Coca-Cola as a case study to reveal ‘the essence of capitalism’ and its insatiable need to expand (2001, pp. x–xi). Richard Wagnleitner’s Coca-Colo­ nization and the Cold War similarly uses Coca-Cola and its entry into post-war Austria as a vehicle to critique capitalism, albeit the specifically Americanised brand version of it (1994, pp. 2–7). Coca-Cola’s role as an agent of Americanisation has also been taken up by various scholars examining dif­ ferent national markets (see Kuisel, 1991; Sørensen & Petersen, 2012). Anthropological accounts examining Coca-Cola have similarly focused on the connections between culture and materiality (Miller, 2002). Robert Foster’s Coca-Globalization (2008), for example, examines Coca-Cola to deliver insights into consumption and the production of meaning. Exploring intersecting cultural, political, and environment stories, Foster demonstrates how connectivity between producers and consumers – both real and imagined – is ultimately responsible for ‘value creation’ (pp. xii–xvii). The most recent accounts of Coca-Cola apply these approaches back to the Coca-Cola Company. In Citizen Coke (2015), Bartow Elmore builds on Foster’s approach by focusing on the Coca-Cola Company’s role as a consumer rather than a producer. Examining the firm’s development from an ecological standpoint, Elmore actively challenges the popular view that Coke ‘is not a product of the vast natural resources of the land, but of the American genius for business organization’ (p. 4). Arguing that the Coca-Cola Company has in fact ‘placed heavy demands on ecologies around the world’ by operating as ‘an organic machine whose perpetual growth was contingent upon the extraction of abundant supplies of natural, fiscal and social capital in the places where it operated’, Elmore identifies the complex web of connections and stakeholders that have directly affected the firm’s growth and development (p. 6). Amanda Ciafone’s Counter Counter-Cola (2019) revisits the firm’s relationship with capitalism. Adopting a multinational perspective that moves beyond the United States, Ciafone argues that the ‘power to both shape and represent global capitalism is contested, and that the process of contestation is itself the central dynamic of modern history’ (p. 17). Like Elmore, she offers a more

Introduction

3

sophisticated account of the Coca-Cola Company’s operations, which recog­ nises the dynamic nature of the relationships between Coke and its different stakeholders. Ciafone’s account also stands out for challenging the popular narrative that the Coca-Cola Company does not really produce anything. ‘Saying that the Company does not “make stuff”’, she observes, ‘ignores its principal commodities – the brand’s advertising, formulas, business strategies, and financial investments – which the Company produced more successfully than nearly any other corporation in history’ (p. 5). Ciafone thus asserts that this ‘immaterial production is an essential part of the firm’s story as it ‘is used to manage the material bottling of Coke’ (p. 5). This collection seeks to build on these studies by offering a further frame­ work for understanding Coke. With Coke’s relationship with capitalism and consumption well covered, our collection situates the Coca-Cola story within a marketing context. While references to Coke’s marketing and branding per­ vade these historical accounts, none have critically engaged with them. Indeed, the terms are tellingly absent from the indexes of the vast majority of these historical accounts. This omission reveals a lack of nuanced understanding of them and, indeed, their relationship with Coke. To this end, we contend that Coca-Cola cannot be fully understood without any critical engagement with the marketing practices that have built and underpinned the Coke brand.

Understanding branding Brands are contentious things, and not clearly defined. Their ‘value’ is in the eye of the consumer or the shareholder, which means that marketers and accountants continue to argue over which concept of value measures the brand ‘better’ (Ambler & Barwise, 1998; Calder, 2019). In marketing, a brand is ‘everything’, it is intangible but is strongly connected to advertising: advertise­ ments, logos, slogans and taglines all convey something about the brand’s ‘essence’ (Hollis, 2013). Branding is therefore the ‘totality of perceptions’ (Kotler & Pfoertsch, 2007 p. 358) that creates a sense of the ‘product’ (i.e. the idea, service or enterprise, etc.). Others argue that the brand is in the mind of the consumer and is the unique position that the product occupies in the consumer’s mind (Keller, 2003). This position is formed by experience with the brand (vicarious or actual) and is made up of expectations about what the brand will ‘do’ or ‘be’ (Coelho et al., 2020). To consumers, the brand provides a cognitive and emotional shortcut to understanding the purpose of the product and the place it takes in ‘life’. Once you understand the brand, you are able to relax a little on selecting between alternative products; shopping gets a little easier to do (Toft et al., 2020). The shareholder’s view of the brand becomes apparent in brand equity lit­ erature, where it is seen as the value that the consumer is willing to pay over and above comparable and alternative products (Netemeyer et al., 2004). This value becomes a commodity that can be traded, as it is reflected in the share (stock) price (Motameni, 1998). Brands such as Kraft, currently owned by 3G

4

R. Crawford, L. Brennan and S. Khamis

Capital and Berkshire Hathaway, change hands relatively regularly. For exam­ ple, in 2011, Kraft was split into two companies; then in 2015, it was spun off from Mondelez, although 2019 saw its share prices decline, so it remains to be seen how valuable the Kraft name will be in the coming years (Whitten & Cheddar Berk, 2019). Branding is the business end of brands. Producers and their marketers create personalities for their products and brands by way of brand manifestos, brand books, or brand manuals (Bibby, 2015). These are purposeful and strategic combinations of marketing and advertising functions and attributes that make up a distinct and differentiated product (Rao, 2019). The creation of a brand’s unique identity, i.e. its ‘personality’, is at the core of this activity. This differ­ entiation will ideally provide a competitive advantage and therefore sustainable revenue flows over time (Coelho et al., 2020). The meaning of a brand is dependent on the sender (brand manager, advertiser) and the receiver (consumer or shareholder) having a common frame of reference. Brand image and reputation develop over time and brands (such as Coke) have histories of their own (Hatch & Rubin, 2006). The alignment between the intention of the brander and the interpretation by the consumer is not always direct. The consumer operates in a cultural context that involves lived experiences outside the control of the agency. Global brands have to account for a wide variety of contexts, cultures, and sub-cultures (Crawford et al., 2017). Brands acquire meaning from the artefacts of their use as well as the intentions of the brand manifesto (Hatch & Rubin, 2006). Consequently, brand meaning evolves over time and according to location and popular culture, as well as societal dynamics – a situation that this collection both illustrates and interrogates.

Insight into marketing In both scope and structure, this books surveys Coke in ways that reflect con­ temporary insights into branding. Specifically, the subsequent chapters under­ line the extent to which, increasingly and inevitably, Coke works through strategies of cultural branding. Following Douglas Holt (2016), ‘cultural branding’ is seen here as the various ways that a brand reflects, integrates, and negotiates culturally dominant ideals, anxieties, assumptions, and currents. From care for the environment, to concerns about personal health, to headlines from the White House – Coke exists as a powerfully symbolic icon that, by virtue of its global reach and everyday accessibility, does not just punctuate popular culture, but communicates with and through wider cultural conversations. This understanding of cultural branding expands one of the most salient and oft-cited aspects of branding phenomena: the concept of brand equity, or the value of a brand based on consumers’ perceptions of it. As theorised by Aaker (1992) and Keller (2016), brand equity is a useful (indeed, necessary) measure of how well brand marketing syncs with market dynamics; it a concession to both the malleability and autonomy of the consumer mindset and mood,

Introduction

5

insofar as equity can go up or down. Put most simply, a brand that registers favourably in terms of consumer expectations, connotations, and loyalty enjoys strong brand equity – realised through market metrics such as share value, pri­ cing, and profit. Conversely, weak brand equity bespeaks the opposite fate. For both Aaker and Keller, then, brand equity is a mercurial construct, one that evolves between the advertiser and consumer – neither party ‘owns’ it, regardless of how much the former tries to influence the latter. The biggest brand campaigns, with fat budgets, celebrity ambassadors and such, can still come undone for reasons seemingly outside the brand’s ambit (country of origin, for instance), or reasons that the brand had not anticipated (such as dodgy practices in its supply chain). The point is, given how slippery brand equity can be, it pays to acknowledge not just what consumers want from the brand, but whatever else consumers might be concerned about – all with a view to sustaining positive associations in the consumer’s mind. Moreover, and in the contemporary mediasphere of social media, consumer-generated con­ tent, and a millennial shift towards brands with purpose (the ‘woke’ turn), this imperative for cultural branding has only accelerated and intensified. Now more than ever, Coke must speak to and through myriad cultural phenomena; invariably, context contours messaging. Depending on where in the world the brand is being advertised, and to whom it is speaking, cultural branding com­ pels Coke to fashion messages that are about more than just the product; they are about the culture itself, one where Coke is framed as the consumer’s best choice. This book canvasses various examples of Coke’s cultural branding in action, around the world and over decades. What emerges is the biography of a brand that is, ironically, both elastic and enduring – true to core brand DNA, yet at the same time capable of shapeshifting both nimbly and strategically. Therein is the essence (and power) of cultural branding, as it spotlights how brand meaning arises out of dialogue, an ongoing exchange between a corporate behemoth like Coke, and its millions of consumers around the planet.

The approaches The chapters in this collection are divided into two themes. The first centres on Coca-Cola’s formal and deliberate efforts to construct its brand with chap­ ters critically examining the firm’s marketing, advertising, design, and public relations efforts. Chapters in the second theme explore the informal influences that have directly and indirectly contributed to the Coke brand. Often oper­ ating in areas beyond or outside of Coca-Cola’s direct sphere of influence, these informal networks have been no less important in creating and, indeed, re-creating the Coke brand. To this end, the chapters in this section traverse space and time to illustrate the impact of different national cultures and gen­ erational perspectives, not to mention the influence of Coke’s arch-rival in the marketplace. Of course, these themes are not mutually exclusive – there is significant crossover between the two, as well as an ongoing dialogue between them. As a result, the perspectives presented through these chapters do not

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R. Crawford, L. Brennan and S. Khamis

necessarily present a single or definitive image of the Coke brand – although several key aspects of the brand’s DNA are certainly identified and critically examined. The opening chapter sets the context for the first section. This highly trun­ cated version of Mark Pendergrast’s For God, Country and Coca Cola under­ scores the significance of marketing for The Coca-Cola Company. Arguing that ‘More than anything else, it is marketing that has underpinned Coke’s success’, Pendergrast and Crawford document the firm’s marketing activities from its earliest days through to its present. In this chapter, it is marketing rather than the product itself that emerges as the key to the past, present, and future of the Coke brand and The Coca-Cola Company. The following five chapters critically explore the most visible aspect of Coca-Cola’s marketing communication efforts – advertising. In Chapter 2, Joanna Love examines the 1971 ‘Hilltop’ television commercial, which has been celebrated and venerated as one of Coke’s best campaigns. In document­ ing its initial lukewarm response from Coca-Cola insiders and American audi­ ences, Love’s closer reading of ‘Hilltop’ challenges these nostalgic interpretations of the campaign. The chapter similarly raises questions about the commercial’s supposed ‘universal’ appeal and contends that the images celebrated by Coke in this commercial were in fact ‘distinctly Western and explicitly American’. Following on from Love’s study, Chapters 3 and 4 both open with a refer­ ence to ‘Hilltop’. However, the two chapters offer contrasting readings of America’s place in Coke’s advertising. In Chapter 3 Susie Khamis analyses the Coke ads from the first three Super Bowls following the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Noting that ‘brands are now read in highly political terms’, Khamis explores the overt politicisation of these Coca-Cola commer­ cials. In revealing how these commercials challenge Trump’s concept of America, Khamis illustrates how the Coke brand is rooted in a specific image of America and the degree to which it actively seeks to maintain that image. The place of America in Coke’s advertising is revisited by Robert Crawford in Chapter 4. Examining seminal Coke campaigns across print, television, and digital media, Crawford’s chapter reveals that Coke’s connection to America changes over time and, indeed, across different media outlets. While Coke’s American heritage and values were celebrated in the American market, their presence in other markets becomes more ambiguous, as Coke progressively places a greater importance on global profits over American patriotism. Pauline MacLaran’s Chapter 5 explores the representations of gender in Coca-Cola advertising. In order to develop a clearer understanding of Coca-Cola’s recent efforts to position itself at the forefront of challenging gender norms, MacLaran examines and contextualises the changing representa­ tions of gender across four key periods in relation to Butler’s heteronormative matrix. Despite key consistencies across these periods, MacLaran also demon­ strates that the Coke brand is not necessarily a hostage to its past. However, the following chapter reveals that the past was still an essential part of the Coke brand. In Chapter 6, Tao Deng, Daradirek Ekachai, and Jean Grow similarly

Introduction

7

explore gender portrayals in Coca-Cola’s marketing efforts, albeit on a single platform – Instagram. The chapter examines images across the firm’s global and regional accounts to identify whether Coca-Cola employs gendered stereotypes. In finding that ‘the brand is continuing its long history of targeting women through the lens of masculinity’, Deng, Ekachai, and Grow demonstrate the consistency in Coke’s messaging. This chapter also demonstrates the degree to which these images continued to be informed by Coca-Cola’s efforts to balance global and local appeals. Chapter 7 moves the focus away from advertising to design. Yaron Meron’s study examines visual motifs that are central to the Coke brand. Specifically, Meron looks at the efforts to create an entirely new typeface in 2018 and what this can tell us about the relationship between the brand and design for Coke. Meron argues that, despite a promising foundation, the bespoke typeface was quietly abandoned in favour of a familiar visual heritage. Such a retreat, he contends, indicates that Coca-Cola is not yet ready to abandon a successful design heritage. Chapters 8 and 9 both examine Coke’s relationship with the environment and sustainability. In Chapter 8 Simon Lockrey, Karli Verghese, Sophie Lang­ ley, and Linda Brennan analyse the packaging of Coke products to examine Coca-Cola’s efforts to engage with environmental issues. Using Coke’s PlantBottle as a case study, the chapter illustrates how the marketing around the packaging product has omitted several key environmental concerns – from the proportion of the packaging that is made from plant matter to the potential impact on current recycling practices of such a material. A similar situation is outlined in Chapter 9, which examines the sustainability themes embedded in the Coca-Cola brand. In this chapter, Peter Jones and Daphne Comfort reveal that Coca-Cola has a vested interest in protecting the environment and sup­ porting sustainability initiatives, but this is undermined by a lack of transpar­ ency when it comes to documenting what the firm is actually doing in this space. Both chapters highlight the tensions that exist between Coke’s economic and environmental goals and offer a guarded interpretation of the firm’s ability to find a resolution to it – and for good reason. Coke has form for effectively appropriating social movements into its marketing strategy. Our second section on the informal responses that have informed the way that the Coke brand is seen and understood opens with Chapter 10. Laureen Kuo’s examination of the impact of the Cold War on Coke’s post-World War Two expansion focuses on its rocky reception in France. Demonstrating how Coke emerged as a lightning rod for broader concerns about America’s grow­ ing global dominance and France’s declining power, Kuo’s chapter underscores the impact of local context and national culture on the brand’s reception. Chapter 10 also provides an important reminder that Coke’s global expansion was neither inevitable nor smooth. Chapter 11 offers similar insights, albeit from a different standpoint in terms of time and space. In this chapter, Vander Casaqui and Adriana Lima de Oliveira move the focus to Latin America. Focusing on the Brazilian market, Casaqi and de Oliveira examine the

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R. Crawford, L. Brennan and S. Khamis

construction and circulation of images of America contained in Coca-Cola’s regional marketing materials. The chapter outlines how Coke’s iconography, ideology and strategy have contributed to this process over four distinct peri­ ods. By reiterating the degree to which local social, cultural, political, and economic contexts have impacted on the brand’s meaning in Latin America, Chapter 11 demonstrates the degree to which globalisation is subject to national interests and issues. In Chapter 12 Philip Hayward explores the meanings circulating around one of the most iconic images in Coca-Cola’s marketing – the beach. Drawing on branding theory, Hayward explores how marketing has engaged in a dialogue with social behaviour and popular culture in a process of ‘vernacular co-creation’. The results of this process exist outside the company’s proprietary control. Far from tarnishing the brand, these unauthorised texts have enabled the Coke brand to become an entity that extends and reproduces itself autonomously in the popular cultural sphere. The significance of these texts become even more important in the digital age as audiences voluntarily disseminate such materials to peers via social media platforms. The importance of digital platforms is also noted in Chapter 13. In this chapter, Viviane Riegel and Joana Pellerano document the opinions and atti­ tudes of the youth market. Although this market has long been one of Coke’s key demographics, its importance has increased in the digital age, as they simultaneously act as consumers and producers of the Coke brand and its meanings. Based on interviews with young people in São Paulo, this chapter demonstrates the integral role played by digital media platforms in generating the dialogue between this market and the brand. However, it also notes the ongoing importance of older media technologies and strategies as well as established ideas about consumption. In Chapter 14, Ella Chorazy examines Coca-Cola’s relationship with health and the degree to which this discourse has both challenged and changed Coca-Cola over the course of its history. Concerns about Coke’s impact on health have consistently dogged the brand. Chorazy’s chapter begins with nineteenth century concerns about Coke before focusing on Coke’s non­ sugar products – TaB, Diet Coke, Coke Zero – to highlight Coca-Cola’s more recent efforts to abate public concerns about health and to reposition the Coke brand in relation to them. In exploring Coke’s actions to safeguard its brand in this context, Chorazy also demonstrates how Coke managed to feed back into and inform the broader discourse of public health – a feat that few other brands could achieve. Chapter 15 rounds out this section and, indeed, the collection as a whole. Andrew McCowan explores an unlikely contributor to the Coke brand – Pepsi. While Coca-Cola dismissed its rival and considered itself to be the ‘real thing’, Chapter 15 reveals that the spectre of Pepsi was always present in the minds of Coca-Cola stakeholders. By highlighting the impact of the famed ‘cola wars’ on the Coke brand as well as the operations of The Coca-Cola Company, McCowan demonstrates the degree to which Coke’s ‘other’ served

Introduction

9

to challenge Coke’s claims and push The Coca-Cola Company to work even harder. Taken individually and collectively, the chapters in this collection not only identify and unpack some of the strands of DNA that make up the Coke brand; their approaches also demonstrate the strengths of interdisciplinarity and its capacity to bring about a more holistic understanding of the branding process.

References Aaker D.A. (1992) ‘The Value of Brand Equity’, Journal of Business Strategy, 13 (4), pp. 27–32. Allen, F. (1994) Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-known Product in the World. New York: Open Road. Ambler, T. & Barwise, P. (1998). ‘The Trouble with Brand Valuation’, Journal of Brand Management, 5 (5), 367–377. Bibby, D.N. (2015). The Role of Brand Identity in the Implementation of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) by Advertising Agencies. PhD Thesis. Auckland University of Technology. Blanding, M. (2011) The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink. New York: Avery. Calder, B.J. (2019) ‘The Financial Value of the Brand’, Strategic Finance, 101 (4), pp. 24–31. Ciafone, A. (2019) Counter Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Coelho, F.J., Bairrada, C.M., & de Matos Coelho, A.F. (2020). ‘Functional Brand Qualities and Perceived Value: The Mediating Role of Brand Experience and Brand Personality’, Psychology & Marketing, 37 (1), pp. 41–55. Crawford, R., Brennan, L., & Parker, L. (2017). Global Advertising Practice in a Borderless World. London: Routledge. Elmore, B.J. (2015) Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Foster, R. (2008) Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hatch, M.J. & Rubin, J. (2006). ‘The Hermeneutics of Branding’, Journal of Brand Management, 14 (1–2), pp. 40–59. Hays, C. (2005) The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. New York: Random House. Hollis, N. (2013) The Meaningful Brand: How Marketing Adds Financial Value to a Business. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holt, D. (2016) ‘Branding in the Age of Social Media’, Harvard Business Review, March, pp. 40–50. Keller, K.L. (2003). ‘Brand Synthesis: The Multidimensionality of Brand Knowledge’, Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (4), pp. 595–600. Keller, K.L. (2016) ‘Reflections on Customer-based Brand Equity: Perspectives, Progress, and Priorities’, AMS Review, 6, pp. 1–16. Khan, Y. (2019) ‘These are the Top 10 Brands in the World in 2019’, Business Insider, 18 October. Available at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/interbrand-top-10-brands-inthe-world-2019-10?r=US&IR=T.

10 R. Crawford, L. Brennan and S. Khamis Kotler, P. & Pfoertsch, W. (2007). ‘Being Known or Being One of Many: The Need for Brand Management for Business‐to‐Business (B2B) Companies’, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 22 (6), pp. 357–362. Kuisel, R. (1991) ‘Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French Face Americanization, 1948–1953’, French Historical Studies, 17 (1), pp. 96–116. McQueen, H. (2001) The Essence of Capitalism: The Origins of Our Future. Sydney: Sceptre. Miller, D. (2002) ‘Coca-Cola: A Black Sweet from Trinidad’, in Daniel Miller (ed.) Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. London: Routledge, pp. 169–187. Motameni, R. (1998). ‘Brand Equity Valuation: A Global Perspective’, Journal of Product & Brand Management, 7 (4), pp. 275–290. Netemeyer, R.G., Krishnan, B., Pullig, C., Wang, G., Yagci, M., Dean, D., & Wirth, F. (2004) ‘Developing and Validating Measures of Facets of Customer-based Brand Equity’, Journal of Business Research, 57 (2), pp. 209–224. Pendergrast, M. (2013) For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink. 3rd edn. New York: Basic Books. Rao, C. (2019). Making Marketing Music: Integrated Marketing Communications at Work, New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing. Sørensen, N.A. & Petersen, K. (2012) ‘Corporate Capitalism or Coca-Colonisation? Economic Interests, Cultural Concerns, Tax Policies and Coca-Cola in Denmark from 1945 to the Early 1960s’, Contemporary European History, 21 (4), pp. 597–617. Thomas, M. (2008) Belching out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola. London: Ebury. Toft, M., Sunny, J., & Taylor, R. (2020). Authenticity: Building a Brand in an Insincere Age. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Wagnleitner, R. (1994) Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Australia after the Second World War. Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press. Whitten, S. & Cheddar Berk, C. (2019). ‘Kraft Heinz has lost the one thing that dis­ tinguishes it from General Mills and Mondelez’, CNBC News, 22 February. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/22/kraft-heinz-lost-what-distinguished-it-from­ general-mills-mondelez.html.

1

Coke and The Coca-Cola Company Mark Pendergrast and Robert Crawford

The story of The Coca-Cola Company is fundamentally a story of marketing. By keeping its ingredients a tightly guarded secret, Coca-Cola has not only kept imitators and competitors at bay, but also afforded itself greater opportu­ nities to create, cultivate, and recreate the stories that underpin the brand and its meanings. Over time, the secret ingredients have become less important than the stories that were created to obscure them. As one Coca-Cola spokesperson explained, the essence of Coke was not found in a bottle, but in the marketing of that bottle: We’ve spent over a hundred years and untold amounts of money building the equity of that brand name. Without our economies of scale and our incredible marketing system, whoever tried to duplicate our product would get nowhere, and they’d have to charge too much. Why would anyone go out of their way to buy Yum-Yum, which is really just like Coca-Cola but costs more, when they can buy the Real Thing anywhere in the world? (Quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 493) More than anything else, it is marketing that has underpinned Coke’s success. It has informed the way that the product is manufactured, distributed, and sold. It has informed the way that consumers see it and consume it. And it has informed the way that The Coca-Cola Company has developed – from its earliest days through to its present. By outlining the growth and development of The CocaCola Company in relation to its marketing strategies and initiatives, this chapter provides a truncated version of Mark Pendergrast’s For God, Country and CocaCola to demonstrate that marketing is an integral part of Coca-Cola’s DNA that has left an indelible impact on the firm and its historical development.

Establishing a brand The image presented by the World of Coca-Cola – the brand’s Atlanta-based corporate museum – reinforces a long-standing company tradition. The Coca-Cola saga has been reverentially preserved and nurtured over the years.

12 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford John Pemberton, who invented Coca-Cola in 1886, has been depicted by the company as a poor but lovable old Southern root doctor who stumbled upon the miraculous new drink (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 7). In this story, Coca-Cola was supposedly born in a humble three-legged kettle in Pemberton’s backyard. This official version of events is a myth, however. John Pemberton was not an uneducated, simple root lover. He did not brew the drink in his backyard. More importantly, far from being a unique beverage that sprang out of nowhere, CocaCola was a product of its time, place, and culture. It was, like many other such nostrums, a patent medicine with a distinct cocaine kick (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 8). During this period, clever promoters made fortunes in patent medicines. In large measure, Coca-Cola’s success stemmed directly from advertising and marketing, which made it an emblem of the good things in America, a kind of secular communion drink (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 12). It was Frank Robinson who came up with Coca-Cola. A salesman who teamed up with Pemberton (and two others) in 1885, Robinson had an innate understanding of marketing and promotions. He and his business partners agreed that CocaCola was the best name, not only because it described the two principle drug ingredients, but because it had an alliterative ring. Triple (and sometimes quadruple) alliterations were in vogue, particularly in Atlanta, allowing a tongue-twisting tour of the alphabet (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 28). Having devised the ‘euphonious’ title, Robinson worked on the script logo, intro­ ducing the familiar Spencerian handwriting for the first time in a 16 June 1887 ad. The ad was remarkably brief, pointing the way to modern adver­ tising (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 28). Significantly, it was also low-cost, which facilitated multiple insertions and extended awareness of the brand. During the first year of the drink’s existence, total advertising expenditure amounted to around US$150 (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 29). Although relatively modest, it bought a sizable amount of exposure for Coca-Cola, and Robin­ son soon set about expanding its scale. An oilcloth sign was pinned to the awning of Jacobs’ drugstore – the drink’s first point-of-purchase advertising – with red lettering on a white background ordering patrons to ‘DRINK COCA-COLA 5¢’. Within a year, there were oilcloth signs advertising Coca-Cola at 14 Georgia soda fountains. Thousands of Coca-Cola posters were distributed, while every streetcar in Atlanta carried an ad for the drink (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 30). The impact of Robinson’s work was not lost on his partners. Pemberton (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 33) once mused that ‘If I could get $25,000, I would spend $24,000 on advertising and the remainder in making Coca-Cola. Then we would all be rich.’ Clearly, he was well aware that he was not responsible for the secret ingredient to his invention’s success.

Creating a new narrative By 1887, a series of complicated deals meant that the ownership of Coke’s formula was spread among multiple individuals. With Pemberton ill and

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increasingly dependent on morphine, Asa Candler staked his claim as Coca­ Cola’s owner. Candler liked to paint a log-cabin portrait of his poor-but-happy rural youth. In fact, Sam Candler, his father, was a well-to-do planter and merchant who founded the town in which Asa was raised. Unlike Pemberton, Asa Candler was no brilliant inventor (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 49). His unique skillset centred on Coke’s real ‘secret’ ingredients – marketing and promotion. Throughout 1889, Candler saw sales of Coca-Cola mushroom. Although he promoted Coca-Cola as a soda fountain drink, Candler also advertised the straight syrup as a patent medicine, which he sold for 25 cents a bottle – about a quarter of the going rate for most medicines – in grocery and drug stores (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 52). Like so many other patent medicines on the market, its actual medicinal value was not entirely consistent with the claims made in advertising materials. As Coca-Cola was rocketing to fame, rumours of its cocaine content were stirring. A concerned citizen complained that ‘the ingredient which makes Coca-Cola so popular is cocaine … it is insidiously but surely getting thousands of people into the cocaine habit’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 53). Candler responded by taking out an ad in which he challenged anyone to prove a case in which Coca-Cola had led to cocaine addiction (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 53). Although the controversy died down, rumours about Coca-Cola’s drug con­ tent would continue to haunt Candler and the drink in the years to come (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 54). With the incorporation of The Coca-Cola Company finally completed in 1892, Candler was in a position to pay greater attention to marketing and pro­ motional matters. He moved quickly to patent the trademark Coca-Cola script. In his first annual report, covering the ten months after incorporation, Candler reported that the firm had spent almost US$22,500 on ingredients for Coca-Cola and over half of that amount (US$11,400) on advertising. He commented that ‘we have done very considerable advertising in territory which has not as yet yielded any returns. We have reason to believe that it will show good returns during the ensuing year’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 56). The majority of the advertising budget was spent on point-of-purchase signs, calendars, novelties, and newspaper ads, all of them prominently displaying the Coca-Cola script. Candler, who at first had misspelled his own product, became very touchy about the correct spelling of Coca-Cola – not coca-cola or cocoa-cola, it must also be capitalised and hyphenated (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 57). Promotional activities were complemented by Coca-Cola’s recognition of the importance of distribution. At this time, Atlanta stood at the centre of a web of rails carrying the recycled whiskey barrels full of sweet syrup across the country (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 58). The product was also available from a wide range of outlets, including stands, grocers, and saloons. These were revolu­ tionary new outlets for Coca-Cola, allowing the drink to reach a completely different class of consumer (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 70). Coca-Cola’s growing reach was not lost on management. By the end of 1895, Candler could proudly report to his stockholders that ‘Coca-Cola is now sold and drunk in

14 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford every state and territory in the United States’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 58). Not surprisingly, the Coca-Cola News declared that Coca-Cola had become a truly national brand: ‘The great American Eagle – that discriminating bird of freedom – is passionately fond of Coca-Cola because Coca-Cola has become a National drink’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 58). Candler opened branch offices and syrup factories in Dallas (1894), Chicago (1895), Los Angeles (1895), and Philadelphia (1897), and plans were under way for an office in New York (1899). Whenever possible, Candler sent nephews to assume command of these branches (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 61). The 1897 annual report noted that Coca-Cola was also extending internationally into Canada and Hawaii, with further plans for entering Mexico. Coca-Cola’s growing need for lawyers was another sign of the company’s coming-of-age. Candler had complained of ‘bogus substitutes’ in his 1894 annual report. As Coca-Cola’s success grew, so did its hangers-on (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 59). In addition to these fake Coca-Cola products, the firm was con­ fronted by internal problems. The dilution of Coca-Cola’s own syrup was a major issue. Because one universal characteristic of the imitation syrups was their lower price, it was tempting for drugstore owners to add the cheaper syrup to the real thing, hoping no one would know the difference (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 59). The success of Coca-Cola’s marketing and promotional activities spurred management to pay closer attention to the question of how to increase sales. The realisation that there was more future in Coca-Cola refreshment than medicine was a key insight. After all, everyone got thirsty. As Robinson put it, ‘We found that we were advertising to the few when we ought to advertise to the masses’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 60). By promoting Coca-Cola as a beverage, they reached thousands rather than ‘one man in a hundred’. Consequently, he published more ads that simply said, ‘Drink Coca-Cola. Delicious and Refreshing.’ Instinctively, Robinson understood that the older ads were too long and too negative. With a larger budget, he flooded the market with his succinct message, not only in newspaper ads, but with posters, streetcar signs, calendars, serving trays, thermometers, clocks, pencils, bookmarks for schoolchildren, and glass plates for fountains (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 60). It was a fortuitous shift. In 1898, Congress passed a special war tax on proprietary medicines, but not on beverages. In a case of life imitating art (or marketing), Coca-Cola’s claims that it was a beverage, rather than a medicine, meant it could safely argue for exemption.

New partners Despite the growing popularity of Coca-Cola, Candler was reluctant to embrace the opportunities afforded by bottling Coke, as early attempts to bottle the drink had failed. But in 1899, two determined lawyers, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, eventually won him over. While Candler remained highly dubious of the initiative, he agreed to give the lawyers the

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rights to leading and developing the soft drink maker’s latest foray into the bottling business (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 66–8). Thomas and Whitehead set up their first bottling plant in their hometown of Chattanooga. A falling out with one another meant that they would divide their operations – Thomas took the Eastern seaboard and the West Coast, leaving Whitehead with the Coca-Cola heartland of the South, plus much of the West (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 71). As neither could afford to set up their own plants, they signed contracts with various bottlers across their regions to sell them syrup and provide an expert bottler, caps, and advertising. In return, they would garner half of the plant’s profits. Consequently, these firms became known as the ‘parent bottlers’, while the manufacturing plants were called the ‘actual’ or ‘first-line’ bottlers. By 1919, there were 1,200 plants; virtually every town in America had a Coca-Cola bottler. Asa Candler was delighted but still mystified by the bottlers’ success (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 77). The expansion of Coca-Cola’s network via Thomas and Whitehead’s deals created a further demand for advertising and marketing materials. Thomas was convinced that offering free coupons was the fastest way to build trade, but to hold it he needed massive advertising, including streetcar placards, calendars, change plates, trays, posters, and steel, muslin, and oilcloth signs. Pleading with Frank Robinson for more point-of-sale advertising for Louisville, Thomas wrote that ‘this is the first real large city that we have operated in’. The 100 signs he had were inadequate, because ‘we expect to have 400 or 500 places started up there within a very short time’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 74). He also advertised extensively in newspapers, after bottlers informed him which local paper had the highest circulation. More creative marketing activities included the hiring of railway employees on commission to sell and promote bottled Coca-Cola on trains and at depots. Candler regretted his promise to provide free advertising, because Frank Robinson was deluged with requests for streetcar signs, expensive German lithography, blotters, novelties, and all the other available items. At the same time, the parent bottlers were frustrated by delayed shipments from the com­ pany (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 75). In an undated amendment, the 1899 contract was changed to allow a ten-cent-per-gallon rebate to give the bottlers respon­ sibility for their own advertising. In effect, the syrup price was set at 90 cents a gallon, with the parent bottlers paying ten cents a gallon for advertising – an expense they immediately passed through to their actual bottlers (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 75). As parent and local bottlers covered their territory with the Coca-Cola logo, the brand cemented its presence in the daily lives of millions of Americans. By the turn of the century, Frank Robinson was annually sending out over a million pieces of advertising in some 30 forms. In 1900, the firm spent almost US$85,000 on advertising. By 1912, that figure was well over a million dollars a year. Coca-Cola was the single best-advertised product in the United States. Wherever Americans looked, they could not avoid seeing the Coca-Cola script. During 1913, the company advertised on over a hundred million items,

16 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford including thermometers, cardboard cut-outs, and metal signs (50 thousand each); Japanese fans and calendars (a million each); two million soda fountain trays, 10 million matchbooks, 20 million blotters, 25 million baseball cards, and innumerable signs made of cardboard and metal. The novelties distributed in that one year alone could have supplied every man, woman, and child who had lived in the continental United States since 1650 (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 85). Coca-Cola was not simply a soft drink, but a phenomenon (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 83). Coca-Cola’s insatiable growth in the early 20th century also gave rise to two other defining marketing developments. Coke’s straight-sided bottles looked just like any other soda pop and its diamond-shaped paper labels were easily copied by competitors. The call for a package so distinctive that people could recognise it by feel and instantly identify even a broken bottle led the firm to approve the ‘hobble skirt’ bottle shape in 1916 (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 98). The new bottle eventually came to symbolise Coca-Cola as much as the script logo. The second major development was the decision to move Coke’s advertising from inhouse to an external agency. William D’Arcy and his St Louis agency took on the Coke account in 1906. While some executives were uncomfor­ table with the implications of this move, as well as its impact on the style and scope of Coca-Cola’s advertising and marketing activities (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 99–100), it was consistent with the firm’s commitment to innovative mar­ keting practices, not to mention the bottlers’ dependence on it.

Modern business and nostalgia Coca-Cola’s seemingly irrepressible rise would hit a snag in 1916. The United States’ entrance into World War One resulted in sugar rationing. Coca-Cola took out ads proclaiming that ‘sugar enlists for war’, asking the public’s patience with reduced supplies. Another patriotic spread showed a hand holding a glass of Coca-Cola with a shadow of the Statue of Liberty grasping the flame behind it. For the first time, the company found itself actually begging its bottlers not to seek new markets, since it couldn’t provide enough syrup (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 120). The firm’s woes did not end with the Armistice in 1918. Beset by management woes, loaded down with overpriced sugar, and threatened by pending lawsuits, the new Coca-Cola Company appeared to be floundering (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 133). Slowly but surely, Coca-Cola navigated its way through these challenges, settling its case with the bottlers and winning its case against competing brands. More importantly, consumer demand had not decreased – amid the doom and gloom of war, sales had continued to grow across the United States. Despite their successes, Coca-Cola’s leaders understood that they could not afford to rest on their laurels. As sales increased, so too did the size and scope of the firm’s operations. In some ways, Coca-Cola typified major corporations in the twenties – the era of the first professional managers, who relied increasingly on lawyers, public relations experts, market researchers, psychologists, and

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advertisers (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 148–9). Robert Woodruff, who had become president of The Coca-Cola Company in 1923, had an innate understanding of how to manipulate corporate structures for profit, privacy, and control while minimising taxes and governmental scrutiny. He was a consummate manager, and brought an almost military precision to what had essentially been a family business, run in a brilliant but amateurish fashion by Asa Candler and his rela­ tions (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 149). Under Woodruff, procedure manuals were developed to systematise almost every aspect of the company – including marketing and promotions. The muckraking Progressive Era was essentially over, and Coca-Cola emerged from its cloud of controversy to match the image it had always sought – a wholesome family drink, a temperate alternative to bootleg liquor during Prohibition. Those who continued to attack the soft drink now appeared old-fashioned holdovers from a prior era (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 149). For its part, Coca-Cola moved on from defending itself from critics and focused its efforts on conveying to consumers the simple pleasure of enjoying a Coke. Such folksy modesty became a staple of Coca-Cola’s advertising. Just as the United States was becoming increasingly industrialised, Norman Rockwell’s ads with freckle-faced boys at the old fishing hole, complete with dog and Coca-Cola bottle, nostalgically connected consumers and Coke back to sim­ pler times (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 152). This would become even more impor­ tant when the Great Depression hit. Extensive Depression-era advertising presented the drink as a pleasant, inexpensive time-out from an increasingly difficult reality. Everyone could find a nickel to ‘bounce back to normal’, as Coke’s slogan promised (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 165). The increasing adherence to standardisation extended to Coca-Cola’s part­ ners too. By the end of the thirties, the D’Arcy agency had to follow a series of cumbersome, pedantic rules to prevent ruffling of executive feathers (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 170). Such rules included: Never split the trade mark ‘Coca-Cola’ in two lines, the trade mark must never be obliterated so that it is not perfectly legible, adolescent girls or young women should be the wholesome type; not sophisticated looking, and never refer to Coca-Cola as ‘it’. (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 171)

Going international Woodruff’s bedrock tenet that Coca-Cola should be standardised meant that every bottle and fountain drink should taste exactly the same across the United States – and abroad. By the end of the twenties, Coca-Cola’s missionaries had installed bottlers throughout the world. Because the soda fountain was a uniquely American institution, sales of foreign fountain Coca-Cola were meagre (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 158). These international endeavours took a significant investment of time, money, and effort. In each new country, the

18 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford company hired local lawyers to handle the delicate matter of registering the trademark, a process occasionally complicated by someone who had arrived first. Even though the overseas business didn’t bring in much immediate rev­ enue, Woodruff knew that it had great public relations value (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 160). In 1930, Woodruff formed The Coca-Cola Export Corporation to replace the Foreign Department. Throughout the following decade, Coca-Cola’s already established overseas outposts gradually grew, while new countries were added – small islands like Curaçao, Java, Trinidad, and Jamaica as well as major territories such as England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Switzerland, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. As sales increased abroad, Woodruff decided to build plants worldwide to manufacture concentrate. That way, only the secret flavouring ingredient, 7X, and Merchandise No. 5 would have to be exported (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 173). By the time America entered World War Two, Coca-Cola was over 50 years old and well entrenched in the nation’s culture. Outside the United States, however, was a different story. True, Woodruff had tried to spread the drink worldwide, but in most places it was quite thinly spread. While Coca-Cola had established strong presences in Canada, Cuba, and Germany, it barely had a toehold elsewhere. The Japanese didn’t realise that by bombing Pearl Harbor they were indirectly giving The Coca-Cola Company a worldwide boost that would ensure the soft drink company’s unquestioned global dom­ inance of the industry (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 184). At first, the company attempted to ship already-bottled Coca-Cola abroad. But, despite its privileged status, Coca-Cola ran afoul of military shipping priorities. In a 1942 NBC radio broadcast, Martin Agronsky criticised a massive Coke transport to Australia when there was a critical need for guns and planes. With logistics and the media against them, company officials devised another plan, copying the army’s use of dehydrated food. Why not ship only Coca-Cola concentrate and bottle the stuff overseas? And where a bottling plant wasn’t feasible, why not import portable soda fountains to the front lines? (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 186) The strategy would reap immediate and, indeed, long-term rewards. Incredibly, it appears that technicians who installed Coca-Cola plants behind the front lines were deemed as vital as those who fixed tanks or airplanes. Each Coke man received a military rank commensurate with his company salary, leading some wags to nickname them ‘Coca-Cola Colonels’. These Technical Observers were well aware of the possible markets they were opening. ‘I’m sure that many of the smaller children had never tasted Coca-Cola before’, wrote one Technical Observer from New Guinea, ‘but they’ll certainly be steady customers from now on’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 197). Coca-Cola was not drunk exclusively in Allied countries. In order to thrive inside Nazi Germany, Coca-Cola franchises had waged a rigorous campaign to disassociate themselves from their American roots. While the soft drink came to

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symbolise American freedom – all of the good things back home the GI was fighting for – the same Coca-Cola logo rested comfortably next to the swastika (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 201). Well aware of the need to maintain a positive standing on the home front, Coke’s ad campaigns in the US exploited the drink’s patriotic presence abroad. To avoid paying more taxes, the company poured money into wartime pro­ motions. Coke’s ads carried the new catchphrase, ‘the global high-sign’, and introduced American readers to a few foreign phrases. The Russians, for instance, reacted to Coke by saying ‘Eto Zdorovo’, translated as ‘How grand!’ The ad men continually touted the soft drink’s status as an American icon: ‘Yes, around the globe, Coca-Cola stands for the pause that refreshes – it has become a symbol of our way of living’ (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 191).

The spoils of war The Allied victory in Europe and the Pacific meant that Coca-Cola was in a strong place to capitalise on its wartime investments. By the end of 1950, the business had started in Egypt, Morocco, Barbados, Liberia, Rhodesia, Guadeloupe, Algeria, Gibraltar, Kenya, Thailand, Tunisia, India, Congo, Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, additional plants and aggressive marketing in countries where the industry was already established – primarily Europe and South America – substantially increased per-capita consumption around the world. And Coca-Cola was even more popular on the home front, where the returning veterans brought a decided preference for the drink that had meant so much to them overseas. This result was anticipated by at least one soldier. ‘Personally, I think that The Coca-Cola Company’s cooperation with the Army in getting Coca-Cola to the men in the field is the best advertisement that Coca-Cola has ever had’, he wrote to his former boss at the company. ‘The things that are happening to these men now will stick with them for the rest of their life’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 200). Coca-Cola’s systematic approach was applied to all aspects of its international network. For example, the first step when entering a country was to locate a wealthy, socially prominent, politically influential bottler. Key employees were then brought to the United States for an extensive eight-month indoctrina­ tion – working in plants, riding the trucks, putting up advertising, properly icing coolers, enduring endless Visomatics lessons in the appropriate language. By the time they went home, the new Coca-Cola men had received multiple syrup transfusions. ‘They are linked,’ wrote one company man, ‘by a common faith in Coca-Cola, their belief in the honesty of the product and its value to mankind’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 220). Not surprisingly, Coca-Cola’s signs looked nearly identical worldwide. The company’s ‘pattern advertising’ used the same illustrations and message – all portraying middle-class white Americans (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 228). In 1955, Bill Robinson was appointed the new president of The Coca-Cola Company. Loyal company men were shocked. A rank outsider, a marketing

20 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford and public relations man, Robinson had very limited experience with Coca-Cola and was – God forbid – a Yankee (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 245). Robinson’s background illustrated the value that Coca-Cola placed on marketing and pro­ motions. Significantly, one of Robinson’s first actions was to switch ad agencies, curtailing the long-standing D’Arcy relationship in favour of McCann Erickson, a bigger, more sophisticated New York outfit with worldwide offices. The agency switch symbolised the formal end of the gracious golden age of Coca-Cola advertising. The new agency made extensive use of market research and testing, bringing a contemporary ‘scientific’ bent to Coca-Cola commercials (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 245–6). By the time Paul Austin took over from Robinson in 1962, Coke was facing serious challenges. Despite its agency’s ‘scientific’ approach to advertising, its campaigns failed to hit the mark. Moreover, its primary competitor, Pepsi, was making inroads into a key demographic – the youth market. After three years of research, McCann Erickson found a winner with the ‘Things Go Better with Coca-Cola’ campaign. Launched in 1963, its ‘one-sight, one-sound, one-sell’ approach was universal (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 258). In addition to bringing together disparate appeals that had hitherto been used in the firm’s marketing, the campaign also enabled Coke to appeal to both younger and older consumers. As Coca-Cola continued to grow, its management was forced to adapt to changes occurring both within the firm and, indeed, beyond. ‘We used to be an American company with branches abroad. Today we’re a multi-national business’, explained Austin. To facilitate decision-making, Coke’s worldwide export managers exercised increased autonomy in Austin’s decentralised man­ agement system (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 262). However, new training approa­ ches for senior executives ensured that they remained true to the brand. Coca-Cola’s response to broader social shifts posed a different challenge. As the American civil rights movement gained momentum, Coca-Cola under­ stood that it could not afford to ignore the sweeping social phenomenon. After decades of advertisements featuring smiling white faces, the firm’s management finally permitted Coke advertising to showcase African Americans. In 1965, Barbara McNair appeared in the first ‘main thrust’ TV commercial for CocaCola to use a black celebrity. The cheerful folky sound gave way to Ray Charles, the Supremes, the Fifth Dimension, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Marvin Gaye soulfully conveying the message that ‘Things Go Better with Coke’. Each artist created a distinctive version of the song (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 267). Of course, this shift did not mean that Coke identified with every social movement. Sexism thrived in the America of the mid-sixties, and the men heading Coca-Cola’s marketing department had little desire to do anything about it. Coke’s ‘Smile Girl’ promotion offered prizes to the most toothsome beauties, while ‘curvaceous misses’ added sex appeal to bottler convention skits (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 267). The battle with Pepsi continued to intensify throughout the sixties. With Pepsi marketing making real inroads into the youth market, Coca-Cola redoubled its efforts to connect with this lucrative demographic. McCann

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Erickson’s psychological researchers reported that young people despised hypocrites and phonies, and valued genuine, spontaneous feelings. In response to these findings, one of the agency’s ad men, Bill Backer, resurrected an old 1942 slogan and created ‘The Real Thing’ campaign. Coca-Cola was ‘real’, not phony. It was part of the authentic, natural goodness that the counterculture was seeking. At the same time, the phrase was a subtle dig at Pepsi, which by implication was a fraud. The simple phrase ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ was also altered at this time to ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola’ – a more fitting command from the image-conscious company (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 273). By the late 1960s, the counterculture was in full swing and Pepsi was not the only challenge the company was facing. Protesters were shifting their attention from the Vietnam War to pollution, poverty, malnutrition, racism, sexism, poor education, and chemical additives. In 1969, Ralph Nader, fresh from his victory over General Motors, attacked Coca-Cola in a hearing before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. ‘While The Coca-Cola Company is distributing a high protein chocolate drink … to developing countries’, the crusader complained, ‘it supplies the United States with cola – a massive affliction that someday may be characterised as a disease’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 274). Packaging was another problem. At the beginning of the seventies, 40 per cent of all soft drinks were packaged in ‘one-way’ containers, and the figure was steadily rising. Just after the first Earth Day in April 1970, protesters dumped mounds of nonreturnable Coke bottles in front of the North Avenue headquarters (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 279). As if this was not enough, Coca-Cola was also implicated in the United States’ unpopular and protracted war in Vietnam. Since Coca-Cola symbolised America more than any other product, company executives perceived the country’s faltering self-image as a direct threat. At home, this meant pulling back from messages of worldwide brotherhood and directing McCann Erickson to create an ad campaign that would renew American pride (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 288). For many abroad, Coke symbolised America’s superpower status. Paradoxically, worldwide sales for the first quarter of 1975 reached all-time highs, while gross sales in the United States had actually fallen below those of the previous year (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 289). Coca-Cola’s problems in the American market stemmed from multiple sources. For one, its fiercest competitor was beginning to threaten its dom­ inance. Despite the bravura of Coke’s ads, Pepsi was slowly gaining in the domestic market. In 1977, Pepsi’s advertising budget actually surpassed Coca-Cola’s for the first time, with each firm spending just over US$24 million a year on their main brands (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 289). The brand was also coming under fire from other quarters. Nuns and labour leaders protested at the violence directed at unionised workers at a Coca-Cola bottler in Guatemala. The shrill crusade against homosexuals mounted by Anita Bryant, a star of earlier campaigns, did little to improve Coke’s reputation, as did the firm’s decision to sever communication with the financial press. Internally, things were little better. Coca-Cola’s management viewed their ancient bottling contract as a major problem. Dating from the

22 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford beginning of the 20th century, the contract did not allow for increased labour costs, advertising, overhead, or ingredients besides sugar. The move to alter the contract did not go down well with many bottlers, leaving them divided and angry. By 1979, Coca-Cola stock was worth less than its value at the beginning of the decade, despite a two-for-one split in 1977 that was supposed to encourage the small investor. While reported annual growth for the decade registered 12.5 per cent, the 7.1 per cent inflation rate reduced that to an unimpressive 5.4 per cent (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 302).

A new age When Roberto Goizueta became president of The Coca-Cola Company in May 1980, things were looking bad. There was a perception that ‘Over the last few years, the company has drifted … to a perceived image of a traditional, sedentary, conservative company’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 315). Not only was Coke losing ground to Pepsi, but Diet Pepsi was also muscling it out of the diet market. Although Coca-Cola had been producing TaB for the latter market since 1963, the Pepsi challenge required it to rethink what Coke was and what it meant. It would result in the creation of two iconic products that would go down in history – for very different reasons. With Pepsi making serious inroads into the increasingly lucrative diet market, Coca-Cola’s senior executives understood that they could not afford to let their competitor’s efforts go unchallenged. Their bold solution was to utilise the ‘brand equity’ of the Coca-Cola name. To lend the magical Coke name to any other soft drink was heretical. When a few daring company men had suggested the idea in 1963 when TaB was invented, they were condemned for it. With a commanding lead over all other diet drinks, why would the company want to cannibalise its venerable drink with another diet entry? Furthermore, wouldn’t another product with the Coke name simply dilute the brand, confuse con­ sumers, and contribute to already poor bottler morale? Their solution was Diet Coke, which constituted a ‘line extension’ rather than a new product (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 315). The bold introduction of Diet Coke in 1982 would have a tremendous impact on Coke’s staid image. Moreover, it would revitalise the bottlers, and capitalise on the Coca-Cola name. It would also be profitable, since a sac­ charin-sweetened drink wouldn’t cost as much to produce. The timing was demographically perfect as well: the aging baby boomers weren’t drinking fewer cola drinks, as doomsayers had warned, but were switching to diet drinks as part of the emerging fitness craze. Sergio Zyman, who headed the Diet Coke project, concluded that ‘competition cannot duplicate this effort’, simply because there already was a Diet Pepsi. Because Coke had held back so long, this late bloomer would have an enormous catalytic effect, moti­ vating bottlers to ‘go out and really get aggressive’. In short, concluded the Mexican marketer, ‘this could be the silver bullet’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 315–6).

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Despite being an instant hit with consumers, Diet Coke had critics within the organisation itself. Bottlers interpreted the move as an attempt by The Coca-Cola Company to undermine them and duly challenged the argument that it was a different product. Though legally complex, the basic Diet Coke case issues boiled down to an existential question: What was Coca-Cola? Dis­ affected bottlers argued that Diet Coke constituted an alternatively sweetened form of the old soft drink. After all, the company called it Coke, and the advertising claimed similarity to be the ‘real thing’. If so, the company had to abide by its original contract with the non-amended bottlers, rendering Diet Coke technically illegal, because it didn’t contain 5.32 pounds of sugar. Publicly, Coca-Cola pooh-poohed the lawsuits, dismissing the angry bottlers as a disgruntled minority with little effect on the company’s bottom line. Coke’s lawyers regarded the cases as simple contract disputes over incremental profits (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 324). At the same time that Coca-Cola was launching Diet Coke, it was also moving to undermine the success of its arch-rival. Since its launch in 1975, the Pepsi Challenge had succeeded in establishing a discernible difference between the two brands in the consumer’s mind. Rather than ignoring or refuting its competitor’s claims, Coca-Cola’s marketing team countered them with humour. Commercials featuring comedian Bill Cosby ridiculing Pepsi’s claims were credited with killing the Challenge, which was halted in 1983 (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 321). These commercials slotted neatly into the ‘Coke Is It’ campaign. Launched in 1982, ‘Coke Is It’ was consistent with past campaigns, while enabling con­ sumers to interpret ‘It’ in their own way. They were not the only ones rein­ terpreting what ‘It’ meant. The Coca-Cola Company’s decision to acquire Columbia Pictures for US$750 million that same year indicated that it was not limiting its attempts at diversification solely to its lines of drinks. While CocaCola did not overtly fiddle with the creative content at Columbia, it made sure that certain products never appeared in their films, sending a memo to studio executives forbidding the use of any PepsiCo or Philip Morris (owner of 7-Up) items (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 322). Despite the apparent boldness and innovation of Goizueta’s initiatives, CocaCola continued to face a serious problem. In 1984, Coca-Cola lost one per cent of its market share, while PepsiCo gained one and a half points. The company had tried everything – massive, effective advertising; aggressive mar­ keting; price promotions; almost universal distribution – and nothing had halted the slide. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that, just as the Pepsi Challenge had asserted, the real problem was the product’s taste. People no longer appreciated the Coca-Cola bite. They wanted a sweeter drink – a new Coke (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 328). When Goizueta declared that he was willing to reformulate ‘any or all of our products’ in 1981, he revealed the degree to which Coca-Cola feared it may be overtaken by Pepsi. To this end, it was more important that Coca-Cola be the best-tasting drink in the world than to cling to an outmoded formula

24 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 330). A solution to Coca-Cola’s problems emerged as it was developing Diet Coke. Market research on this new Coke found that consumers preferred its flavour. New Coke was formally launched in 1985, replacing the established formula. At first, the firm revelled in the avalanche of free publicity, negative or other­ wise. Within days, 96 per cent of all Americans knew about the flavour change. The company proceeded with the national roll-out, along with a new Cosby campaign and modified ‘Coke Is It’ slogan (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 334). Having slain the Pepsi Challenge, Cosby was now charged with the task of selling New Coke. Dressed in a silly-looking toga, Cosby intoned: ‘The words I’m about to say will change the course of history. Here they are. Coca-Cola has a new taste.’ His words weren’t terribly convincing. ‘Now, more than ever, Coke is it!’ he finished, but his fatuous smile looked pasted on (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 335). The decision to replace the traditional formula with New Coke was a spec­ tacular failure. No amount of hoopla could mask the shocked misery of loyal Coke drinkers. All of the taste tests had missed one crucial point. Researchers had never informed their respondents that the hypothetical new formula would replace the old. Incredibly, no one had examined the psychological ramifica­ tions of withdrawing the old formula (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 333). A 1979 study had in fact predicted the negative backlash: ‘The brand cannot be made new or improved, for to do so would destroy the mystique, mystery, and lore that surround the brand and constitute its heritage. In the minds of our consumers, the brand cannot be improved’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 334). It seems that in the rush to unveil the great new flavour, a kind of corporate hypnosis had occurred. ‘No one would have listened if someone had said we were going to catch unholy hell’, Zyman (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 333) admitted later. ‘Everybody just said, “This can’t go wrong.”’ It did. Within weeks, sales plummeted, and surveys underscored that Coke’s image was slipping badly (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 338). In the face of the unmitigated disaster that it had brought upon itself, CocaCola brought back its original product to sit alongside New Coke and Diet Coke, with Goizueta curtly declaring: ‘We have heard you.’ Eighteen thousand calls of gratitude jammed the toll-free line on the day of the announcement. Announcing the recall of the traditional Coke, Goizueta (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 338–9) mused: ‘Some critics will say Coca-Cola made a marketing mistake. Some cynics will say that we planned the whole thing. The truth is we are not that dumb and we are not that smart.’ In hindsight it is clear that Goizueta and colleagues had in fact been ‘that dumb’ and that they were responsible for committing what Business Week termed ‘the marketing blunder of the decade’. Oddly enough, pride still blinded the executives. Despite the return of Coca-Cola Classic, they steadfastly maintained that New Coke would surge ahead (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 340). It never would. The New Coke fiasco did not end with consumer discord. It also damaged The Coca-Cola Company’s problematic relationship with its bottlers. In the

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court case against the bottlers, Goizueta had insisted that Coca-Cola was whatever he and the company said it was. On 22 April 1985, it had been one formula, and the next day, it was something completely different. Now, the company insisted that Coke Classic constituted a completely ‘new’ drink with a different name, reserving the right for flexible pricing in the future. To this end, the return of the original formula as Coca-Cola Classic posed a funda­ mental conundrum for Coke advertising. The New Coke disaster effectively killed the ‘Coke Is It’ campaign, since it wasn’t quite clear which Coke was it (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 341). It cost The Coca-Cola Company US$4 million to research and develop New Coke. The masses of data, the taste tests, the well-honed strategy had failed to reveal just how well Candler and Woodruff had done their jobs. Coca-Cola, as much icon as soft drink, stood for traditional values. The corporate blindness stemmed not so much from geography or cultural background as from the eighties mentality. Aggressive, ruthless, and cocky, the new team wanted to repeat the blockbuster breakthrough of Diet Coke. In the process, they over­ looked the most vital emotion of all – love (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 343).

The taste of victory? Over the course of the 1980s, Coca-Cola sought to move on from the New Coke mess by positioning it as just another Coke line. ‘When Coca-Cola is a part of your life’, its new campaign jingle promised, ‘you can’t beat the feeling’. This rather vague concept was supposed to claim consumers with a ‘special relationship’ to Coke. At the end of each spot, a tagline for Classic, New Coke, Diet Coke, and Cherry Coke materialised, but the ads ultimately emphasised the ‘flagship brand’, Classic (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 355). Although the New Coke disaster was largely confined to the United States domestic market, its impact could also be discerned in international operations. Outside the United States, the company maintained ‘Coke Is It’ well beyond the introduction of ‘Can’t Beat the Feeling’ in the domestic market – a normal procedure to see how well the American campaign was progressing and to allow time for testing it in foreign venues. Finally approved for overseas ads late in 1988, it didn’t translate well in several markets, where ‘beating a feeling’ meant something nonsensical or obscene (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 358). The goal for the 1990s, Goizueta (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 366) wrote, was to ‘expand our global business system, reaching increasing numbers of consumers who will enjoy our brands and products more and more often’. This ambitious goal was driven by the dramatic events in Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In November 1989, before the world’s astonished eyes, the Berlin Wall fell, and as it did Coca-Cola men filled the gap, handing out free drinks. Cars lined up for miles to receive cases as they drove through the West Berlin bottling plant. When a young East German soldier stationed on a watchtower yelled down from his lonely perch, a quick-witted Coca-Cola man tossed him a twelve-pack. Western civilisation and its favourite fizzy beverage

26 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford poured through crumbling walls. The East Germans had watched tantalising Coke commercials on their TV sets for years; now they could sample the essence of capitalism (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 366). As Eastern Europe and other former communist countries opened themselves to the mixed fortunes of capitalism, Coca-Cola reconsidered its advertising strategy. Goizueta felt that the main brand’s advertising was lacklustre. Although the Interpublic Group had produced all Coke product ads for dec­ ades, it was felt that the ads had lost fizz and focus (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 372). At the same time that Germany was formally reunifying in the autumn of 1990, Goizueta complained that ‘Can’t Beat the Real Thing’ wasn’t working. A Coke marketing executive noted that Pepsi’s spots were ‘hipper’ than Coke’s. ‘Then go to a hipper source’, Goizueta snapped (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 372). Coca-Cola approached Creative Artists Agency (CAA) about the prospect of reinvigorating the brand by connecting it more closely with current and emerging cultural trends and mores. By using both CAA and McCann Erickson separately to create Coke commercials, Coca-Cola marked the beginning of a new approach. The ads signalled the end of the traditional ‘onesight, one-sound, one-sell’ approach. Instead, each of the disparate spots was supposed to represent a ‘rifle-shot’ directed at one particular market segment. To some critics, they simply appeared uncoordinated (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 374). Over the coming years, this approach was extended. Eventually, Coca-Cola would hire some 25 different agencies to do ads for various company beverages. Agencies were played off against one another. Zyman also hired his own mar­ keting people – most of them without soft drink experience – and placed them around the world, reporting directly to him. ‘It’s very exciting to have all these creative agencies around’, one anonymous ad man observed, ‘but holding them to the same brand values can prove almost impossible’. Another critic called the Coke approach ‘profoundly flawed’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 379). Despite the concerns, the strategy of using different agencies to create targeted commercials seemed to be paying off. By the end of 1994, Coca-Cola had regained its momentum and was named Marketer of the Year by Brandweek magazine (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 382). Another major coup for the brand was the decision to award the 1996 Summer Olympics to Atlanta. While Coca-Cola had cultivated a long-standing relationship with the Olympics, having the event staged in its own backyard would cement this relationship. As an internal publication gloated: As a marketing property and a volume-driving opportunity, the Games in Atlanta will be like nothing this company has ever seen. Really, it’s a soft drink marketer’s dream: During one of the hottest periods of the entire year, millions of scorched, thirsty visitors from all over the entire world will be packed into a circle 3 miles in diameter [and] the company’s pro­ ducts will be within an arm’s reach. (Quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 385)

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Coke had paid US$12 million for the right to sponsor the torch as it crossed America on an 84-day, 15,000-mile journey during which 10,000 runners – none of whom had to pay anything – would carry the flame. Over half of the participants were ‘Community Heroes’ chosen for their good works by local United Way agencies. Coca-Cola chose another 2,500 winners of a contest called ‘Share the Spirit: Who Would You Choose?’ The remainder of the slots were reserved for former Olympic athletes and corporate sponsors. Although the runners did not wear Coke logos, just about everything else did, including the ‘escorts’ who ran alongside. ‘The torch relay will be one long commercial,’ lamented Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Zyman was delighted to agree. ‘Three things have been constant at the Olympics since 1928 – the athletes, the fans and Coca-Cola’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 386). Journalists covering the Games were similarly compelled to comment on Coke’s omnipresence and the brand’s significance. ‘Atlanta’s Olympic Games’, wrote French newspaper Le Monde, ‘touched on some classic themes of the American myth – immodest ambition, an obsession with gold, the powerful reign of the dollar’. Groused another reporter, ‘Atlanta was every bit as ready for the Olympics as America was for New Coke’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 388). For Coca-Cola, the problems that pla­ gued the Games didn’t matter as much as the brand’s newfound ability to connect with the world. As Goizueta would boast: ‘We have gone from simply teaching the world to sing, to teaching the world to drink Coca-Cola’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 388).

Reviving the marketing giant The unbundling of the Coke advertising account and the integration of the Olympic Games into the brand’s marketing strategy reflected a broader shift that emphasised local marketing initiatives around the world. While advertising might be high profile, it had not been the driving force behind Coke’s recent market growth, which could instead be attributed to the execution on the ground, with the proliferation of vending machines, promotions, and inter­ active consumer experiences, such as the virtual reality NASCAR ‘Wall of Speed’ race (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 408–9). The growing emphasis on mar­ keting over advertising was being driven from the top. ‘You let me have the bottling plants and the trucks and the highly efficient systems, and I’ll let you have the TV commercials. I’ll beat you to a pulp over time’, Goizueta had declared. Even with ads, the content wasn’t as important as the ubiquity in places such as pre-movie spots or the burgeoning internet (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 409). Goizueta’s death in 1997 saw Doug Ivester elevated to the firm’s top role. Unlike many of his predecessors, Ivester was not a marketing man – he had been the firm’s Chief Financial Officer (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 346). However, Ivester appreciated the importance of marketing. He had been instrumental in the introduction of new packaging for most of Coke’s products, along with

28 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford other initiatives such as launching sampling campaigns in international markets. His financial and marketing skills would be put to the test shortly after he took over from Goizueta, however, as a global economic downturn in several key markets plunged Coca-Cola into financial difficulties. In 1999, the company’s worldwide volume declined for the first time in a decade. At home in the US, soft drink per capita consumption dropped for the first time in decades (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 412). With the price of Coca-Cola shares falling, key board directors made their move to remove Ivester and replace him with someone who had a better understanding of the brand. Doug Daft would fit the bill. A soft-spoken, affable, and direct Australian, Daft was untested at the highest level, but he had the marketing background that Ivester lacked. He had experience in Japan, with its wild array of beverages, and he had overseen the building of the Chinese business from scratch (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 413). Daft viewed the world differently to his American predecessors. Goizueta’s mantra had been that Coke should think globally but act locally. Daft pronounced that Coca-Cola must not only act locally, but also think locally. Instead of directing the far-flung beverage empire from the North Avenue tower in Atlanta, man­ agers should live in their territories (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 414). The firm’s financial difficulties saw Daft take drastic action. In 2000, he dismissed 20 per cent of Coca-Cola employees worldwide. The workforce at Coke’s head­ quarters fared worse – nearly half of the employees in Atlanta were dismissed. The international market was showing some troubling signs. While the American post-Cold War ascendancy had opened new international markets for Coca-Cola, it was also creating new problems for the brand’s global operations. In Asia, Coca-Cola served as a convenient symbol for US capitalism and imperialism. In October 2001, the radical People’s War Group bombed a Coke plant in southern India in protest of the American invasion of Afghani­ stan. A month later, Maoist rebels attacked a Coca-Cola factory in Nepal (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 423). Meanwhile, Coke’s fabled marketing machine appeared to be broken. With the ‘Always Coca-Cola’ theme wearing thin after seven years, early in 2000 the company switched to ‘Coca-Cola. Enjoy.’ The television spots were pre­ dictable. In one, a young man dives down a huge waterfall, then swims to the bottom to retrieve a refreshing Coke to share with his friends. Another non­ verbal beach scene features loud music over dizzying edits of surfboarding and parasailing, with Coke-swilling at the end. ‘Rather bland and forgettable’, one viewer noted (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 417). In January 2007, Coke bought a Super Bowl ad for the first time since 1998, even though a thirty-second television spot cost US$2.6 million (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 447). While this return to the world’s most famous commercial break signalled Coke’s commitment to improving its marketing presence, television’s effectiveness as an advertising and marketing medium was coming under threat from the internet. At first, Coke marketers weren’t sure what to make of the wild, unpredictable, democratic world of the internet. In 2005, Fritz Grobe, a

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juggler, and his friend Stephen Voltz, a lawyer, discovered that when they dropped candy Mentos into Diet Coke, it caused a fizzy eruption. Experi­ menting in Grobe’s backyard in rural Maine, they became impresarios, and in June 2006 they posted a hilarious video of their ‘Experiment 137’ on the web. Dressed in white lab coats and protective goggles, they choreographed a fan­ tastic, varied geyser display using 101 two-litre bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos. At the end of the two-minute video, they toast each other with Diet Coke, then spit-spray it at each other and laugh. The video went viral, attracting millions of viewers, and Grobe and Voltz appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman and the Today Show. Coke initially distanced itself from the odd phenomenon but then embraced it, inviting Grobe and Voltz to pro­ duce their geysers at North Avenue headquarters and hosting ‘Experiment 214’ on the Coke website for several months (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 448). Growing concerns about Coke’s impact on health posed a more profound challenge than new media platforms. While questions about Coca-Cola’s nutritional value had been circulating since the nineteenth century, the latest wave focused on obesity and its relationship with an ingredient that was cer­ tainly present in the Classic line – sugar. Coke Zero was intended to launch as a no-calorie alternative to Coke Classic without cannibalising Diet Coke sales, but marketing in the US again proved a weak point. The campaign flopped, as the vague ads failed to convey the essential message that Coke Zero had zero calories (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 439). However, Coca-Cola’s multilateral global marketing strategy meant that it had the capacity to adapt successful initiatives and strategies from individual markets and apply them elsewhere. In Australia, Coke Zero sales took off. Why? Partly because the bottles and cans were a distinctive, macho black. So Coke switched to black in North America, pur­ suing a so-called ‘red-black-silver strategy’ – red for Coke Classic, black for Coke Zero, and silver for Diet Coke (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 448). The stigma attached to sugary soft drinks led The Coca-Cola Company to diversify its holdings to include water, juices, and energy drinks. Appointed to Coca-Cola’s CEO position in 2004, Neville Isdell was a career Coke man who had worked for the brand across five continents. With his global perspective, Isdell invited his leadership team to reconsider what Coke stood for. While management and marketing challenges were his key areas of concern, Isdell also considered broader issues affecting the brand. Giant multi­ nationals like Coca-Cola needed to pay closer attention to their social obliga­ tions and responsibilities – failure to do so would alienate consumers and key partners. In 2007, Isdell announced that Coke would give the World Wildlife Fund US$20 million to help conserve seven of the world’s most vital river basins, including the Yangtze, Mekong, and the Danube. Isdell also emphasised the company’s commitment to reduce its water usage and improve water recycling at its bottling plants (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 449). Such actions were not mere exercises in public relations; they also made business sense. Despite the efforts to reinvigorate the company and the brand, Coca-Cola continued to face a tough market. By the time Muhtar Kent become CEO of

30 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford the company in 2008, the US economy was sliding into recession. The entire stock market declined, dragging Coca-Cola stock back down to US$50 a share. As gas prices simultaneously rose to US$4 a gallon, people cut back on buying drinks at convenience stores after filling up at the pump. In fact, soft drink sales by 2009 had declined for four consecutive years in the United States, and percapita consumption had been falling since peaking in 1998 (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 454). Kent’s solution to these problems was to make Coca-Cola ‘more efficient, leaner and more adaptive to changing market conditions’. One of his solutions was to drive efficiencies in the supply chain and to encourage green initiatives that got good press and saved money. Coke and its bottlers began a switch to hybrid vehicles. Thinner, lighter bottles reduced plastic and saved on shipping costs. A small but significant efficiency measure was the decision to drop ‘Classic’ from the Coke name. It had been used only in the United States and was an unwelcome reminder of the 1985 New Coke disaster that had made the designation ‘Coca-Cola Classic’ necessary (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 455). In 2009, Coca-Cola launched a new global marketing campaign, ‘Open Happiness’, created by Wieden+Kennedy. It was a brilliant evolution from the previous campaign, and it showed that Joe Tripodi, Coke’s new Chief Marketing Officer, had been boning up on Coke history and culture. ‘Our brand isn’t here to solve world peace or fix the economy’, he said. ‘We represent a small moment of pleasure in a sometimes very stressful or difficult day’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 454) Just as ‘The Pause That Refreshes’ had worked during the Great Depression, ‘Open Happiness’ fit the global recession of the twenty-first century (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 454). Coca-Cola continued to face challenges, but under Kent the firm displayed greater confidence in dealing with them. Coke freely admitted that its do-good activities were ultimately designed to boost the bottom line one way or the other. Kent pointed out that in Kenya where Coke drilled a new well, women who had spent hours fetching polluted water in buckets were now operating a local catering business. Like thousands of others in the developing world, they used bicycles or pushcarts to deliver Coke products (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 459). The prospect of having governments place taxes on sugary soft drinks elicited a more aggressive response, and the company’s budget for lobbying the US fed­ eral government was ramped up from around US$3 million in 2008 to over US$12 million in 2009. Coca-Cola similarly dug deep to support the American Beverage Association’s efforts to combat proposed soda taxes at the state level. By contrast, the changing media landscape required Coke to rethink its tightly run marketing strategies and approaches. The demise of the broadcast model meant that the television commercial could no longer operate as the flagship of Coke’s marketing efforts. In the digital age, consumers were calling the shots. Coca-Cola’s 2010 campaign featured ‘Happiness Ambassadors’ whose travels were dictated by consumers using online platforms. ‘We did something we’d never done before,’ said Clyde Tuggle, Coke’s chief PR man. ‘We basi­ cally turned over the public relations for our brand to the consumers’ (quoted

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in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 465) The event was, of course, tightly choreographed and planned to garner as much positive publicity for Coca-Cola as possible. Yet Tuggle had a point. Coke was pioneering a new marketing approach. The Happiness Ambassadors were part of many Coke efforts to involve consumers interactively. For instance, in 2010 Sprite launched its first global marketing campaign, allowing online fans to remix and mash up songs and to create their own short animated movies (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 465). Over the coming decade, Coke would increasingly embrace digital platforms and establish itself as an innovative advertiser in the process. In March 2011, Beverage Digest published its annual soda ranking, revealing that Diet Coke had surpassed Pepsi to become the number two soft drink in the United States. Even though the sales for Coca-Cola had dipped by 0.5 per cent in 2010, and Diet Coke by 1 per cent, sales of Pepsi had declined by 4.8 per cent. It was a humiliating result for the perennial runner-up. ‘Pepsi lost the cola war last week’, Advertising Age announced (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 468). By the 2010s, it had become clear that The Coca-Cola Company was no longer merely a soft drink business. When Coke paid nearly US$1 billion in 2011 for half of Aujan Industries, a Saudi Arabian company that made a line of fruit drinks, such purchases had become almost routine. Around the world, the company sold 3,500 non-alcoholic beverages with 500 brands, three times as many as ten years before (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 469). While the corporation was moving beyond the cola wars, the Coke brand remained at the core of the firm’s operations. Its 2016 ‘Taste the Feeling’ campaign combined the past and the present. Rather than marketing each Coke brand separately, Coca-Cola Light/Diet Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola Zero and Coca-Cola Life would all be united under a single global umbrella: ‘Taste the Feeling’. As Coca-Cola’s Chief Marketing Officer, Marcos de Quinto, explained: We are reinforcing that Coca-Cola is for everybody. Coca-Cola is one brand with different variants, all of which share the same values and visual iconography. People want their Coca-Cola in different ways, but which­ ever one they want, they want a Coca-Cola brand with great taste and refreshment. (Geier, 2016) Far from being an attempt to return to the glory days of the past, this was a solution to current issues. The proliferation of Coke products on the market, coupled with the growing number of online platforms reaching niche audiences, had eroded the brand’s overall salience in the marketplace.

Conclusion The decision to centralise Coca-Cola’s marketing efforts reveals the degree to which the Coke brand underpins The Coca-Cola Company’s fortunes. Despite

32 M. Pendergrast and R. Crawford declining sales of carbonated soft drinks, the Coca-Cola brand remains the ‘oxygen’ of the company (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 480). Throughout For God, Country and Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola was treated as a tongue-in-cheek religion of sorts, but the notion actually isn’t so far-fetched (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 471). Since its development in the nineteenth century, Coke has achieved the status of a substitute modern religion that promotes a particular, satisfying, all-inclusive worldview espousing perennial values such as love, peace, happiness, and uni­ versal brotherhood (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 472). In the process, it has survived management disasters, morale problems, obesity concerns, human rights and environmental allegations, and more. Of course, the reality is more prosaic. Paul Foley, the long-time head of McCann Erickson’s umbrella agency, summarised it best. ‘We’re selling smoke’, he always reminded his creative staff. ‘They’re drinking the image, not the product’ (quoted in Pendergrast, 2013, p. 473). To this end, we can see that the Coca-Cola religion has no real morality, no commandment other than increased consumption of its drinks (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 481).

References Geier, B. (2016) ‘Coca-Cola Has a Tasty New Ad Campaign’, Fortune, 19 January. Available at https://fortune.com/2016/01/19/coca-cola-has-a-tasty-new-ad­ campaign/. Pendergrast, M. (2013) For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. 3rd edn. New York: Basic Books.

2

Coke and the Hilltop Joanna K. Love

On 17 May 2015, 3.3 million viewers tuned in to watch the curtain call of the critically acclaimed US television series Mad Men. It became famous for its historically informed portrayal of the innerworkings of the 1960s and early 1970s American advertising industry (Kissell, 2015). Fans watched eagerly as the show’s anti-hero, Don Draper, escaped to a secluded Californian retreat centre to grapple with his uncertain future. In the show’s final seconds, Draper experienced a life-changing vision during a period of meditation: this vision was familiar for many viewers in its picturing of international youth singing the praises of America’s number one soda brand amid the expanses of a pastoral hillside. In real life, the television spot had become one of the most iconic music-themed commercials of the twentieth century. Its inclusion led experi­ enced viewers to realise, and inexperienced ones to surmise, that Draper’s envisioning of Coca-Cola’s famous 1971 commercial, ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ (commonly known as ‘Hilltop’), would seal his fate as one of the most acclaimed admen in history. This carefully crafted inclusion of ‘Hilltop’ illuminates the spot’s enduring legacy. Draper’s character was, of course, fictional – the idea was well credited to McCann-Erickson creative director, Bill Backer – but the placement of this commercial in the final moments of Mad Men was critical in boosting the credibility of the series as well as the iconicity of the television spot. For the show, ‘Hilltop’ aligned Man Men with the cultural capital of the Coke brand and allowed it to have a hopeful and pleasant resolution – something many fan theories thought unlikely (Pennington, 2015; Wood, 2015). To Coke’s advantage, baby boomers were reminded of an idealised countercultural past, while subsequent generations were introduced to a commercial that changed the standards for pop-themed jingles and international marketing efforts. As a result, Mad Men revived public interest in the spot and dozens of media outlets revisited the story of its creation and reception, further encouraging the show’s fans to re-watch, prompting thousands, if not millions, of new YouTube views. Most significantly, the act of playing the entirety of ‘Hilltop’ in the show’s last seconds venerated it as the pinnacle text from the golden age of the American advertising industry, sealing the public perception of Coca-Cola as the most successful and popular brand of the twentieth century.

34 J.K. Love ‘Hilltop’ is recognised as The Coca-Cola Company’s earliest calculated attempt at global advertising with McCann Erickson (O’Barr, 2000). Its place­ ment in Mad Men confirms the sheer breadth of Coke’s international expansion by the early 1970s; the massive popularity of the spot and its jingle-turned­ chart-topping single, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’, has turned it into a piece of cultural folklore. Indeed, the show revived widely circulated narratives about the spot’s perceived authenticity and sincerity as a commercial loosely based on a true story that garnered instant fame by extending US countercultural desires of peace and love into a global context. Mad Men thus faithfully reproduced the well-worn tale that its success ultimately rested on its ability to picture the world and teach it ‘to sing in perfect harmony’. However, the realities of ‘Hilltop’s’ creation and reception are far more complicated and perplexing. What is left out of Mad Men and other accounts is that the television spot was a necessary extension of Backer’s jingle idea that despite its later popularity was initially not well received. Both the jingle and television commercial faced considerable obstacles and were met with resistance at various points from US consumers, bottlers, and overseas distributors. Moreover, top executives like Roberto Goizueta expressed lukewarm feelings toward the campaign, because it ‘did not sell much Coke’ (Greising, 1998, p. xviii). The title phrase of Goizueta’s biography, I’d Like the World to Buy a Coke, aptly quotes his misgivings in its deliberate re-arrangement of the jingle’s lyrics (ibid.). Then-CEO J. Paul Austin also reportedly did not care for the commercial but was thought to approve it simply because the brand needed to extend its international marketing (Greising, 1998, p. 44). Twenty-two years later, Backer wrote a retrospective book detailing the multiple failures and sometimes herculean efforts that he, and the others he named as part of a larger ‘Hilltop’ ‘idea family’, undertook just to keep the campaign alive. This chapter revisits ‘Hilltop’ and the competing narratives that surround its legacy – namely, the extremes of its successes and failures, varied reception, and musical acclaim yet unimpressive soda sales – in an effort to provide a more nuanced consideration of how Coca-Cola’s aspirations and identity as an American brand played a role in its mid-twentieth century international advertising efforts. More specifically, the sections below re-examine and re­ historicise the spot’s legacy through a closer analysis of its musical track and imagery against the backdrop of the political ethos of the brand’s American homeland, its well-documented marketing approaches, and its position within the cola wars. Part I employs first-hand accounts and primary sources to reconsider ‘Hilltop’s’ place within the larger history of Coca-Cola’s global expansion and marketing, its relationship to the late 1960s and early 1970s US counterculture, and the particulars of its creation and reception. Part II engages with cultural theory on advertising, race, and multiculturalism to closely investigate ‘Hilltop’s’ music and images against Coke’s efforts to portray itself as a global brand. This chapter thus demonstrates that, despite the intent for ‘Hilltop’ to appeal to international markets by amplifying the brand’s wellworn aims to promote product universality through burgeoning ideologies of

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multiculturalism, it was the spot’s distinctly Western and explicitly American approaches – specifically the counterculturally minded musical score and the typecast internationally themed visuals that supported it – that resonated with US audiences while complicating its reception and sales abroad.

Part I: Coca-Cola and ‘Hilltop’ in context Advertising at home and abroad Touting itself as America’s first and best-selling national soda brand, Coke has built its reputation on claims of consistency and pleasantness since its creation in 1886. Pat Watters documents that Coke’s early print ads often pictured attrac­ tive, wholesome-looking and fair-skinned women, and rarely included sugges­ tions of political or social turmoil (1978, pp. 214–33). Smiling imagery and idyllic Americana also pervaded its mid-twentieth century marketing with unforgettable Norman Rockwell artistry, as well as the now-iconic images of a white-bearded and red-suited Santa Claus that became America’s preferred version of Saint Nick. According to long-time Coca-Cola executive Robert Woodruff, the simple purpose of its advertising was ‘to be liked’ (Backer, 1993, p. 83). In fact, the brand mandated that its advertising ‘must never be “com­ petitive, offensive, tricky, [or] brash”’ (Time Magazine, 1950, p. 30). Coke therefore remained steadfast in disseminating pleasant and likeable messages, even through the World Wars and Great Depression years, as it strove to pro­ ject happiness and American values that aligned with its Southern US head­ quarters – most obviously the white and middle-class notions of family, respectability, and upward mobility. As Coke spread globally, it applied these same values abroad. It began exporting to Canada as early as 1900 (The Coca-Cola Company, 1971, p. 22), and Woodruff increased overseas operations during his reign from roughly 1919–1960 (Jackson and Fulberg, 2003, p. 90). His successors followed suit, leading to its presence in 200 countries today. Notably, the com­ pany’s mid-twentieth century global approaches to operations, sales, dis­ tribution, and marketing followed the premise that Coca-Cola was a universal, and a universally appealing, product and brand. Coke prided itself on hiring locals to manage, mix, bottle, market, and distribute its product abroad. Because each branch was locally owned and operated, the company made bold claims that its product was ‘indigenous’ to other nations (The Coca-Cola Company, 1971, p. 22). Moreover, while claim­ ing to recognise that each region or nation fostered its own sets of cus­ toms, beliefs, and values, its business practices reflected the ideology that all Coke people were inherently the same, united by their appreciation of ‘the real thing’. In an effort to keep this vision intact and avoid taking political risks, the brand’s public policy was to stay out of local affairs, and when asked to participate, or were accused of doing so, executives denied any involvement (Watters, 1978, pp. 193–5).

36 J.K. Love Although explicit mention of its competitors was strictly forbidden, especially arch-rival Pepsi-Cola (Pendergrast, 1993, pp. 265–6), Coke kept Pepsi in its sights following the success of the latter brand’s Depression-era 1939 ‘Nickel, Nickel’ campaign, which considerably boosted its US sales with claims of superior quantity and affordability. When Pepsi experimented with its image, target demographics, and psychographics in the 1940s and 1950s, Coke held steady in its approaches and relied on its reputation and consistency to maintain its dominant market share. However, when Pepsi made the key shift towards youth in 1961 – a wise move considering that the baby boomer generation would make up almost half of the US population by mid-decade (Bart, 1962, p. 66) – Coke had no choice but to respond. Popular music then became the turf on which the ‘cola wars’ took place during latter half of the twentieth century (Love, 2019). Coke watched Pepsi closely throughout the 1960s and was quick to respond to, and even outdo, its competitor by hiring big name musical endorsers. Surprisingly, most accounts of Coke’s 1971 ‘Hilltop’ campaign often glossed over or left out the fact that this close culturally focused rivalry prompted its creation (Love, 2019). More importantly, they failed to mention its similarities to Pepsi’s preceding 1969– 1973 counterculturally minded campaign, ‘You’ve Got a Lot to Live, and Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give’ (Live/Give), and the mutual benefit the two campaigns had on one another. The cola wars meet the counterculture As pictured in Mad Men’s final episodes, the countercultural movement of the mid-to-late 1960s was centred in specific areas of the US, especially the California Bay Area. It eventually spread to other parts of the country and to some extent had similar resonances in the UK, although as Theodore Roszak notes, European youth movements took different approaches (1969, pp. 2–4). Music was central to the ideals of college-aged youth who followed the US movement (Anderson, 1995 p. 245), where folk and psychedelic rock became their preferred genres for expression. More generally, it promoted an anti­ establishment ethos that followed Timothy Leary’s call to ‘turn on’ one’s mind (often through drug use), ‘tune in’ (to new, sensory-focused ways of experi­ encing the world), and ‘drop out’ (of school and society). Author Thomas Frank (1997) details how some US cultural industries picked up on countercultural themes of the ‘hip’ and the ‘cool’ later in the decade. But at the height of the movement, most national brands shied away from explicit associations with it because its participants – often referred to as ‘hippies’ – were viewed by authorities as threatening to Cold War American political structures (Anderson, 1995, pp. 241–5), corporate industries, and nuclear family values with their advocacy for (among other things) communal living, environmental protec­ tions, ‘free love’, and world peace. By the end of the decade, the optimism of this movement was crushed by the assassination of key civil rights leaders, continued war in Vietnam, violence at the Altamont Music Festival, and

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unresolved racial and gender inequalities. As Americans were left feeling uncertain about their futures, both soda giants seized the opportunity, as Frank put it, to present the world with a ‘sanitised’ and ‘depoliticised’ version of countercultural hope (1997, pp. 181–2). Just two years prior to Coke’s ‘Hilltop’ television debut, Pepsi’s ‘Live/Give’ employed its own communal anthem – a substantially reworked version of a protest tune written by Joe Brooks (Bergin, 1985) – and coupled it with posi­ tive images that were intended to lift the nation’s spirits with references to the aspirations of the then-largely defunct countercultural movement. In a story that predates similar accounts about the success amassed by ‘Hilltop’, Pepsi reported that its bottlers received over 10,000 letters about ‘Live/Give’ while its advertising agency – the legendary BBD&O from which Mad Men creators took inspiration – received thousands of congratulatory phone calls (Pepsi-Cola World, 1968, p. 20). Coke’s ‘Hilltop’ followed hot on the heels of Pepsi’s ‘Live/Give’, using its momentum to promote similar resonances of communal goodwill and nostalgia for more optimistic times. In terms of sales, the campaigns were surprisingly less competitive than supportive of one another, pushing Pepsi’s US market share closer to Coca-Cola’s even in the years following ‘Hilltop’ and the success of its jingle-turned-hit-single (Pepsi-Cola Media Ordering Catalogs, 1972–1973). But as Frank points out, the popularity of these campaigns proved crucial in making the counterculture seem ‘all American’ (1997, p. 179).

The rocky road to ‘Hilltop’ In early 1971, Bill Backer, who had gained favour for his highly effective, musicfocused ‘Things Go Better with Coca-Cola’ campaign, was instructed to devise a new jingle using Coke’s ‘It’s the Real Thing’ slogan, which had been revived from the brand’s early 1940s efforts to respond to the achievements of Pepsi’s ‘Nickel, Nickel’ (Dietz, 1973, p. 174). As indicated by its unique selling proposition (USP), the campaign aimed to tout the legitimacy of Coke over its perceived imitators. Backer reported that the idea for what would become ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ came to him on his way to work out new ideas with Billy Davis (a music producer/writer and former Four Tops member) and Roger Cook (a British songwriter). Backer had also booked a recording session with the Australian-born folk-pop group The New Seekers, who were building a following in the UK (Backer, 1993, pp. 2–7). While on his way to meet with his collaborators in London, Backer’s plane was grounded by dense fog in Shannon, Ireland. As he and other international passengers suffered through less-than-ideal overnight accommodations, and assembled to await clearance at the airport the following day, Backer noticed that even those who were most disgruntled the day before appeared to relax as they shared a Coca-Cola with those around them. Finding the experience moving, he took the idea about linking the soda with intercultural bonding to Cook and Davis who, in only a matter of hours, would affix the lyrics to a tune they intended to use for a different jingle (Backer, 1993, p. 33).

38 J.K. Love Soon after taking ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ to The New Seekers manager, Backer discovered that the group was having a difficult time record­ ing it. Foreshadowing the way in which US audiences would initially respond to the jingle, they did not understand its message. They also struggled to sing it in the traditional Madison Avenue choir jingle sound they assumed Coke would want (Backer, 1993, p. 53). After many failed takes, Backer stopped the session to better explain his concept. The New Seekers expressed their confusion about who the ‘I’ in the lyrics referred to, assuming it referred to the Coca-Cola corporation (Backer, 1993, p. 57). As Australian citizens they also did not understand the ges­ ture of inviting a global community to drink a soda instead of tea. Backer attempted to address their confusion by explaining that the concept of the ‘I’ was a universal one – one that matched the universal ideology held by the brand – and included anyone who wanted to help the world. As for choosing to invite the world over for a cold, carbonated, syrupy drink, he told them to simply pretend to be Americans for a day. Backer further reminded them that they were hired for their sound and encouraged them to sing in their acclaimed folk-pop style (ibid.). The resulting recording featured the group’s well-known close vocal harmonies, acoustic instrumentation, and lilting delivery. The New Seekers recording of ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ was sent to US radio stations on 12 February 1971 (Backer, 1993, p. 82). To Backer’s dismay, it was a bust as the jingle’s message was lost on listeners. Coke’s bottlers further complained that it was not a hard-enough sell (ibid.). It became clear that the tune was not persuasive enough to realise a universalising vision of the world as a Coca-Cola-sipping community. Coke’s promotion of global unity funnelled through a folk-tinged jingle required more explanation. It was not until the release of the ‘Hilltop’ television commercial in the US that audiences would take to the jingle. An explicit picturing of Coke’s ‘United Chorus of the World’ worked to clarify the tune’s implied connections to the product and people around the globe (Backer, 1993, p. 128). However, the task of creating the commercial proved challenging, as inclement weather and casting issues wasted considerable film, time, and money. It caused multiple set reloca­ tions, script revisions, and pleas for more funding. Many weeks and an estimated $250,000 later on an Italian hillside, Backer’s initial concept was finally visualised in a commercial picturing hundreds of international youth lip-syncing over The New Seekers recorded track (Ryan, 2012). Before making it on air, the campaign hit yet another snag: Coca-Cola Europe refused to use it, claiming it was simply ‘too American’ for their con­ sumers to understand (Backer, 1993, p. 248). US union laws that regulated filming abroad also prevented it from being distributed at home until it pre­ miered overseas or the brand could justify its filming location. Practicality thus necessitated that Backer add one final piece of information: a text crawl explaining the USP and the premise that young people from various nations had assembled in the Italian countryside to bring Coke’s message of unity to the world. This addition pleased local unions and added the final piece of clarity that audiences needed to comprehend the campaign’s message.

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The McCann Erikson agency, as well as Coke’s bottlers and headquarters, reported receiving over 100,000 letters in the months after the spot aired in the US in July 1971 (Ryan, 2012), many of which asked for copies of the song’s score and lyrics (Herbert, 1972, p. 13). US radio stations claimed to be bom­ barded with requests to play the jingle as if it were a hit song (Andrews & Barbash, 2016). This flurry of interest prompted Backer and his creative team to rewrite the lyrics, add more verses, and rerecord it to circulate as a standa­ lone song, first with a newly created group called the Hillside Singers (because The New Seekers were unavailable), and then later with the original group. For the recording featuring The New Seekers, Backer removed explicit refer­ ences to the brand, renamed the tune after its second verse (‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’), and added a third verse that intentionally described the commercial’s imagery. To everyone’s surprise, these recordings did well on mainstream music charts, hitting #13 and #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US and becoming the Christmas #1 in the UK. The tune even inspired a spin-off play for American school children (Taylor, 2012, pp. 157–8). Even without specifically mentioning the product or the USP, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’ helped to keep Coca-Cola and ‘Hilltop’ in viewers’ minds, allowing for the commercial and song to reinforce one another and keeping it on the US charts well into the following year (Music Industry Data, 1971–1972). As surmised by Mark Pendergrast, the popularity of the spot and single was also surely boosted by the success of similar acoustic, folk, and singer-songwriter hits that graced the charts at the same time (1993, p. 305). Songs by Carole King (‘You’ve Got a Friend’) and Simon and Garfunkel (‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’) fea­ tured analogous themes about healing and hopefulness, and used the same musical tactics as The New Seekers – close vocal harmonies, acoustic instrumentation, large-scale textural and dynamic expansions, and soaring climactic choruses. Backer’s jingle-turned-pop-song blended well with the sounds of other mainstream US singles. ‘Hilltop’ also seemed to anticipate the future convergences of advertising and the music industry, functioning like a promotional music video for the hit single just a decade before the launch of MTV and 13 years before hearing the latest hit songs would become commonplace in television commercials (Love, 2015; 2019).

Part II: Teaching the world to lip-sync Coke’s universalist approaches to multiculturalism Despite its overwhelming acceptance by American and some overseas audi­ ences, ‘Hilltop’ continued to receive scepticism from European markets. Dis­ tributors argued that it was not only ‘too American’ (as noted above), but British executives in particular thought it was in bad taste coming from a soda company saying that the message was not about the bottom line (Backer, 1993, pp. 275–6). A closer consideration of the ideas ‘encoded’ into the spot’s music

40 J.K. Love and images (Hall, 1973) – namely, the musical allusions to the American counterculture and aims to filter the universalism of the US brand through a visual depiction of the nation’s emerging multicultural practices – illuminated why ‘Hilltop’ might have been read cynically as imposing rather than inclusive for non-US audiences. Backer credits his team of songwriters with filling in the jingle’s lyrical framework with non-soda sentiments that turned out to be essential to its perceived countercultural message. The title phrase, written by Backer, served to foreground the product but its hard-sell lyrics were eventually placed much later in the jingle. The opening phrase was then changed to ‘I’d like to buy the world a home’, following Billy Davis’s suggestion the brand should recognise that the people, first and foremost, required a roof over their heads (Backer, 1993, p. 32). Davis’s lyrics gestured nicely towards the sense of community that Coke’s continued international expansion sought to reach, and also to the ‘harmony’ that its politically tense American homeland hoped to restore. The phrase also worked well to set the tune up for a softer-sell message – one that would deviate from the other soda commercials of its time by omitting the spoken narration typically inserted to explain the slogan or product’s qualities. The language in the following phrases continued Davis’s sense of global goodwill, but proved specific to the American and British, to some extent, countercultural movement with calls for ‘love’ and ‘harmony’, an affinity for nature with references to ‘trees’, ‘bees’, and ‘turtledoves’, and the promotion of unity through song – teaching the world to sing. Countercultural ties between community bonding and music-making were further emphasised in the recor­ ded arrangement by The New Seekers, which incrementally added vocal lines and instrumentation. The track’s rousing quality was therefore created by its skilful movement from an aural suggestion of individuality – first heard in the singer-songwriter-tinged opening female solo voice, and later, in the repeated refrain, ‘I’d like to’ – to the thicker textures and increased dynamics of multiple voices and instruments that harmonised, echoed, and extended the soloist’s melodic line. Listeners would later reflect that the song took on a ‘hymn-like’ quality as the solo-voiced folk-tune gradually expanded into multi-voiced counterpoint harmonies that proved reminiscent of a community or ‘church’ choir (Holt, 2004, p. 24). The climactic energy of the counterculturally minded jingle-hymn thus became uplifting enough, and distracting, by the second verse to allow the eventual naming of the Coke product to glide by almost unnoticed. Call and response patterns clearly derived from African-American music enveloped the unison melody to add further aural dimension as the verses gave way to an inspiring or – more appropriately for a commercial – a convincing contrapuntal chorus on the ‘It’s the Real Thing’ USP. The increased textural density further created text painting by sonically supporting what some heard as an overly ‘sentimental’ assertion (Backer, 1993, p. 275) that the unity between multiple voices, as facilitated by the US-based product, was ‘what the world wants today’. The jingle’s overlapping suspended chords perpetuated an unending

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loop of tension and release as the ‘Real Thing’ slogan and affirmations about the world’s desires for it were staggered to harmonise with the repeated title phrase in a cycle that moved from the resolute tonic (I) to the non-resolute V-of-V. The jingle’s fade-out on the contrapuntal USP thus avoided reaching any sense of finality, allowing the tune in theory to continue in perpetuity – a common tactic used to aurally boost desire for the product (Love, 2015, pp. 194–5, 197). Backer later recounted that his central idea was ‘to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be, but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help them to keep company for a few minutes’ (1993, p. 7). ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ thus aligned with Coke’s self-image and its aforementioned one-directional perspectives on global expansion by attempting to provide a contemporary, early 1970s vision of its product as a unifying and universal commodity. Regardless of the location consumed, the intent was to encapsulate its consumers into one ‘I’ Coke drin­ ker. Backer and his team therefore sonically name and define the universal ‘I’ protagonist in the musical score, demonstrating how she, in this case, aurally becomes part of a much larger Coke-drinking community. However, the problem with any position of universality is that it typically takes on a hegemonic position, one in which the dominant structures of power over­ take all others. The very concept of joining the world together in song works off the well-worn bromide that music itself is universal – a premise that has been thoroughly critiqued by music scholars (see McClary, 1991). The tropes employed in the track reinforced the notion that the universality of Americaninfluenced popular music is paired with praises to a universally lauded soda cor­ poration to create a doubly universal means for finding commonality. In this way, the musical track imposes an American vision of universalism through its musical characteristics, English-language lyrics, praising of a US brand, and recounting of a thoroughly ‘sanitised’ and ‘depoliticised’ version of US countercultural ideology. Strikingly, the absence of non-Western sounds and languages that made the stand-alone jingle initially ineffective for US audiences who, like The New See­ kers, struggled to hear ‘the world’ to which the lyrics referred to, was made even more obvious with the addition of ‘multicultural’ imagery in the television spot. ‘Hilltop’ represented an early, albeit clumsy, attempt to explore the eco­ nomic potential for multicultural discourses in advertising. US views of multi­ culturalism in the 1970s grew out of the post-civil rights era as a pedagogical practice that aimed to recognise cultural differences and teach empowerment and acceptance (Gordon and Newfield, 1996, pp. 1–15). By the following decade, these aims would be absorbed into late-capitalist ideology as the process of identifying differences allowed for further segmentation of the marketplace, thereby opening more avenues for economic gain (Ritchey, 2019). Multi­ culturalism thus seeped into American cultural, social, and political life in unexpected ways and would, by the 1980s, be enveloped into corporate policies and become a staple of US marketing practices. ‘Hilltop’ held off on revealing Coke’s multiculturalist vision until the camera had established the brand’s status-quo values with a close-up of a blue-eyed,

42 J.K. Love blonde-haired, fair-skinned woman whose ‘pleasant’ image is reminiscent of the brand’s early twentieth century print ads. This young woman who lip-syncs the opening solo phrase represents the ideal ‘I’ Coke drinker – one who is Western, ‘wholesome’, and innocent in her appearance. An English governess in real life (Ryan, 2012), this actress is also well matched with the domesticity implied in Davis’s opening lyrics as she mouths her wish to ‘buy the world a home, and furnish it with love’. Her image further aligns with the countercultural themes explored in the track, since most who participated were white college-aged students (Roszak, 1995, p. xl), and as critics point out, many were privileged enough to return to their previous social positions once the movement had grown cold. When the camera pans out on the following phrase, it reveals advertising’s, and America’s, often heavy-handed approaches to depicting difference in the post-civil rights era, as intentional typecasting and exoticised consuming (Backer, 1993, p. 213) heightens and encapsulates the perceived racial differ­ ences between these youth. Since no effort was made to promote real insight into or acceptance of these cultures outside the confines of the commercial, ‘Hilltop’s’ depictions of multiculturalism follow American advertising’s typical practices of reducing diversity down to appearances, which in turn works to create a more obvious division between the Western sounds heard and the exoticised multicultural community who is made to awkwardly lip-sync these tropes on screen. Advertising scholar Linda Fu confirms that imagery like this helps viewers to identify their own place in an ad, because ‘the self needs the Other in order to have meaning’ (2014, p. 246). The projected Western ‘self’ heard in the commercial’s musical track and shown in the faces of the fairskinned women who take the solo lines (superimposed during the lip-syncing of the USP), are therefore positioned against those being welcomed into Coke’s fold – the ‘Others’ onscreen who are ‘particular, marked, [and] raced’ (Dyer, 1997, p. 38) by their darker skin, hair colour, and non-Western cloth­ ing. The spot’s varied reception likely resulted from the fact that America’s Coke-loving, Western self could be heard in the folksy, counterculturally tinged musical track, and seen taking the solo lines, while the global others who were welcomed into the branded ‘home’ could only do so within the bounds of the hegemonic discourses that forced them to lip-sync English lyrics, wear costuming meant to enhance their racialised appearances, and hold Coke bottles in a way that, according to Holt, essentially stood in for patriotic flags (2004, p. 24). ‘Hilltop’s’ approach illuminated the problems that arose in US multicultural discourses. As Jon Cruz discusses, the very process of advocating for the rights of women and people of colour – in this case, the ‘right’ to consume an American product – simultaneously worked to naturalise concepts of race and gender, effectively fetishising, reifying, and reinforcing inequality along the borders of identity formation (1996, p. 19–39). Moreover, as confirmed by Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, despite the fact that multiculturalism outwardly ‘rejected racial subordination [it] seemed sometimes to support it’ (1996, p. 3).

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Despite Backer’s beliefs that his jingle encompassed everyone (1993, pp. 8, 29), the ventriloquism imposed by the musical track worked to sonically ‘subordinate’ and even erase the ‘fetishised’, ‘reified’, and ‘naturalised’ differences on screen; these youth are brought together not only to sing in English, but most importantly, to speak the language of the (American-based) Coca-Cola commodity. This imposed ventriloquism epitomises the facade of what Holt pinpoints as Coke’s ‘identity myth’, where American solidarity and global goodwill merely become a ‘symbolic act of healing racial, political, and gender divides’ (2004, p. 24). Coke’s universalising aims thus reinforced a hegemonic position over its multi­ cultural promises: The ‘harmony’ promised here, both literal and figurative, could only take place within the imaginary confines of the corporate brand, making the sheer veil of its capitalist imperatives and American ideologies easy for non-US audiences to see – or in this case, to hear – through. In this way, ‘Hilltop’ realised fears that the countercultural revolution would eventually become a commodity in itself (Roszak, 1995, p. 27). Hilltop legacy Coke’s approaches to multiculturalism prove notable in their foreshadowing of future markers of neoliberalism that Marianna Ritchey identifies as operating under a universalising strategy that would infiltrate global life and transcend cultural and national boundaries (2017, p. 8). The multicultural discourse of the 1970s would therefore be adopted more obviously in the 1980s – an era Jodi Melamed calls ‘liberal multiculturalism’ (2011, p. xv) – and corporate America would fold it into neoliberal economic policies that viewed diversity as key to promoting ‘democracy’ within a ‘free’ capitalist marketplace, all while (as just demonstrated) reinforcing existing structures of power (Ritchey, 2019). In the years just before US neoliberal policies took hold, the universalising vision of ‘Hilltop’ relied on a multiculturalist lens to depict difference in an effort to reinforce and reinscribe ‘sameness’ under the umbrella of the commodity. These types of practices have led scholars and critics to argue against Coke’s said claims to indigeneity, calling its globalising practices, and those of other US brands, ‘Coca-colonisation’. In spite of these critiques, the legacy of ‘Hilltop’ remains largely unaffected – at least within US cultural memory. In an interview with Matthew Wiener about his choice to include it in the Mad Men series finale, he signalled its continuing iconicity, calling it ‘the greatest commercial ever made’ (Lee, 2015). The overwhelming popularity of the jingle and spin-off single that followed it confirms that the tune was able capture the cultural zeitgeist of early 1970s America, while its moderate successes in other countries signalled the impetus of the Westward gaze. More specifically, for American audiences (and some of its sympathisers), the television spot appeared hopeful and cathartic in uncertain times with its combination of a singer-songwriter, folksy sing-along track, counterculturally themed lyrics, and imagery that embraced new initiatives for cultural tolerance. In the nearly six decades since its release, Coke has

44 J.K. Love attempted to recapture these feelings with derivative commercials, including a mid-1970s Christmas version, a ‘Hilltop Reunion’ (featuring a mash-up of the original jingle with its 1990 USP), a revival of the jingle for its 2010 sponsor­ ship of NASCAR racing, and a 2014 spot titled ‘America the Beautiful’ that re­ positioned global multicultural diversity within the US borders. Most recently, the spot’s legacy has been preserved with the remastering and colour-correction of its original footage (Nudd, 2016). Rehearing ‘Hilltop’ and considering its place within the larger history of Coca-Cola advertising reveals how the spot – and even the soda giant itself – was as much forward-looking as nostalgic in its attempts to test the boundaries of global marketing while staying apace with its biggest competitor. A 1987 interview with McCann Erikson’s Director of Global Brands, Marcio M. Moreira, confides that ‘Hilltop’ taught the agency and the brand a lot about global advertising, admitting that they did not realise until later in the decade that the ‘franchising’ approach of shipping US advertising overseas would need to be replaced by centrally developed international marketing that was more strategic in its understanding and picturing of local cultures (O’Barr, 2000). As a formative commercial in Coke’s international marketing approaches, the true legacy of ‘Hilltop’ is thus perhaps best realised in the ways it has highlighted the complexities of defining Coke’s place as a powerhouse American brand within the rapid globalisation of the twentieth century marketplace.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the staff at the Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; at the Archives Centre of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution for providing me access to the materials cited here. I am also grateful for the research funding approved by the University of Richmond’s Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office. I am further indebted to Marianna Ritchey and Elizabeth Morgan for offer­ ing suggestions and feedback.

References Anderson, T.H. (1996) The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press. Andrews, T.M. & Barbash F. (2016) ‘“I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”: The Story Behind the World’s Most Famous Ad, in Memoriam its Creator’. The Washington Post. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/05/17/ id-like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke-the-story-behind-the-worlds-most-famous-ad-whose­ creator-has-died-at-89/?utm_term=.9d30cd2ce3f5 (Accessed 15 September 2018). Backer, B. (1993) The Care and Feeding of Ideas. New York: Times Books. Bart, P. (1962) ‘Madison Avenue: Think Young’. SR, 8 December. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, 1938–1986, Collection 111, Series 1, Box 1. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Insti­ tution, Washington, DC.

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Bergin, J. (1985) Interview by Scott Ellsworth, New York City, 6 February. Pepsi Gen­ eration Oral History and Documentation Collection, 1938–1986, Collection 111. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The Coca-Cola Company. (1971) Portrait of a Worldwide Company. Coca-Cola Com­ pany: Coca-Cola Collection, 1912–1990, Collection 620, Box 1, Folder 5, Item 1. Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Atlanta, GA. Cruz, J. (1996) ‘From Farce to Tragedy: Reflections on the Reification of Race at Century’s End’, in Gordon, A.F. and Newfield, C. (eds), Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 19–39. Dietz, L. (1973) Soda Pop: The History, Advertising, Art, and Memorabilia of Soft Drinks in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dyer, R. (1997) White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge. Frank, T. (1997) The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fu, L.C.L. (2014) Advertising and Race: Global Phenomenon, Historical Challenges, and Visual Strategies. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Gordon, A.F. and Newfield, C. (1996) Mapping Multiculturalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Greising, D. (1998) I’d Like the World to Buy a Coke: The Life and Leadership of Roberto Goizueta. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Herbert, I.C. (1972) ‘Selling Coca-Cola through Music and Song’, Broadcasting Maga­ zine, 3 January, p. 13. Holt, D.B. (2004) How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Jackson, D.M. and Fulberg, P. (2003) Sonic Branding: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kissell, R. (2015) ‘“Mad Men” Finale Ratings: DVR Playback Boosts Series to RecordHigh 4.6 Million’, Variety. Available at: https://variety.com/2015/tv/ratings/mad­ men-finale-ratings-amc-drama-draws-3-3-million-sets-demo-high-1201499468/ (Acces­ sed 16 January 2019). Lee, A. (2015) ‘“Mad Men” Creator Matthew Weiner Explains Series Finale, Character Surprises and What’s Next’, The Hollywood Reporter. Available at: https://www.holly woodreporter.com/news/mad-men-series-finale-matthew-797302 (Accessed 26 April 2019). Love, J.K. (2015) ‘From Cautionary Chart-Topper to Beverage Anthem: Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Pepsi’s “Choice of a New Generation” Television Campaign’, Journal for the Society of American Music, 9 (2), pp. 178–203. Love, J.K. (2019) Soda Goes Pop: Pepsi-Cola Advertising and Popular Music. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Melamed, J. (2011) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in New Racial Capitalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, S. (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Music Industry Data. (1971–1972) ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’. Available at: http://musicid.academicrightspress.com (Accessed 29 April 2019).

46 J.K. Love Nudd, T. (2016) ‘Coca-Cola Just Remastered Its Famous “Hilltop” Ad From 1971, and It Looks Fantastic’, Adweek, 5. Available at: https://www.adweek.com/creativity/ coca-cola-just-remastered-its-famous-hilltop-ad-1971-and-it-looks-fantastic-170630/ (Accessed 26 April 2019). O’Barr, W.M. (2000) ‘The Airbrushing of Culture: An Insider Looks at Global Adver­ tising’, Advertising & Society Review, 1 (1), doi:10.1353/asr.2000.0024. Pendergrast, M. (1993) For God, Country and Coca-Cola. New York: Basic Books. Pennington, G. (2015) ‘Mad Men Fans Bring Hopes, Theories to Finale’, St. Louis PostDispatch. Available at: https://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/television/gail­ pennington/mad-men-fans-bring-hopes-theories-to-finale/article_ 5ce9d88b-d323-5962-a449-d5a051c8bfb7.html (Accessed 15 January 2016). Pepsi-Cola Media Ordering Catalogs. (1972–1973) ‘Live/Give’. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, 1938–1986, Collection 111. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Pepsi-Cola World. (1968) ‘The Livin’ is Easy’. November, p. 20. Pepsi Generation Oral History and Documentation Collection, 1938–1986, Collection 111. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Ritchey, M. (2017) ‘“Amazing Together”: Mason Bates, Classical Music, and Neoliberal Values’, Music and Politics, 11 (2). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp. 9460447.0011.202 (Accessed 29 April 2018). Ritchey, M. (2019) Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roszak, T. (1995) The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ryan, T. (2012) ‘The Making of “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”’, The Coca-Cola Company. Available at: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/stories/coke-lore-hill top-story (Accessed 30 January 2019). Taylor, T.D. (2012) The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music and the Conquest of Cul­ ture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Time Magazine. (1950) ‘The Sun Never Sets on Cacoola’. 15 May, pp. 28–32. CocaCola Company: Coca-Cola Collection, 1912–1990, Collection 620, Box 10, Folder 1, Item 10. Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Atlanta, GA. Watters, P. (1978) Coca-Cola: An Illustrated History. New York: Doubleday & Company. Wood, J.M. (2015) ‘8 Fascinating Fan Theories About Mad Men’, Mental Floss. Available at: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62718/8-fascinating-fan-theories-about­ mad-men (Accessed 16 January 2019).

3

Coke and the Super Bowl Susie Khamis

Introduction In the series finale of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s meticulous rendering of Madison Avenue in the 1960s, the show’s protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm) leaves viewers with an impression that is either slightly quixotic, or deeply cynical. In a moment of what seems like centredness and clarity, at a meditation retreat in sunny California, Draper’s enigmatic smile segues into one of the most iconic advertisements in US history: ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’, McCann Erickson’s 1971 campaign for Coca-Cola. Just how chron­ ological the juxtaposition is remains unclear (Vranica and Sharma, 2015). Draper may well have channelled some newfound sense of humanity into this Big Idea, or perhaps it was simply a historical marker, a nod to what was then corporate America’s nascent awakening to cultural diversity, social inclusion, and brand purpose. In The Conquest of Cool (1997), Thomas Frank’s history of ‘hip consumerism’, the intermingling of politics, branding, and culture begins roughly around the same time as Draper’s personal epiphany, if that is indeed what it was (Howard, 2018). There is a slide here away from the didactic mode of advertising employed before this moment, towards the weightless, nuanced style of postmodern branding – of allusions and moods, and the emotional engagement of lifestyle marketing – that would become more prevalent after­ wards. Both literally and metaphorically, Draper moves from a world of suits and social engineering to its ideological antithesis – the counterculture – and the Coke ad is the symbolic and ironic manifestation of this transition. The Mad Men finale reminded viewers that Coke has, for decades, wrapped its brand identity around a message of unity in diversity. At a cost of US $250,000, which was at the time roughly four times bigger than the average ad spend, the image of some 500 culturally and linguistically diverse singers on a hilltop outside Rome (hence its nickname, and what it is referred to hereafter: Hilltop) was an unabashed affirmation of multicultural harmony. Whatever the motivation for ending Mad Men on Hilltop, it remains a compelling testament to the cultural resonance of a timely message. Reeling from the social unrest of the 1960s, with street riots, contested segregation, assassinations and the col­ lective trauma of the Vietnam War, middle America embraced Hilltop with

48 S. Khamis unprecedented and atypical affection (Riggs, 2000). It not only set in place brand values that continue to define Coke decades later, but made a bold and ultimately convincing bid for affective engagement. Then, as now, advertising that speaks to contemporary anxieties and concerns can place brands at the heart of dominant cultural conversations. Moreover, when these conversations are marked by division and discord, such forays register even more pointedly. This chapter considers how the message communicated by Coke’s Hilltop ad registers now, in a commercial climate that has parallels to the late 1960s and early 1970s. To do so, the focus of its analysis will be placed on that nebulous, sometimes frustrating space where politics, commerce and art converge in ways that defy clean demarcation. By canvassing the ads that Coke ran before and during the first three Super Bowls since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the discussion shows how Hilltop’s central motif – beauty in diversity – has not only been sustained over several decades, but has assumed particular meanings in light of current political debates. What emerges then is the cultural logic of contemporary branding, at the nexus of commercial imperatives, the ‘culture wars’ with which brands have been implicated, and a generational drift towards more personalised expressions of political identity (Precourt, 2016). The Coke ads considered here both point to and draw from politically charged debates. This, however, is not an entirely new or novel phenomenon. To return to Frank: for decades, brands have reflected politically inspired ideals and aspirations. For Frank, this speaks to the inevitable exchange that links the advertising world with emerging cultural movements. First, and in practical terms, there is the extent to which even the most ‘authentic’ countercultures are themselves informed and endowed by the mediated ephemera of the ‘sponsored society’, the stuff of advertising (Frank, 1997, p. 8). Second though, and since the seismic cultural ferment of the 1960s, the advertising world – itself weary of hierarchy, excited by creativity, and embodied by Draper – increasingly saw countercultures not as Red-leaning adversaries but rather as inspirational allies, kindred spirits that fired up the creative imagination (Frank, 1997, p. 9). As such, neither the ‘establishment’ ethos of Draper’s pre-retreat persona nor ‘the people’ he seemed to finally connect with were ever com­ pletely independent, autonomous, or self-sufficient from the other. The analysis that follows sees this irony as a springboard for unpacking Coke’s Trump-era Super Bowl ads. It shows that Coke has integrated imagery and ideals tied to a broad coalition that takes umbrage with Trump’s more incendiary statements. This speaks to both shared symbolic resources, insofar as Coke is neither the first nor the only brand to take such a stand, as well as a perceived ideological symmetry with demographically significant consumers – that is, census data that shows that Latinx, African-American, and Asian-American people constitute a growing percentage of the US population (Russo Whylly, 2010). Herein lies the tense space alluded to earlier. When a corporate behemoth co-opts the language and imagery of countercultural resistance, it is easy to dismiss it as a cynical play for relevance, a ‘woke’ wink that does nothing to disrupt the status quo. Indeed, since Coke is a capitalist construct beholden to shareholders and

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driven by profit, the ads here are not framed as anything other than commercial artefacts. That said, though, contemporary branding is such that this does not cancel out political freight. Rather, and insofar as consumers increasingly code their political leanings into lifestyle choices, it is not the case that Coke has atypically or accidently ventured into contested discourses. As amply evidenced by consumers’ conversations across social media, brands are now read in highly political terms, with their imagery, rhetoric, and stories screened through par­ tisan logics. Now more than ever, brand statements are politically fraught – and this was vividly illustrated with Coke’s first three Super Bowl ads since the election of Donald Trump.

The MAGA milieu In his winning bid for the White House, Trump promised to ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA). Central to Trump’s ‘explanation’ of where and why the US had lost its way as global leader was an alarmingly skewed view of migrants – and this had immediate and devastating consequences. Since announcing his run for the presidency in July 2015, Trump has flaunted his disregard for ‘politically correct’ speech. For Trump, and as Jessica Gantt Shafer (2017, p. 2) writes, political correctness ‘is not an effort to use language that includes different peoples and acknowledges systematic injustices, but rather a weak bureaucratic sugarcoating of inherent truths – pandering to populations for the sake of a political career’. This made way for Trump to level some of the most caustic accusations squarely at migrants that sought entry into the US – in particular, Mexicans and Muslims. The former were defined almost exclusively as drug carriers, criminals, and rapists – hence the urgency to build a wall along the US–Mexican border. The latter were casually and repeatedly equated with terrorism; even refugees fleeing war-ravaged Syria were, by Trump’s reckoning, potential threats to US security. Once elected and in the White House, it did not take long for Trump to show Americans (and a bewildered world) how he planned to rebuild America’s wealth and prestige. Not only did Trump double down on his commitment to ‘build the wall’ – and make Mexico pay for it, as if such a demand could be enforced – but in January 2017, just days after his inaugura­ tion, he signed into law Executive Order 13769, also known as ‘Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States’. This was widely referred to as ‘the Muslim ban’, since it put an immediate block on all arrivals from seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days, as well as Syrian refugees indefinitely. It was the most extreme and public display yet of Trump’s intransigence. In turn, whatever pluralism, hope, and progress had been her­ alded by his predecessor Barack Obama appeared to have belonged to another country; and in some ways, it did. When he was campaigning for re-election in 2012, President Obama created (also by executive order) the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). DACA granted two-year work and residence permits to around 740,000 unauthorised foreigners that had arrived in

50 S. Khamis the US as children (i.e. under the age of 16), were between ages 16 and 30, had lived in the US illegally for at least five years, and had either a high school diploma or were honourably discharged veterans (Martin, 2017, pp. 166–167). It protected those who had come to the US illegally as children, the so-called ‘Dreamers’, from the threat of deportation. More than an article of law, DACA spoke to an America of generosity and hope, where illegal immigrants were actually seen as ‘Dreamers’ rather than potential terrorists, or a fiscal drain (Edwards, 2018, p. 189).

Trolling Trump? Trump was inaugurated on 20 January 2017; the National Football League (NFL) Super Bowl that year was played on 5 February (the first Sunday of the month). That the biggest television event in the US, with the most expensive advertising in the world, should fall so soon after such a controversial election would prove highly significant. Of interest here, though, is not just the tem­ poral proximity that linked the 2017 Super Bowl to Trump’s election, but the fact that a brand as iconic as Coke should make such an emphatic statement on Super Bowl Sunday, and continue to do so the following two years as well. Few sporting events in the US are as anticipated or spectacular as the NFL Super Bowl. More than a football match, it is, for domestic audiences at least, a panoramic television institution (Yelkur et al., 2004). Almost every year, records are rewritten: audience size, ad spend, and global reach grow annually, forging a worldwide community as well as a national one. The Super Bowl sits within the US calendar (and its retail) much like Christmas and Halloween, and attracts viewers worldwide with much more than football (O’Barr, 2012). In fact, over the last few decades, and as far as much of the world is concerned, there have been at least two other attractions. First is the halftime entertain­ ment, which almost always features a major headline act. This has included in previous years Prince, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, and U2. Second are the advertisements, which, remarkably and most unusually, are experienced and analysed like at no other time, anywhere. It is only the Super Bowl that can guarantee an audience that is as attentive to the ads as it is to the content they sponsor (Raithel et al., 2016, p. 3788; Tomkovick, 2010, p. 354). Given the scale of the Super Bowl now, it is practically expected that, in addition to the competing teams, both the halftime entertainment and the advertisers should step up and treat the largest television audience in the world to something extraordinary. This was certainly expected for the 2017 Super Bowl. Once it was announced that the halftime performance was to be deliv­ ered by pop sensation Lady Gaga, media was abuzz with speculation. Lady Gaga was a youthquake phenomenon – bold, outspoken, and quick to rally her fans, who she calls her ‘Little Monsters’, around contemporary activist causes. That she should headline the Super Bowl just weeks after Trump’s inaugura­ tion was therefore ratings gold dust. As Billboard magazine reminded readers on

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the eve of the game, Gaga had tweeted that, to get elected, Trump had ‘empowered racist intolerant Americans’ (Lipshutz, 2017, p. 36). As far as most media were concerned, Gaga was primed to take on Trump’s more divisive and controversial policies, statements, and tweets, on television’s biggest stage. That did not happen. Not only did Lady Gaga not mention Trump at all during her Super Bowl performance, but almost every advertisement that aired did – obliquely if not directly, and critically nonetheless. Without citing his name, few left any doubt that he had inspired their approach, and their consensus was clear (Hunt, 2017). Budweiser, for instance, maker of ‘America’s beer’, reimagined its founder’s journey from Germany to St Louis, his story an unmistakeable parallel to the present-day refugees facing discrimination, bigotry, and travel bans. Airbnb upped its #weaccept campaign, also launched in the wake of Trump’s travel ban; across imagery of ethnically diverse faces was this message: ‘We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept.’ Carmaker Audi went with its #DriveProgress initiative, to campaign against lingering pay disparities between men and women, which assumed a more critical edge in light of Trump’s infamously sexist and misogynistic comments. For its part, though, Coke did not launch a new advertisement but rather recycled its ad from the 2014 Super Bowl, called ‘It’s Beautiful’. That Coke should repeat this campaign in the early aftermath of Trump’s win was highly telling. The one-minute ad featured Americans of varying ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. In turns, the late nineteenth century Christian patriotic song, ‘America the Beautiful’, is sung in different languages, including Spanish, French, Keres and Tagalog. Even when it pre­ miered in 2014, Coke anticipated pushback from conservative Americans. Back then, and to help its online fans survive the so-called ‘culture wars’ that sim­ mered across social media, Coke designed a strategy to arm them with apposite and fact-based retorts. Against charges that ‘real’ Americans sing only in English, for instance, Coke (via its online community) stressed that the singers were in fact all American citizens. Still, and as expected, the ad proved divisive. During the 2014 Super Bowl, Coke’s advocates helped #AmericaIsBeautiful to trend number one across Facebook, Twitter, and Google within the first 24 hours that the ad aired. Inevitably, though, there was immediate backlash (Poniewozik, 2014), with #SpeakAmerican and #BoycottCoke also trending. If nothing else, this much could be said: within 24 hours, ‘It’s Beautiful’ had 10.5 million YouTube views, the Wall Street Journal called it one of the few ads to have had ‘lasting impact’, and Coke reaffirmed its celebration of a multilinguistic, multi-faith, multicultural America (Lacey, 2015). To revisit this ad in 2017 was therefore powerful, unambiguous, and unexpected – and thus that much more effective. In this instance, and perhaps paradoxically, to repeat a Super Bowl ad that had proved divisive on its first outing was newsworthy for both its novelty, and as a show of an emboldened commit­ ment to American diversity. Within what seemed an advertising-led push to

52 S. Khamis troll Trump, with one advertiser after another referencing his more inflam­ matory statements and stances, it was impossible to miss Coke’s point: they too saw in Trump’s rhetoric a version of America that both conflicted with its brand values, and ran counter to a narrative of diversity and inclusion that had inflected American advertising for decades – or at least since Hilltop. Indeed, Coca-Cola’s Turkish-American CEO Muhtar Kent had already joined numerous industry leaders by publicly condemning the travel ban as an affront to both Coke’s core beliefs and commitments to diversity, fairness, and inclusion (Grantham, 2017). As detailed at length elsewhere in this book, Coke is a globally recognised and widely consumed American icon, with a cultural presence that has grown over 130 years, and expanded outside the US in particular since the 1960s. By virtue of this salience, and a heritage steeped in the symbols and mythology of America itself, it matters what Coke should say during the biggest television event in America. In fact, with a newly minted president who vowed to ‘Make America Great Again’ through such schismatic policies and promises, it behoves icons of American culture to demonstrate a point of view. For a brand like Coke, then, having crafted such a sanguine image of multicultural bliss, Trump’s win posed a break with narrative, inasmuch as nativist talk of border control and ‘extreme vetting’ signalled deep displeasure with multicultural America. Connotatively, then, the consequences for the Coke brand, tethered to such a warm embrace of radical diversity, are significant. Within a political milieu infused with the angry populism that characterised Trump’s signature policies, Coke’s messaging assumed a distinct, almost jarring poignancy. Coke presented a very different reading of what in fact had made America great in the first place – and continues to do so.

Super Bowl, super significant Perhaps in any other period, ‘It’s Beautiful’ would not have struck such a profound note. Yet such is the power of context and timing that, in the wake of Trump’s win, Coke’s ostensibly generous, tender and optimistic vision for multicultural America was especially affective. Moreover, nesting this adver­ tisement within the Super Bowl was critical. As the most expensive real estate in advertising, brands strive for more than just cut-through; a strong Super Bowl ad becomes a national talking point (Alberti, 2016). Audience engage­ ment during this broadcast is so precious and rare that whatever mindshare a brand secures is born of atypically careful planning and strategy. Messages are crafted specifically for the Super Bowl on the safe assumption that they will reach the largest television audience in the world; statements that are audacious or polarising are therefore doubly high-risk, since the potential for negative fallout is that much greater. The significance of this ad thus sits at the inter­ section of three highly charged contexts: the history and mythology of the Coke brand; the cultural weight associated with the Super Bowl; and a political climate contoured by a controversial president.

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Super Bowl viewers are receptive in ways that are not just unusual fortelevision, but are almost impossible in the twenty-first century era of media surplus and fragmented audiences (Quesenberry and Coolsen, 2014, p. 439). Not only are the majority of US households, bars, and clubs tuned in, but they are deeply engaged with the advertising. An oft-cited Nielsen study once found that over half the Super Bowl audience in the US alone actually enjoyed these ads more than the game (Taylor, 2016, p. 167). The event achieves what McAllister and Galindo-Ramirez (2017, p. 52) call ‘a revered commercial cocoon’, as viewers become ‘advertising attentive, not only tolerating advertis­ ing but actively watching it, seeking it out in advance and after the game, and discussing it with others’. For this, the 2017 advertisers paid a record US$5.8 million per 30 seconds of airtime, up from US$5 million the previous year. Cognizant of how viewers’ engagement with these ads manifests now (that is, increasingly online), brand marketers often pre-release their Super Bowl ads prior to the game itself, since this has been shown to animate and intensify post-game conversation (Spotts et al., 2014, p. 464). This shows a form of cultural spillage, as the ads merge with a suite of social conventions that mark the Super Bowl as spectacular consumption – with rituals around food, fandom, and conviviality (Kim et al., 2013). In turn, and as Matthew P. McAllister (1999, p. 409) writes: ‘Super Bowl ads are no longer seen as crass sales pitches – an obvious self-interested discourse that viewers eye with cyni­ cism and suspicion’; rather, like ‘the latest blockbuster movie, these ads are now to be watched for their own sake’. It is within this setting that Coke’s Super Bowl ads during Trump’s pre­ sidency take on an acute immediacy, sitting so close to what became the main headlines coming out of Washington. By the time the 2018 Super Bowl neared, Trump had neither tempered nor qualified his views. In turn, the stage was set once again for advertisers to either ignore or acknowledge ideas that had hardened into White House orthodoxy. Once again, in 2018, Coke chose to do the latter with a campaign called ‘The Wonder of Us’. Again, there was a kaleidoscopic montage of contemporary America. Instead of song, though, there was a simple paean to the ‘wonder’ of diversity. It was written by Becca Wadlinger, copywriter with Wieden+Kennedy (the agency responsible for the ad). The lines include: No feet have wandered where you’ve walked No eyes saw what you’ve seen No one’s lived the life you live No head has held your dreams It was a call to action – there is a Coke for every American – but it worked through an appeal to empathy. As with ‘It’s Beautiful’, the diversity on show was progressive, contentious, and for some, un-American (Sacks, 2014). The inclusion of hijabs, homosexuality, and gender fluidity was seized by alt-right news network

54 S. Khamis Breitbart, conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and many others on social media as Coke’s airbrushed apologia for terrorists and sexual deviants. As it hap­ pened, 2014/2017’s ‘It’s Beautiful’ had also included a hijab (and Coke’s 2019 Super Bowl ad, discussed shortly, did too). Since September 2001, and certainly in the US, few sartorial items have been as politically laden as the hijab; it is a hotbutton index to the ‘other’ and triggers online conversations that veer from ani­ mated to outraged with speed and intensity. The Hilltop ad marked difference through complexion and clothing; almost 50 years later, this does not go any­ where near far enough for the intersectional politics of identity today – and ‘The Wonder of Us’ pointed to this truth, hijab and all.

‘You aren’t the same as me’ Departing from the cinematic style of ‘It’s Beautiful’ and ‘The Wonder of Us’, Coke’s ad for the 2019 Super Bowl was a short animated film, again with a poem as the voiceover. It was called ‘A Coke is a Coke’. Both aesthetically and in phrasing, ‘A Coke is a Coke’ drew liberally from Pop Art’s Andy Warhol (1928–1987). It both referenced Warhol’s quote regarding the egalitarianism of Coke, and nodded to his 1960s-era visual vocabulary: accessible, ironic, and graphic in shades of red, brown, white, and black. In his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, the artist writes: You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. (Phaidon, 2019) Grafted onto the 2019 Super Bowl ad, a certain naivety is implied by both the artwork and the poem, which includes these lines: A Coke is a Coke is a Coke, it’s the same for everyone You can get one if you want it, no matter where you’re from He drinks Coke, and she drinks Coke, even though they disagree And while the bottles look alike, you aren’t the same as me Stars drink it, chefs drink it, farmers want one when it’s hot There’s a Coke here if you’re thirsty, but that’s cool if you’re not We all have different hearts and hands, heads holding various views Don’t you see? Different is beautiful and together is beautiful too

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In 2019, and for the first time in 12 years, Coke broke with convention by airing its ad not during the game itself but rather just before the national anthem (which was sung by Gladys Knight) – a decision not without political carriage. Again, the context involved Trump, and his response to what had become a wedge issue in American public life. In solidarity with Black Lives Matter, the movement to protest widespread indifference to police shootings of young African-American men, NFL superstar Colin Kaepernick famously ‘took a knee’. From 2016, the quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the US national anthem prior to each game, in order to spotlight the heart­ breaking chasm between the sentiments expressed in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and the lived experience of young black American men. The issue intensified in September 2017 when President Trump called for NFL bosses to fire any players who refused to stand during the anthem; it was a pointed rebuke not just to Kaepernick but other US athletes who followed his lead. By then, to ‘take a knee’ had become code in an increasingly divided country; it spoke to police brutality and the social positioning of African Americans, and the extent to which the Trump era coincided with (and probably contributed to) the unapologetic politicisation of all cultural spaces, including sport. Of course, Kaepernick was not the first footballer to bring politics into sport, but with Trump’s incendiary intervention, Kaepernick came to symbolise just how fractured US politics had become, and how deep its fissures ran. After that season ended, Kaepernick opted out of his contract and, as a free agent, could sign with any other team – but he was not picked up. The subtext appeared simple enough: Kaepernick had both antagonised the president and divided football fans who were, if declining audience ratings were any indication, turned off by his protest due to either apathy towards his cause, or support of Trump’s position. By taking a knee during the anthem, Kaepernick was standing up to racism, bigotry, and prejudice; he also reminded the NFL (and its audience) that the anthem’s lyrics rang hollow for many Americans. For Coke to shift its 2019 offering to the cusp of this moment (rather than the actual game) in turn shifted the focal beam towards the conversation that Kaepernick had started, and made a branded contribution to it: ‘Don’t you see? Different is beautiful.’ It was therefore no mere coincidence (Schultz, 2019). According to Stuart Kronauge, then Coke’s Senior Vice President of Market­ ing in North America: We have a long history of using the country’s biggest advertising stage to share a message of unity and positivity, especially at times when our nation feels divided. This year, we decided to place our ad just before the national anthem as Americans come together in their living rooms to remind everyone that ‘together is beautiful’. (Quoted in Steinberg, 2019) Coke did not ignore or underplay just how divided the US had become, but they did pivot this fact back to their Hilltop hopefulness. Fault lines exist, and

56 S. Khamis that is okay: ‘you aren’t the same as me’. The tone seemed more resigned than overly ambitious; the humanity that Coke settled on appeared at peace with (or even ambivalent towards) contemporary American life, its cultural fissures too strong even for Coke to repair or resolve. For all that, though, the fact that the ad aired literally seconds before the anthem was sung was important. For many Super Bowl viewers, the issues around Kaepernick, the anthem, and his con­ tention that the continuing mistreatment of numerous Americans belied its spirit and sentiments were top of mind. Coke’s reworking of the Warhol quote spun the dialogue back to its central premise: the radical, unshakeable egalitar­ ianism of the world’s most famous soft drink. It might well have appeared an obscene conflation; the accessibility of Coke (by any measure) is not on par with the upholding and protection of basic civil rights. The ad thus worked primarily as a reminder: the equality that both Kaepernick and Coke champion is not one achieved with the erasure of difference and diversity, but through it – and that is entirely consistent with whatever hope and pride is expressed in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.

Conclusion In the decades since Hilltop premiered, its upbeat message of togetherness in diversity has underpinned and upheld the Coke brand; it has been a consistent and coherent trope around which Coke has fashioned numerous iterations of ads. Therein lies a huge part of Coke’s brand equity. As with all brand strate­ gies, it is premised on the opportunities and challenges of contemporary mar­ keting: competitive, globalised, and increasingly required to show a distinct agility in light of dynamic conditions (political, cultural, social, and economic), without compromising brand identity. That Coke should weave the Hilltop message into its 2017, 2018, and 2019 Super Bowl ads is not in itself surprising. However, while the cultural logic of branding has not changed too much since the 1970s, it does not follow that its messaging strikes the same notes as it did then, quite simply because cultural conditions have changed. Specifically, the political climate in Trump’s America has problematised Coke’s sunny opti­ mism, since so much of the president’s most vitriolic statements run counter to Coke’s Hilltop ‘heart’. As such, for Coke to foreground its take on multi­ cultural America as something to be celebrated and cherished during its most important advertising opportunity (the NFL Super Bowl) both warrants acknowledgement and offers critical insights. As a perennial presence in American culture and a global symbol of America itself, there is much at stake in terms of how Coke manifests in the Trump era. In his promise to ‘Make America Great Again’, Trump arrived at a definition of ‘great’ that effectively excised huge swathes of the American population. Coke’s first three Super Bowl ads since Trump’s inauguration are thus read as politically hued, unapologetic commitments to a very different notion of ‘great’. In turn, the Hilltop ad now seems like an inspired (and inspiring) salve for a nation bruised by violence, war, and unrest; the Super Bowl ads

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considered here, by comparison, carry far more critical bite. Against White House rhetoric that hinges on a narrow, exclusive, and exclusionary concept of American progress, Coke counters with the assertion that America is already ‘great’, not despite its multiculturalism, but because of it.

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4

Coke and the media Robert Crawford

In the final scenes of the hit television series Mad Men, creative director Don Draper, the programme’s protagonist, sits in the lotus position at a Californian retreat. He listens as the yogi invites the group to reflect on the rising sun: ‘The new day brings new hope to the lives we’ve led, to the lives we’re yet to lead. A new day. A new idea. A new you’ (Weiner, 2015). Such words not only provide solace to the deeply troubled Draper; they also provide inspiration for him to create one of the most famous advertising campaigns for one of the most famous brands. Matt Wiener, the program’s creator, selected Coca-Cola’s 1971 ‘Hilltop’ commercial in its final scene. Stating that ‘Coca-Cola, [is] a trendsetter in advertising, always’, Wiener describes the commercial as ‘the best ad ever made, and it comes from a very good place’ (Lynch, 2015). Wiener’s comments not only underscore the relationship between Coca-Cola and advertising, but also hint at their capacity to connect with deeper ideas, values, and sentiments, as well as the ways that they connect with international audiences. The relationship between Coca-Cola and America has been an abiding one. Citing a Coca-Cola executive’s claim that Coke was ‘the most American thing in America’, a 1959 article in The New Yorker on the making and selling of Coca-Cola reflects the firm’s connection with its birthplace (Kahn, 1959). The relationship has not been one way. A 2018 survey found that Americans con­ sidered Coca-Cola to be one of the most patriotic brands in the US (Craft, 2019). This connection has also been readily recognised by others. In What Objects Mean, Arthur Asa Berger (2016, p. 162) offers a typical account of how this relationship has been viewed internationally: ‘Coca-Cola is a universally recognised signifier of American culture and society, and drinking cokes was a way for people all over the world, to indicate their sense of attachment to the United States’. While the connection between Coca-Cola and America has been widely acknowledged and accepted, the nature of this relationship and its impact on audiences has generated greater debate – particularly outside of the United States. Such concerns have been expressed through the discourse of Americanisation or, more disparagingly, Coca-Colonisation. Coined by French communists in the late 1940s, this portmanteau evocatively expresses the fears

60 R. Crawford of American economic, political, military, and cultural power (Kuisel, 1991, p. 101). Cultural historians have focused on the latter, exploring hegemonic power as one of the defining features of Americanisation. Such power lies in the formation of a consumer society. Describing Americanisation as ‘a process of cultural transformation’ whereby individuals, organisations, and institutions that ‘refused to identify themselves with the logic of the consumer society … had to be worked over by propaganda and advertisement’, Reinhold Wagn­ leitner’s Coca-Colonization and the Cold War (1994, p. 7) positions American­ isation as a form of cultural imperialism. Victoria de Grazia’s (2006, p. 6) account of the rise of the so-called ‘Market Empire’ across post-war Europe contends that the United States’ hegemonic power not only stemmed from its status as the premier consumer society but also its capacity to convert its consumer revolution into a system of global leadership. While both studies offer significantly more nuanced accounts than the simple cultural imperialist interpretations, they nevertheless reveal some of the internal structures sup­ porting and, indeed, driving Americanisation. Observing that Americanisation, as an historical process, ‘will not yield its secrets if we treat it as a manifestation of some loathsome “imperialism”’, Richard Kuisel (2000, p. 509) points to the need to pay closer attention to those at the receiving end of this process. Far from being passive recipients, audiences have actively ‘selected, adapted, and transformed what America has sent them’ (Kuisel, 2000, p. 509). Scholarship on the reception of Americanisation has characterised these responses as ‘creolisations’, whereby local and imported ideas and values are blended in a myriad of ways across multiple, different contexts (Berghahn, 2010, p. 121; Foster, 2008, pp. 119–20; Bell and Bell, 1993). The uniqueness and multiplicity of such responses, how­ ever, should not overshadow the asymmetrical nature of this relationship (Sørensen and Petersen, 2012, p. 599). As Kuisel (2000, p. 510) notes, these cultural transfers may well be ‘a two-way street, but most of the traffic has been heading in one direction – from the United States’. Debates over Americanisation have also contributed to those concerning globalisation, which in itself has provided an opportunity to situate the pro­ cesses within a broader context. Volker Berghahn (2010, p. 120), for example, contends that globalisation ‘was in effect the further Americanisation of the world’. Studies such as Susanne Hilger’s (2008) account of the American busi­ ness practices driving the expansion of German business appear to confirm this point. Others, however, have called for greater nuance. Asking ‘how American is globalisation’, William Marling (2006, p. vii) proffers the somewhat ambig­ uous response: ‘[it] is not as American as we think it is’ but equally ‘more than we know’. Kuisel (2000, p. 515) observes that ‘globalisation preceded Americanisation and may succeed it’, adding that it ‘may be useful to con­ ceptualise Americanisation as a stage of globalisation – one in which … there was strong overlap and mutual reinforcement … the two are not congruent’. In arguing that globalisation ‘has a history that bears the marks of … earlier developments’, Frank Trentmann’s (2009) examination of consumption and

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globalisation similarly underscores the need to view and position the process of Americanisation within broader contexts. These calls are in part a response to the weakening state of American power in the twenty-first century and the corresponding emergence of increasingly complex networks of power and influence. In light of these shifts, Berghahn (2010, p. 121) muses that ‘the concept of Americanisation may no longer be as useful as it had been’. The diminishing amount of scholarship on the topic in recent years certainly sug­ gests that many concur with this viewpoint. Such shifts then indicate that a revisitation of Coca-Cola’s much-vaunted connection with Americanisation would be both timely and revealing. Is Coke still the all-American brand? How does the past sit with the present? The need to revisit Coke’s relationship with Americanisation is also driven by changes in the media landscape. In ‘Theorizing Globalization’, Douglas Kellner (2002, p. 287) notes that theorists of globalisation had often failed ‘to observe the fundamental importance of scientific and technological revolution and the new technologies that help spawn globalisation or interpret the process in a technological determinist framework’. Over the past three decades, the decline of broadcast media and the rise and proliferation of digital media plat­ forms has fundamentally changed the ways that large advertisers and marketers like Coca-Cola operate, as well as the stories that their advertising campaigns tell about themselves and their place in the globalised world. As the media landscape changed, so too did the marketing landscape. In the early 2000s, Coca-Cola’s global marketing strategy embraced a ‘think local, act local’ approach instead of the ‘think global, act global’ or, even more common, ‘think global, act local’ strategies adopted by other giant multinationals. It was a marked departure from the highly centralised strategy that had underpinned its growth over the twentieth century. Rowan Wilken and John Sinclair (2011, p. 5), however, warn that ‘it would be a mistake to think that this new approach represents a total embrace of localisation’, arguing that ‘the Coke approach more accurately constitutes an amalgamation of global, regional and local strategies’. To this end, Coke’s strategy exemplifies the concept of glocalisation, which might be understood ‘as the refraction of globalisation through the local’ (Roudometof, 2015, p. 403). By emphasising the agency and dynamism of local and global forces, glocalisation appears to have pushed Americanisation further to the margins. While the Americanisation narrative’s receding popularity certainly reflects recent social, economic, political, and technological changes, it also creates an opportunity to undertake a broader historical reconsideration of the process – particularly where it has been taken for granted. Coca-Cola’s advertising therefore provides a unique case in point. As advertising has been an essential ingredient in Coca-Cola’s global success, its relationship with Americanisation has been uncritically accepted. However, a closer reading of Coke campaigns across a longer timeframe reveals that that interpretation is perhaps more con­ venient than accurate. In How Brands Become Icons, Douglas Holt (2004, p. 27) castigates Coca-Cola’s advertising efforts since the 1980s, describing Coke today as little more than ‘a nostalgic brand, harking back to the days when the

62 R. Crawford drink enjoyed its peak iconic stature. Coke now stands for 1950s Americana.’ At a glance, Holt seems to be reinforcing the relationship between America and Coke. However, his broader argument actually presents the opposite case. Arguing that Coca-Cola’s use of nostalgia represents a misunderstanding of the actual social and cultural connections between Coke and America, Holt (2004, pp. 22–7) asserts that Coca-Cola advertising has in fact lost its unique connec­ tion with America. This chapter similarly surveys the changing face of ‘Amer­ icanness’ in Coke advertising with a view to contextualising this shift within the evolving media landscape. To this end, this chapter will examine seminal Coke campaigns across different media – print, television, and digital – and across three separate periods. Such campaigns not only provide a long-term perspective of the different ways that Coca-Cola has sought to connect Coke with ideas of America and the process of Americanisation; they also illustrate the degree to which the medium has affected the message.

The image of happiness One of Coca-Cola’s first and most important lessons was the power of adver­ tising. In 1892, the firm spent US$11,400 on promotion (including advertising, calendars, and point-of-purchase signs) – a significant sum given that it had spent US$22,500 on ingredients that same year (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 56–7). Eight years later, its promotion budget had grown to US$85,000. The 1906 appointment of an external advertising agency, D’Arcy Advertising Company, further underscored Coca-Cola’s commitment to advertising, and by 1912 its advertising outlay was exceeding a million dollars. Early campaigns went from introducing the product to highlighting the brand via its Spencerian script. Around the end of the nineteenth century, Coke advertisements were featuring celebrities such as Hilda Clark and Lillian Nordica. Campaigns then moved to ‘slice-of-life’ imagery, where Coke offered both refreshment and reprieve (Allen, 1994, p. 70). D’Arcy’s cam­ paigns sought to energise such images through engaging copy and storylines. The agency also made use of Coca-Cola girls, who ‘remained fresh and wholesome’ while simultaneously having a ‘new unmistakably flirtatious air about them’ (Allen, 1994, p. 73). A defining aspect of the D’Arcy campaigns was their concerted efforts to engage the common person – Coke was a product that every American could enjoy. The popularity of these everyday scenes increased in the interwar period. Popular periodicals like Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post not only reached a national audience; they also provided a platform for high-quality artwork. Eminent artists and illustrators were duly commissioned to adorn Coca-Cola advertisements with eye-catching and evocative images (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 151–2). While Norman Rockwell’s sentimental depic­ tions of boys enjoying a Coke projected an idyllic America to tug at the heartstrings, it was Haddon Sundblom’s Santa Claus that emerged as the brand’s most iconic and evocative image.

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Sundblom’s first advertisement featuring Santa Claus appeared in 1931. Winter had always been a slow period for Coca-Cola, and the Great Depres­ sion scarcely helped. It was hoped that Santa’s celebration of ‘the pause that refreshes’ would resonate, particularly with children (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 167). While images of Santa had been in circulation long before Coke launched its campaign, these representations had varied greatly in terms of his size, clothing, and demeanour. By the late 1920s, the image of a portly, jolly, bearded Santa wearing a red suit and carrying a sack of toys had become largely standardised in American popular culture (Charles and Taylor, 1992, p. 13). Sundblom’s images built on this conventional format, but the ubiquity of Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign across multiple media outlets over an extended period of time meant that Coke’s Santa became the standard representation. The popular misconcep­ tion that Coca-Cola was responsible for Santa’s red and white colouring under­ scores the degree to which Sundblom’s images had infiltrated the public’s perceptions (Forsyth, 2016). In his account of the ways that Christmas has been Americanised, George McKay (2008, p. 56) observes that ‘Santa is not … easily identifiable as an American figure – most obviously clothing is red and white rather than (star­ red) red, white and blue’. However, McKay (2008, p. 57) also contends that Coca-Cola’s Santa played an active role in establishing the ‘connection between Christmas, Americana, advertising and commerce’. The relationship is reinforced both explicitly and implicitly in a 1943 Coca-Cola advertisement. In it, a soldier is depicted dressing up as Santa. Underneath, the copy details ‘how Americans spread the holiday spirit overseas’ before explaining that sharing a Coke with a ‘stranger or friend … spreads the spirit of good will’ (Life, 1943, p. 45). This same image was also reproduced in an advertisement for Australian audiences in the Australian Women’s Weekly that same year. Although minor changes were made to the uniform to localise the scene, the copy below told a very different story: ‘The entire output of Coca-Cola in Australia now goes to the armed forces … to contribute its little bit to the comfort and cheer of Australian and American fighting men’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 1943, p. 46). The minor alterations here are perhaps less important than the consistencies. In both appeals, it is the image of the sol­ dier donning the red and white costume to spread good cheer that conveys the central story, not the copy. America’s place across the two advertisements is more ambiguous. While the original advertisement celebrates Santa as a symbol of American values, the Australian advertisement has been actively de-Americanised. The Australian advertisement certainly connects Santa to domesticity (and with it Coke), but it presents this as a more universal experience – enjoyed and celebrated locally and internationally. Sundblom ceased producing the annual Santa campaigns in 1964 (Charles and Taylor, 1992, p. 13). After three decades, it seems that Santa’s image no longer enjoyed the same resonance for the brand. In part, the extended cam­ paign that had helped build the popularity of the jolly man in red and white was also a victim of its own success. His ubiquity and universal appeal across the

64 R. Crawford globe meant that he often overshadowed the brand he was ‘spruiking’. To this end, the connection between Santa, Coke, and America had become unbalanced. However, it was ultimately the simultaneous rise of television and the youth market that saw the Santa campaign come to an end. The imagination and magic that underpinned the print and outdoor campaign did not translate well for television. Santa’s distinctive colouring was also lost in black and white transmission. However, it was Coca-Cola’s strategy of appealing to a new generation of consumers, both in the domestic US market and internationally, that hastened his demise. For these young, affluent consumers, it was fun-in-the-sun imagery coupled with the upbeat jingles that resonated with their lifestyle and dreams – not a jolly old man from their childhood. While Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaigns still periodically feature Santa, he appears in them as a nostalgic figure who principally speaks to the brand’s heritage in the US market (Journey Staff, no date).

Sight, sound, and story – the power of television The rapid expansion of Coca-Cola’s global network during and after World War Two placed a new emphasis on advertising and marketing. Broadcast platforms provided additional avenues for reaching the company’s expanding markets. Although Coca-Cola had made extensive use of radio since the 1930s, it had struggled with the medium. As Frederick Allen (1994, p. 221) notes, the ‘underlying difficulty was that Coca-Cola, whose glory lay in the allure created by its visual art, had no message that could easily be communicated in words or lyrics alone’. Television would be different. Combining sight and sound, tele­ vision provided Coca-Cola with an opportunity to reinvigorate its message for a new age. Two of its most successful television advertising campaigns not only illustrate Coke’s capacity to revitalise its brand image and its relationship with consumers, but also reveal an increasingly ambiguous relationship with America. By 1955, advertising for Coke had become tired and uninspired, particularly in the face of its chief competitor, Pepsi (Ciafone, 2019, p. 127; Allen, 1994, pp. 281, 294). Coca-Cola’s decision to dismiss the D’Arcy agency signalled a desire to move on from the past. McCann Erickson was given the account with a simple but vague brief – to deliver ‘mainly new phrases and mainly new illustrations’ (Allen, 1994, p. 281). Boasting a global network and extensive experience in handling international accounts, McCann Erickson promised to breathe new life into Coke’s advertising by focusing on the new generation of consumers (Ciafone, 2019, p. 127). Its first major campaign was ‘Things go better with Coke’. The catchy, upbeat campaign sought to appeal to young baby boomers by engaging with their culture in an authentic way rather than clumsily speaking at it (Ciafone, 2019, p. 129). However, it was the 1971 ‘Hilltop’ commercial that truly captured the sentiment and the imagination of this audience.

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The ‘Hilltop’ campaign was devised by creative director Bill Backer. Stran­ ded overnight in Ireland by fog, Backer watched on the next morning as other frustrated travellers now began to chat and laugh over a Coke (Andrews & Barbash, 2016). He scribbled the idea ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company’ onto a napkin before taking it to his musical team, who then completed the lyrics: I’d like to buy the world a home And furnish it with love Grow apple trees and honey bees And snow white turtle doves I’d like to teach the world to sing In perfect harmony I’d like to buy the world a Coke And keep it company That’s the real thing What the world wants today Is the real thing Originally aired on radio, the campaign failed to ignite the audience’s imagi­ nation. It needed visuals to bring the song to life and to endow it with authenticity – along with a healthy financial investment from Coke. While Coca-Cola’s marketing team were concerned about its ‘treacly’ message (Allen, 1994, p. 327), they ultimately relented and threw their support behind the big idea of people across the world sharing a Coke. The ensuing combination of hopeful lyrics, folksy music, and a mass of smiling young people of all races resonated with audiences across the world. Interpretations of the campaign’s appeal inevitably highlight its connec­ tion with the zeitgeist, specifically youth culture. Bethany Klein (2008, p. 15) thus likens the campaign to the Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’, with both depicting ‘a throng of hippies singing to a global audience about making the world a better place’. One of the commercial’s co-creators, Roger Greenaway, expressed similar sentiments: ‘I think it was the flower power era, and most of America was tiring of the Vietnam War … The lyrics, although not overtly anti-war, delivered a message of peace and camaraderie’ (Andrews & Barbash, 2016). Others offer a more cynical interpretation. Building on Thomas Franks’ critique of the corporate co­ optation of the 1960s countercultural movement, Amanda Ciafone (2019, p. 147) contends that the commercial could be seen as ‘the representation of a new global capitalist hegemony that would soon be termed neoliberalism’. The commercial’s image of youth, diversity, and harmony, she argues, ‘symbolically annihilated the politics that was actually bringing together multiracial collectives of young people’. The visuals in ‘Hilltop’ were avowedly global – from its international and interracial cast to its Italian setting. Its global credentials, however, did not end

66 R. Crawford there. Where previous campaigns had been created in the US and subsequently localised for international markets (such as the Santa example detailed earlier), the ‘Hilltop’ campaign was both conceived and specifically produced for a global market (Ciafone, 2019, pp. 148–9). While the dubbing of voices for non-English-speaking markets certainly provided an unmistakable reminder that the commercial had been produced elsewhere, the campaign’s overt efforts to embrace the global indicate that the relationship between Coke and America was becoming more fluid. While ‘Hilltop’ marked a new shift in Coca-Cola’s advertising approach, the 1979 ‘Early Showers’ commercial revealed that Coca-Cola had not entirely moved on from its American roots. Better known as the ‘Mean Joe Greene’ commercial, it won a Clio Award and a Cannes Gold Lion. Regularly voted as one of the all-time greats of Super Bowl commercials by commentators and industry insiders, the commercial has assumed an iconic status (Haden, 2018; Siegel, 2015). In 2015, it was rebroadcast as part of a nostalgic ‘throwback’ theme for one of NBC’s NASCAR broadcasts. As a spokesperson for Coke explained: ‘The meaning of this ad is timeless. It remains relevant to the brand and to audiences as much today as it did over 30 years ago’ (Schultz, 2015). In contrast to ‘Hilltop’ and various other campaigns, ‘Early Showers’ eschews music in favour of long-form narrative. The story revolves around American footballer ‘Mean’ Joe Greene, who is shown limping from the arena to the change rooms. Along the way, an admiring young fan tells Greene that he is ‘the best ever’. The ‘mean’ player responds with a deadpan ‘Yeah, sure’, before the boy offers him his Coke. Greene reluctantly takes the drink and finishes it. Disappointed at his hero’s reaction, the boy goes to walk off. Greene then drops his ‘mean’ persona, yelling out to the boy ‘Hey kid, catch’ and throwing him his jersey as thanks. Their ensuing smiles embody the commercial’s tagline: ‘Have a Coke and smile’. As the commercial’s copy­ writer, Penny Hawkey recounted: ‘We wanted a boy and an intimidating man – someone who needs and someone who rejects – and to have plenty of tension and relief when the Coke was handed over’ (Schultz, 2015). For others, it is the commercial’s juxtaposition of ‘the toughness of an aggressive sport with the innocence of a child’ which ‘successfully elicits powerful emotions as the two worlds are bridged’ (Storyful Team, 2018). Given the universality of the commercial’s emotional appeals, it was assumed that the campaign would readily resonate with international audiences. Com­ mentators have consequently interpreted the re-creation of the commercial (The Coca-Cola Company, 2014) featuring local soccer players for interna­ tional markets as evidence of the campaign’s success. However, the fact that the campaign needed alteration for international audiences indicates that the appeal and success of ‘Early Showers’ was less universal than many thought. Hawkey’s reflections on the campaign further expose the degree to which ‘Early Showers’ expressed distinctly American values. While the narrative itself was hardly unique, Hawkey (2016) notes that its ‘corny’ approach was distinctly American:

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‘I think we’re a nation of sentimental saps. And I say that proudly. We love a good heart-wrencher.’ Hawkey also identified a more profound issue for American audiences: While we didn’t set out to make a great social or cultural statement, we certainly had one … Joe was perhaps the first black male to appear in a national brand commercial, and it had a profound effect at the time. The letters we got were full of gratitude and excitement. (Schultz, 2015) Hawkey’s recollection was not altogether accurate. African Americans had in fact been appearing in Coke commercials since the 1960s. Their inclusion, observes Ciafone (2019, p. 131), ‘was not so much a progressive push for social change as a realization that marketing difference was … profitable’. African Americans consumed Coke in greater quantities than their white counterparts. Such images also provided authenticity to Coke’s efforts to be ‘real’ in its efforts to reach its youth market in the US – irrespective of race. Although consumers outside of the United States had little trouble under­ standing the narrative as well as the images being conveyed in the commer­ cial, ‘Early Showers’ did not strike the same chord with them as it did with American audiences. As two of Coca-Cola’s largest and most memorable campaigns, ‘Hilltop’ and ‘Early Showers’ illustrate the power of television as an advertising medium. Both campaigns made the most of the medium to elicit an emotional response: catchy music and a visual spectacle for ‘Hilltop’; and a long-form narrative for ‘Early Showers’. With no competition from pay television, the commercials reached enormous audiences in the US and, indeed, abroad. Significantly, few television campaigns from the 1980s and 1990s would have the same level of popularity or, indeed, memorability (Pendergrast, 2013, pp. 355, 358, 374, 417–18, 423). Despite their success, the two campaigns contained marked differences which reveal the growing tension between the ‘domestic’ American market and international markets. A fundamental difference lay in their production. ‘Hilltop’ was created internationally for a global audience. Despite appearing a decade later, ‘Early Showers’ reverted to the firm’s conventional format of creating advertisements for local audiences and then exporting them internationally. While the success of ‘Early Showers’ revealed the abiding importance of America for the brand, its relative lack of resonance in markets beyond the US helps account for why ‘Hilltop’ emerged as the brand’s defining campaign from the television era. By embodying and celebrating Coke’s status as a truly global brand with global values, ‘Hilltop’ set a new benchmark for the ways that Coke needed to advertise itself on television to its international markets. How­ ever, the degree to which this was a television-era model would become apparent in the twenty-first century.

68 R. Crawford

Giving the consumer a voice – and a name By the early 2000s, Coca-Cola’s dominance appeared to be weakening. Sales in the US market were declining as health-conscious consumers shunned the sugary drink. The appeal of the Coke brand in international markets was also weakening. Coke’s challenges varied from country to country – in some mar­ kets they stemmed from ongoing ideological concerns about American imperialism and globalisation, while in others they reflected the intensification of competition in the soft drink market (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 423). The firm also had problems of its own. Coca-Cola’s marketing seemed to lack the edge it once enjoyed. While new slogans and campaigns sought to reinvigorate the brand, their formulaic structure meant that they were easily forgotten. CocaCola had sought to ameliorate this issue by embracing the ‘think global, act local’ mantra, but the reality was that Coke no longer seemed to be ‘it’. The brand’s apparent slide in the early 2000s was further exacerbated by the emergence of a new media platform – the internet. Although it enjoyed a growing popularity with young consumers and offered an instantaneous global reach, the internet still sat awkwardly within Coca-Cola’s marketing mix (Pendergrast, 2013, p. 448). The problem was not necessarily the task of learning a new technology, but rather the new medium’s impact on Coke’s highly centralised marketing approach. By giving consumers a voice, the internet and emerging social media platforms fundamentally disrupted the marketing team’s tight control over its all-important brand. Coke’s flagging fortunes, however, meant that it needed to revisit and reinvigorate its market­ ing. This meant that Coca-Cola could no longer afford to dismiss the internet as an ancillary advertising medium for its campaigns. In order to reassert its brand’s relationship with its key youth demographic, Coca-Cola needed to develop a campaign that was based on a deeper understanding of the relation­ ship between consumers, emerging digital platforms, and the Coke brand. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign would be the breakthrough solution. In addition to signalling Coca-Cola’s embrace of new media platforms, the creation and execution of the globally successful campaign also indicated that the brand, and now its custodians, were becoming more global than American. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was devised in Australia. As a middle-sized but affluent market with long, hot summers, Australia is an important market for beverage companies like Coca-Cola. Not surprisingly, the competition between marketers there is intense. While the development of new Coke lines offered further choice to consumers, sales remained sluggish. In 2011, Coca­ Cola’s Australian marketing team undertook a closer study of its market. The market research produced two key findings. Firstly, it found that Coke had become ‘too familiar, too predictable’ (Moye, 2016) – the brand had become a hostage to its own success. Coca-Cola’s marketing may have been in line with what had worked in the past, but it no longer enjoyed the same level of vitality or innovation that previously set it apart from its competitors. Recent cam­ paigns had thus sought to reiterate ‘why people loved Coke’ (Moye, 2016), but

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had failed to translate these sentiments into increased sales. Secondly, the research found the key demographic of teens and young adults had adopted an ambivalent view of the brand. While this group ‘loved that Coca-Cola was big and iconic, many felt we were not talking to them at eye level’ (Moye, 2016). Such findings spurred Coca-Cola’s South Pacific marketing team into action. Plans for a new campaign were duly developed with two key objectives: increasing the consumption of Coca-Cola over the summer period; and encouraging consumers to talk about Coke again (Coca-Cola, 2012). In summer 2011, local advertising agencies were invited to pitch their big idea. The winning ‘Share a Coke’ campaign was devised by the Sydney office of Ogilvy & Mather. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign centred on a simple idea – printing names on Coca-Cola bottles and cans. When the director of marketing for Coca-Cola South Pacific, Lucy Austin, first saw her name on a Coke bottle, she was thrilled: ‘My reaction was childlike … I knew many others would have the same reaction’ (Moye, 2016). However, the real strength of the idea lay in its social appeal. Jeremy Rudge, Coke’s Creative Excellence Lead, thus explained that the marketing team ‘purposefully made the invitation more about giving a Coke to someone else rather than keeping it to yourself. The sentiment of “sharing a Coke” with someone else broadened our appeal’ (Moye, 2016). By identifying 150 of the country’s most popular names and placing them on the labels, the campaign actively encouraged consumers to think about others (Coca-Cola, 2012). The act of purchasing a bottle with a friend’s name on it also provided a cheap and fun way of connecting with that person. The campaign’s simple premise belied the complexities of actually bringing it to life. Coca-Cola’s head office was understandably cautious about any changes to the physical appearance of its product and its impact on the brand. Rudge thus recalled that, ‘There was a great deal of nervousness internally. Not so much about the idea, but about the scale of approvals we’d need to go through, and ensuring we had accounted for all risk factors’ (Moye, 2016). The typeface was another important consideration. While the initial designs featured the names in Coke’s famed Spencerian script, trade­ mark issues led to the development of a new typeface based on the Coke logo. Underscoring the campaign’s emphasis on connecting with consumers, Coke’s marketers labelled ‘it the “You” font because it’s about you, the consumer, not Coca-Cola’ (Moye, 2016). The promotions for the campaign reflected the degree to which the media landscape had changed. Materials were created for different media and plat­ forms with the deliberate aim of enabling consumers to engage with the cam­ paign in ways that were consistent with their personal media consumption habits, and of course, their level of interest in the campaign (Coca-Cola, 2012). The campaign’s launch occurred in the unlikeliest media outlet for a modern campaign – the press. Despite proclamations of its death, the press was still an important medium, offering a means by which the campaign could be intro­ duced to the public and, indeed, other traditional media outlets. Stories on the

70 R. Crawford campaign appeared in the national press as well as trade publications catering to the marketing industry. Television commercials featuring ‘a montage of volunteered photos of real people who shared that name’ (Coca-Cola, 2012) were then created and first broadcast during the grand final matches of Australia’s largest football codes. The advertisements reached an estimated 30 per cent of Australia’s population (Coca-Cola, 2012). The traditional media outlets were complemented by the social media platforms. Key media and celebrity influencers were sent personalised seeding kits featuring a Coke product bearing their name. Clear campaign messaging was also included to help ensure that these influencers disseminated the desired image to their networks and followers (Coca-Cola, 2012). The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign had an active digital presence that was fully integrated into the marketing mix. People were actively encouraged to send virtual Cokes to friends via Facebook, which, in turn, encouraged active engagement (Moye, 2016). Significantly, Coke’s marketing team sought to integrate ‘new’ and traditional media outlets. Coke collaborated with Austereo, a national network of radio stations, to identify and broadcast 150 ‘name’ songs. Audiences were then encouraged to discuss the songs on Facebook. Not only was outdoor advertising integrated with digital platforms, but it emerged as one of the campaign’s centrepieces. Consumers were encouraged to SMS their friends’ names, which were then displayed on the giant Coca-Cola sign at Sydney’s King’s Cross. In order to push the campaign into the digital realm, participants subsequently received an MMS of their friend’s name on the King’s Cross sign which they could then repost on Facebook and other digital plat­ forms (Coca-Cola, 2012). While Coke’s marketing team was embracing the freedoms afforded by digital media, they nevertheless remained acutely aware of the risks associated with giving consumers free rein. ‘We knew people would want to publish profanity and abusive language’, explained Rudge, ‘so we had to put filters in place. We came up with a “block list” of over 5,000 words our printers literally could not print and the sign could not display’ (Moye, 2016). With almost half of all SMS messages for the King’s Cross sign using words from the banned list, the caution was well warranted. It was not long before the campaign’s creators realised that it was an enor­ mous success. ‘Share a Coke’ generated significant coverage in traditional media outlets and, importantly, on social media platforms. Consumers were readily buying in. While the team had targeted influencers to promote the campaign, they discovered that celebrities not connected with the campaign were voluntarily endorsing it through their networks. Significantly, people were heeding the campaign’s message and were actually sharing the product with friends and loved ones near and far. ‘We hadn’t really anticipated the packs being used in this emotionally powerful way. It was an example of how the public took the idea and shaped it themselves’, explained Rudge. The popularity of the campaign exceeded the creators’ expectations. ‘The over­ whelming demand for the personalised cans surprised us’, Rudge added, ‘They quickly became a must-have object of desire’ (Moye, 2016).

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The campaign was an enormous success. It not only exceeded Coca-Cola’s aim of having people talking about Coke again; it also saw young adult con­ sumption increase by 7 per cent (Herbison, 2014). The enormous popularity of ‘Share a Coke’ in Australia gave Coca-Cola the confidence to roll it out on an international scale. Over the next decade, the campaign would be run across 80 national markets worldwide (Saul, 2014). In the United States, the cam­ paign saw sales increase by 2.5 per cent (Herbison, 2014). Given that its sales had been falling for 11 years, this was a significant achievement. Analyses of the campaign identified four key components that underscored its success: consumers were prompted to create online media content; the brand was able to connect with consumers on a personal level; the campaign had a powerful call to action; and the campaign could be changed and enhanced across different markets and platforms, and, indeed, over time (Tarver, 2019). Ultimately, it was Coke’s deep and profound integration of social media into the marketing mix that proved to be the foundation stone of the ‘Share a Coke’ campaign’s success. A British report by YouGov found that consumers who were exposed to the campaign across different media platforms had a ‘substantially better view of Coca-Cola than the nationally representative sample’ (Staff Writer, 2014). Significantly, it also found that ‘consumers who were exposed to the campaign on Facebook showed the most dramatic improvement in how they perceive Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero (up 18 per cent)’ (Staff Writer, 2014). The simple call to action was perfectly suited to social media’s celebration of self-expression and shar­ ing. To this end, the YouGov report identified capacity for consumers to personalise their involvement in every aspect of the campaign – from the purchase of a product to sharing images online – as an essential part of its success: ‘People loved that this campaign spoke to them directly by using their names, or those of their friends and family … Share a Coke spoke to them as individuals, while making them feel more connected to the brand and to one another – and that is the secret to its success’ (Staff Writer, 2014). The campaign’s simplicity also meant that it was malleable. In the United States, the number of personal names printed on labels went from 250 to 1,000. It also added an e-commerce shop where consumers could order per­ sonalised bottles (Tarver, 2019). China used nicknames on cans, while the campaign in the UK celebrated the birth of the royal baby by inviting con­ sumers to ‘Share a Coke with Wills and Kate’ (Moye, 2016). New platforms could be easily blended into the mix. By the time ‘Share a Coke’ arrived in the US, Twitter had emerged as a key platform. Emboldened by their experiences, Coke’s American marketing team actively encouraged consumers to tweet about their experiences (Tarver, 2019). Reflecting on the campaign’s media use and what he would do differently if given the opportunity, Rudge observed: ‘We’d probably spend a fraction of what we spent on TV … there wasn’t the confidence in social media then that there is now. “Share a Coke” showed that this new landscape was here’ (Moye, 2016). The campaign’s worldwide success revealed the degree to which the media landscape had

72 R. Crawford changed, and the need for brands like Coke to change and evolve with them in order to remain relevant. The ‘Share a Coke’ campaign also reveals an increasing complexity in the ways that the Coke brand is seen and understood by its creators and, indeed, consumers. As a campaign created in Australia and subsequently launched internationally, ‘Share a Coke’ illustrated the strengths of the ‘think global, act local’ mantra. It also revealed the changing place of America in the brand’s marketing. For Coke, the United States was just another market, albeit an important one. However, it would be incorrect to claim that Coke had embraced globalism at the expense of its American heritage. The campaign’s creators liaised closely with Atlanta throughout its development. Their over­ view of the campaign and its conduct, as well as their veto power, meant that the firm’s American head office was still actively involved in the campaign. With its emphasis on individual consumption, the campaign also expressed and, indeed, celebrated American liberalism and its values. To this end, the cam­ paign’s creation outside of the US, along with its immense popularity across worldwide markets, illustrate the degree to which these values had become internalised internationally. Of course, the evolution of media platforms and media consumption patterns in the twenty-first century meant that this cele­ bration of individual consumption was counterbalanced by the campaign’s emphasis on sharing. While Coke’s connections with America were abiding, ‘Share a Coke’ demonstrated that the brand’s future success had become increasingly intertwined with broader media trends and patterns of consump­ tion among consumers at the global level.

Conclusion Coca-Cola’s embrace of advertising has been one of the foundation stones of its success. Campaigns like ‘Santa’, ‘Hilltop’, ‘Early Showers’, and ‘Share a Coke’ illustrate the degree to which advertising has historically played a cen­ tral role in creating, disseminating, and maintaining the Coke brand both in the United States and, indeed, internationally. Individually and collectively, these campaigns also vividly demonstrate the power of advertising to reflect and inform broader social, cultural, political, and economic trends and developments. To this end, the place of America across each of these seminal campaigns offers a unique insight into the brand as well as its longevity. While the four campaigns reveal that Coke’s relationship with America has been deep and abiding, they also demonstrate that it has not been a static one, with Coke’s connection to America changing and evolving over time and, indeed, across different media outlets. The campaigns examined in this chapter illustrate Coca-Cola’s expansion from a national market to a global one. Early campaigns were created by American marketers for domestic consumption. Their success in establishing a domestic market coupled with their limited experience of international markets led to the assumption that such advertisements could be neatly exported with

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minor alterations to accommodate local tastes. Imbued with American values and outlooks, early campaigns like ‘Santa’ played an active role in promoting Coke’s Americanness to international audiences and, indeed, celebrating it. While this strategy established a powerful and evocative image of Coke, it was not a sustainable one. As ‘Early Showers’ demonstrated, success in the American market did not guarantee international success. A combination of internal and external forces required Coca-Cola to rethink the place of America in its brand. The growing profits drawn from international markets combined with ambivalent perceptions of American economic and political power necessitated a more international approach to the development and appearance of Coca-Cola advertising campaigns. ‘Hilltop’ was therefore created with an international audience in mind. ‘Share a Coke’ went further, being conceived, developed, and executed outside of the United States well before its launch there in 2014. The spectacular success of both campaigns has seen them become an iconic part of Coke’s heritage. Of course, Atlanta was never a pas­ sive observer in these campaigns. The need to gain approval from the American head office meant that it continued to exert influence over each campaign. However, the changing nature of its presence and contribution to such cam­ paigns reveals an increasingly pragmatic approach to its marketing operations. While Coke’s American heritage and values were celebrated in the American market, their presence in other markets was more ambiguous. As it evolved into a truly global brand operating in a global market, Coca-Cola displayed a growing willingness to alter, adjust, or simply drop its Americanness in order to enhance Coke’s transnational appeal. Being global, it seems, was more profit­ able than being American, revealing Coke to be an agent of globalisation rather than Americanisation. The campaigns explored in this chapter thus confirm Holt’s (2004, pp. 22–7) assertion that Coca-Cola advertising had indeed lost its unique connection with America. Of course, Coca-Cola’s rise as a global brand does not entirely account for the changing presence of America in its advertising. Such shifts were equally driven by evolving media technologies and, indeed, patterns of media con­ sumption. From the nineteenth century through to the 21st century, Coke’s advertising progressively made use of new media outlets to promote the brand. Although some media channels were embraced more quickly than others, Coca-Cola’s marketing team nevertheless understood the importance of new media platforms and the opportunities afforded by them. New media outlets not only provided access to new and increasingly large audiences, but also presented opportunities to revisit and reconceptualise the Coke brand and its relationship with consumers. Coca-Cola’s embrace of new media channels was also inextricably linked to its broader marketing strategy – established in the mid-twentieth century – of targeting the youth market. In order to establish and maintain its currency with youth culture and its embrace of these new media outlets, Coca-Cola needed a highly visible pre­ sence in these media. Each of the campaigns examined in this chapter were successful because they understood the power of the specific medium they

74 R. Crawford used (as well as its limitations) and the ways that consumers connected with it. By illustrating the degree to which the advertised image of Coke has been progressively informed by new media technologies and consumers’ relation­ ships with them, ‘Santa’, ‘Hilltop’, ‘Early Showers’, and ‘Share a Coke’ col­ lectively present a timely reminder of the degree to which the medium remains the message.

References Allen, F. (1994) Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-known Product in the World. New York: Open Road. Andrews, T. M. & Barbash, F. (2016) ‘“I’d like to buy the world a Coke”: The Story behind the world’s most famous ad, in memoriam its creator’, The Washington Post, 17 May. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/ 05/17/id-like-to-buy-the-world-a-coke-the-story-behind-the-worlds-most-famous­ ad-whose-creator-has-died-at-89/. Australian Women’s Weekly. (1943) 25 December, p. 46. Bell, P. & Bell, R. (1993) Implicated: The United States in Australia. Melbourne & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, A.A. (2016) What Objects Mean. 2nd edn. London & New York: Routledge. Berghahn, V.R. (2010) ‘The debate on “Americanization” among economic and cul­ tural historians’, Cold War History, 10 (1), pp. 107–130. Charles, B. & Taylor, J.R. (1992) Dream of Santa: Haddon Sundblom’s Advertising Paintings for Christmas 1931–1964. New York: Gramercy Books. Ciafone, A. (2019) Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Coca-Cola. (2012) ‘Share a Coke campaign post-analysis’. Marketing, 22 June. Available at: https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-c/share-a-coke-campaign-post-analysis/. Craft, E.J. (2019) ‘Jeep, Disney, Ford and more: Consumer survey reveals America’s most patriotic brands’, AdAge, 17 June. Available at: https://adage.com/article/digital/ jeep-disney-ford-and-more-consumer-survey-reveals-americas-most-patriotic-brands/ 2178641. de Grazia, V. (2006) Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through 20th Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Forsyth, M. (2016) ‘Coca-Cola didn’t invent Santa … the 10 biggest Christmas myths debunked’, The Guardian, 22 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/21/coca-cola-didnt-invent-santa-the-10-biggest-christmas­ myths-debunked. Foster, R. (2008) Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haden, J. (2018) ‘A marketing expert names the top 5 Super Bowl commercials of all time (and dissects why they were so exceptional)’, Inc., 1 February. Available at: http s://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/an-expert-marketer-picks-top-5-super-bowl-comm ercials-of-all-time-and-dissects-why-they-were-so-effective.html. Hawkey, P. (2016) ‘Hey kid, catch! Why corny is king on the Superbowl’, Campaign, 2 February. Available at: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/hey-kid-catch-why­ corny-king-super-bowl/1381801.

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Herbison, M. (2014) ‘“Share a Coke” campaign increased US sales for the first time in a decade’, Marketing, 30 September. Available at: https://www.marketingmag.com.au/ news-c/share-a-coke-campaign-increased-us-sales-for-the-first-time-in-a-decade/. Hilger, S. (2008) ‘“Globalisation by Americanisation”: American companies and the internationalisation of German industry after the Second World War’, European Review of History, 15 (4), pp. 375–401. Holt, D.B. (2004) How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Journey Staff. (no date) ‘Coca-Cola and Father Christmas: The Sundblom Santa story’, Coca-Cola Journey. Available at: https://www.coca-cola.co.uk/stories/coca-cola -and-father-christmas-the-sundblom-santa-story. Kahn, E.J. (1959) ‘The Universal Drink: The making – and selling – of Coca-Cola’, The New Yorker, 7 February. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1959/ 02/14/the-universal-drink. Kellner, D. (2002) ‘Theorizing globalization’, Sociological Theory, 20 (3), pp. 285–305. Klein, B. (2008) ‘In perfect harmony: Popular music and Cola advertising’, Popular Music and Society, 31 (1), pp. 1–20. Kuisel, R. (1991) ‘Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French face Americanization, 1948–1953’, French Historical Studies, 17 (1), pp. 96–116. Kuisel, R. (2000) ‘COMMENTARY: Americanization for historians’, Diplomatic His­ tory, 24 (3), pp. 509–515. Life. (1943) 20 December, p. 45. Lynch, J. (2015) ‘Why Matthew Weiner ended Mad Men with “the best ad ever made”’, Adweek, 21 May. Available at: https://www.adweek.com/tv-video/why-ma tthew-weiner-ended-mad-men-best-ad-ever-made-164903/. Marling, W H. (2006) How ‘American’ is Globalization?Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. McKay, G. (2008) ‘Consumption, Coca-colonisation, Cultural Resistance – and Santa Claus’, in Sheila Whiteley (ed.), Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 50–67. Moye, J. (2016) ‘Share a Coke: How the groundbreaking campaign got its start “Down Under”’, Coca-Cola Australia, 17 July. Available at: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/ au/news/share-a-coke-how-the-groundbreaking-campaign-got-its-start-down-under. Pendergrast, M. (2013) For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink. 3rd edn. New York: Basic Books. Roudometof, V. (2015) ‘Theorizing glocalization: Three interpretations’, European Journal of Social Theory, 19 (3), pp. 391–408. Saul, H. (2014) ‘Coca-Cola “Share a Coke” campaign boosts US sales for first time in a decade’, Independent, 27 September. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/business/coca-cola-share-a-coke-campaign-boosts-us-sales-for-first-time-in-a -decade-9759739.html. Schultz, E.J. (2015) ‘Coke brings back classic “Mean Joe Greene” ad’, AdAge, 6 Septem­ ber. Available at: https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coke-brings-back-classic-joe­ greene-ad/300252. Siegel, A. (2015) ‘“Hey kid, catch!” Mean Joe Greene, Coca-Cola and the greatest Super Bowl ad of all time’, USA Today, 5 January. Available at: https://admeter.usa today.com/2015/01/05/hey-kid-catch-mean-joe-greene-coca-cola-and-the-greatest­ super-bowl-ad-of-all-time/.

76 R. Crawford Sørensen, N. A. & Petersen, K. (2012) ‘Corporate capitalism or Coca-Colonisation? Economic interests, cultural concerns, tax policies and Coca-Cola in Denmark from 1945 to the early 1960s’, Contemporary European History, 21 (4), pp. 597–617. Staff Writer. (2014) ‘Case study: What brands can learn from the integrated Share a Coke campaign of 2013’, The Drum, 29 January 29. Available at: https://www.the drum.com/news/2014/01/28/case-study-what-share-coke-campaign-can-teach-other­ brands. Storyful Team. (2018) ‘Super Bowl advertisers lean into socially conscious spots’, Story­ ful, 1 February. Available at: https://storyful.com/blog/superbowl-socially­ conscious-spots/. Tarver, E. (2019) ‘Why the “Share a Coke” campaign is so successful’, Investopedia, 24 September. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/100715/ what-makes-share-coke-campaign-so-successful.asp. The Coca-Cola Company. (2014) ‘“Mean” Joe Green Reflects on iconic Coca-Cola ad that changed his life’. Available at: https://www.coca-colacompany.com/ stories/commercial-appeal-mean-joe-greene-reflects-on-iconic-coca-cola-ad-that­ changed-his-life. Trentmann, F. (2009) ‘Crossing divides: Consumption and globalization in history’, Journal of Consumer Culture, 9 (2), pp. 187–220. Wagnleitner, R. (1994) Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Weiner, M. (dir.) (2015) ‘Person to Person’, Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 14. Wilken, R. & Sinclair, J. (2011) ‘Global marketing communications and strategic regionalism’, Globalizations, 8 (1), pp. 1–15.

5

Coke and gender Pauline MacLaran

In a high-profile advertisement during a February 2018 Super Bowl game – one of America’s most watched TV transmissions – Coca-Cola surprised its audience with a non-binary gender reference. The ‘Wonder of Us’ advertise­ ment features a colourful array of diverse characters drinking Coca-Cola while a voiceover proclaims: ‘there’s a Coke for he and she and her and me and them’. By using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘them’ in such a major broadcast to describe a person in the advertisement (with a rainbow lanyard around their neck to leave us in no doubt as to intentionality), Coca-Cola not only signalled its support of the LGBT community to over 100 million people, but also took a step towards normalizing gender non-conformity (Allen, 2018). Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl advertisement thus marks a moment of what gender theorist, Judith Butler (1999), would refer to as a ‘resignification’ in terms of the heteronormative matrix that normalises opposite sex desire. That is to say, the advertisement breaks with the expected repetition of the norms implicit in the traditional male/female binary by adding another sexual category that does not fit within the existing schema. Importantly, the low-key way that the term ‘them’ is introduced within the advertisement encourages acceptance rather than stigmatisation. As a consequence, Coca-Cola is currently positioning itself at the forefront of challenging gender norms, anxious to play a significant part in the vanguard of diversity that is sweeping contemporary media. But how did Coca-Cola evolve from its pervasive image of ‘smiley all-American Coke-quaffing girls’ promot­ ing ‘the pause that refreshes’ (Holt, 2004, p. 23) to being a champion of sexual diversity? And how can we understand this evolution in terms of brand iconi­ city and the overall integrity of Coca-Cola’s changing communications strate­ gies? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by documenting the gendered history of Coca-Cola’s advertising images, dividing discussions into four key periods: 1 2 3 4

1895–1930s: Models of progressive American femininity 1940s–1960s: Perfect housewives and mothers 1970s–2000s: Diversity and female empowerment 2014 onwards: Moving beyond gender binaries

78 P. MacLaran The sections that follow first outline the critical visual analysis on which the study is based before discussing each period in turn, using relevant images of women and contextualising these within the particular historic period. Finally, the concluding discussion uses Butler’s heteronormative matrix as its focal point to evaluate Coke’s evolving gender strategies.

Critical visual analysis and gender performativity For the purposes of this analysis I gathered Coca-Cola advertisements with women as their focus. The images and videos (in the case of later campaigns) were retrieved from a variety of websites, including Pinterest (especially vintage pictures), YouTube, the Coca-Cola website, as well as other media sources, such as marketing and advertising websites relating to professional publications (Marketing Week, Campaign). The latter were also very informative for reactions to particular campaigns. In total I gathered 150 images and 15 videos, dividing these into the four aforementioned periods. The rationale for this division was based on each period representing a significant change in Coca-Cola’s treat­ ment of gender. In respect to my analysis and interpretation, I iterated between images and their historic contextualisation, particularly with regard to prevailing ideolo­ gies of femininity. This resulted in what Schroeder (2006) describes as ‘critical visual analysis’, a mode of enquiry that seeks to understand images in their cultural context. As a form of cultural media, advertisements embed specific ideologies, as well as acting as socialising agents (Hirschman & Stern, 1994). Because the way phenomena are represented produces meaning, images can have broader social and political consequences. This is very consistent with Butler’s (1990; 1993) theory of gender performativity that conceives of gender as something we ‘do’ rather than ‘have’, an ongoing discursive prac­ tice that is maintained through repetition of specific acts. Hence, advertise­ ments that continually represent women and men in certain ways are a powerful contributor to gender construction and socialisation through the heteronormative matrix on which these representations are traditionally based.

1895–1930s: Models of progressive American femininity Coca-Cola has a long and illustrious history of using female figures in its advertising (‘Digital Deli Online, nd). From the ubiquitous Coca-Cola girls gracing the pages of its calendars as early as 1891, to Marilyn Monroe’s endorsement of the brand in the 1950s, Coca-Cola has portrayed women in a myriad of ways and circumstances. As ‘the quintessential American lifestyle product’ (Mooney, 2012), Coke’s illustrations provide fascinating vignettes of the times in which they were conceived, especially in relation to fashion and cultural trends. Images depicted on their famous calendars document the changing times, from images of tennis-playing Edwardian ladies, through the

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1920s flappers, to the war years of the 1940s that depicted women’s participa­ tion in the war effort. The popular actress and singer Hilda Clark was the first female face of CocaCola in 1899 in one of her early endorsements of the brand, she adopts what was to become a classic pose for a Coca-Cola model, a pose that lasted well into the 1950s. The stereotypical Coca-Cola girl throughout this period (1895– 1969) was a conventionally beautiful, slim, smiling, white-skinned brunette who, Coke-in-hand, holds our gaze in a coy but often mildly flirtatious manner. Alongside her, one of Coca-Cola’s many straplines reminds us that the drink is: ‘delightfully carbonated’ or ‘so easily served’ and so forth. The model herself conveys an image bursting with good health, an image that additionally implies social and moral responsibility together with an overall ‘wholesomeness’ of mind and body. This early advertising also shows Coca-Cola differentiating between male and female consumers in its communications strategy, reinforcing gendered assumptions of the period about women’s emotional nature. In its original inception in 1886, Coca-Cola was conceived as a nerve tonic for men and women, a ‘cure for all nervous affections – Sick, Head-Ache, Neuralgia, Hysteria, Melancholy, etc’ (Culley, 2014, p. 139). However, the wording of a 1905 Coca-Cola advertisement reveals that, whereas the drink was recommended for male consumers on the basis of ‘mental and physical exhaustion’ caused by professional concerns, the recommendations for female consumers were based on them being ‘thirsty, weary and despondent’ (Culley, 2014, p. 139). In other words, men’s need for the drink was rational, rooted in hard work, an explanation contrasting sharply with women’s needs, attributed to more irrational feelings and sensitivities. Women were also likely to be weary from shopping, according to another early advertisement featuring two handsome, high-society ladies who have paused for a glass of Coca-Cola and a chat while seated around restaurant table. They are dressed in the style of the Edwardian ‘Gibson Girl’ era. That is to say, they are wearing a classic Edwardian two-piece that comprises a voluminous A-line ankle-length skirt and top with puffy sleeves that show off a curved, corseted waistline. Their lavish outfits are complemented with large hats adorned with colourful flowers and feathers. The advertisement’s strapline reads: ‘Take one glass of Coca-Cola when weary with shopping. It imparts energy and vigour.’ Such examples reveal how Coca-Cola frames its advertisements within a binary logic of production as masculine and consumption as feminine. This, of course, is unsurprising given the dominance of such logic in the modern era, one that privileged the male breadwinner and his production over the female consumer and her consumption. Coca-Cola, like many other marketers in the early 1900s, was showing interest in gendered aspects of consumption as a means of market differentiation and brand positioning, resulting in male mar­ keters typically targeting female consumers (Fischer & Bristor, 1994). The shopping domain, however, was increasingly being portrayed by marketers as a

80 P. MacLaran realm where women could assert their agency through consumption (Wit­ kowski, 2004) and we see this very clearly in the Coca-Cola images and mes­ sages of the time that emphasise women’s growing independence in conjunction with their shopping trips. Significantly, the Gibson Girl image that the two women connote in the aforementioned advertisement is distinct from that of the New Woman, another cultural image that had also emerged in the 1890s. Although both were educated, independent, and likely to be upper middle class, the Gibson Girl was more of a fashion statement and did not align herself with the suf­ frage movement in the same way as did the New Woman who argued for social and political reform (Minowa et al., 2019). Going with the Gibson Girl image was then a much safer strategy for Coca-Cola as she did not threaten men’s status or masculinity, whereas the New Woman was often stigmatised by the popular press of the time (Patterson, 2005). So, in show­ ing two women out in the public domain, enjoying themselves without male escorts, the Coca-Cola advertisement is nodding to women’s increasing independence while also carefully avoiding making a political statement. It is significant that we never see women in bloomers or shorter skirts of the style that denote the suffrage movement. Indeed, there is no evidence in these advertisements that Coca-Cola supported the suffragettes, unlike other commercial ventures who openly declared their support as, for example, Gordon Selfridge who flew the suffragette flag above his famous department store (see Maclaran, 2012). Nevertheless, Coca-Cola certainly did not want to alienate this group either, as suffragettes were mainly from the wealthy segments it hoped to target. So, the company would have been keen to ensure it reflected the changing times and women’s growing independence. We therefore see women engaging in sports, driving cars, and, importantly, being on their own, both within the home and outside of it. These are all very progressive images of femininity for the period. Interestingly, too, these early adver­ tisements do not depict women with children or undertaking common household chores as is often the case in later commercials. Rather than attributing this fact solely to female emancipation issues, however, it is equally likely to have been because its targeted demographic would have had servants to help with these tasks. In its early advertising, Coca-Cola was thus portraying middle-class ideals of femininity associated with American modernity and its concomitant individualised consumer subject while, at the same time, carefully avoiding any more politically orientated stance. Hence, Coca-Cola was reiterating fashion discourse of the time. From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards, fashion magazines, like Vogue, were run­ ning editorials encouraging women to see themselves as individuals, not only in terms of choices available to them, but also in determining their own futures (Delhaye, 2006).

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1940s–1960s: A supporting role as perfect housewives and mothers In recognition of the buying power of the female consumer, women were certainly the predominant focus of Coca-Cola’s advertising in its early period and through the 1930s up until World War Two. During the war years, however, Coca-Cola was more concerned with associating with the war effort, turning its focus to those who played the most obvious roles in this, namely men (Hymson, 2011). Women became the smiling bystanders, looking in on the male world of war that Coca-Cola depicted. Whereas men in uniform peppered Coca-Cola advertisements, there were only rare portrayals of women in uniform, despite the fact that almost 400,000 women served in the US armed forces during World War Two (Holm & Bellafaire, 1998). Conse­ quently, Coke depicted a patriotic masculinity that stereotyped gender roles, using women as the supporting cast in its portrayals of male war heroes. A typical advertisement of the period will serve to illustrate this point. We see a young couple resting on their bicycles on a sunny day in the country. They have obviously paused for a moment to drink their Cokes. Sitting astride his bicycle, the military uniform and peaked cap he wears command authority. In contrast, she leans submissively back against her bicycle, gazing at him and dressed in a pretty white knee-length frock with red trimmings to match the red bow in her brown hair that tumbles in curls around her shoulders. She could be straight out of Alice in Wonderland, infantilised and vulnerable, as her dress billows gently in what we presume must be a breeze wafting over the rural scene. It’s his job to protect her and, in turn, metaphorically his country. Its innocuous strapline tells us, ‘Nothing refreshes like a Coke’. Nor does this type of image reflect the reality of the 19 million women in the US labour force in 1945 (Bureau of the Census, 1949). During the war years many more women had entered the workforce to fill the traditional male positions that had become vacant in factories, transport, agriculture, and offices. The iconic US War Production Board poster, Rosie the Riveter, vividly sym­ bolises women’s contribution to the war effort. But Coca-Cola advertisements hold no such equivalent image to depict female strength and determination. Instead, Coca-Cola, like other cultural media of the time (Ziesler, 2008) rein­ forces traditional roles for women either as housewives, pin-ups, or carers such as nurses. Decorative and innocent portrayals of all-American women rein­ forced messages of ‘friendly globalisation’, (Hymson, 2011, p. 134) representing the drink as a benign force of modernisation helping Coca-Cola to bring its American values to the rest of the world. Thus, through such advertisements and its backing of US troops overseas, Coca-Cola very successfully developed its global strategy. Its president during the war years, Robert Woodruff, stipulated that ‘every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents, wherever he is and whatever it costs the company’. Indeed, General Eisenhower himself requested that Coca-Cola ship equipment and materials to set up ten bottling plants to supply his men

82 P. MacLaran (Prendergast, 2013). With such acts and its many print advertisements, CocaCola engendered feelings of national solidarity (Holt, 2004). Apart from com­ forting the soldiers, this also enabled many local people to have their first taste of Coca-Cola. The drink had come ‘to represent American myths exemplified by the war effort’ (Holt, 2004, p. 22). By the end of the war Coca-Cola was well placed for further global expansion, almost doubling the number of countries with bottling operations during the post-war period and up until the 1960s (www.coca-cola.co.uk). After the war ended, women were expected to vacate their jobs for return­ ing men. With women forced back into the kitchen, ideologies of the perfect housewife and mother proliferated in the post-war period and well into the 1960s. Consequently, Betty Friedan (1963) famously critiqued marketers and advertisers in her book, The Feminine Mystique, accusing them of being com­ plicit in confining and controlling women through domesticity. They glorified the role of the housewife, she argued, to ensure her continued enslavement to consumerism. A recurring trope of Coca-Cola’s during this time is the hostess carrying a tray of Cokes to serve either her guests or her family. This trope was also encapsulated in the newly introduced six-bottle carton, ‘The package that gets a welcome at home’; the pause that refreshes had become a ‘family affair’. In a typical advertisement of the time, a woman stands beside her brimming supermarket trolley, sipping a Coke. Long white gloves adorn her arms and a tightly belted frock shows off her small waist to best advantage. Overall, the outfit denotes her role as professional housewife. Her trolley is full and a six­ pack of Coke balances on top of the mountain of other products. We are left in no doubt that she is taking a ‘refreshing’ break from the arduous task of shopping for her family. While such portrayals reflected the attitudes and fashions of the time, they also helped to normalise certain behaviours and values. In Coca-Cola’s case, these values embedded US ideas of progress, individualism, and the nuclear family, values associated with a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, masculine worldview (Hirschman, 1993), and against which different cultural values were often judged and found lacking. This hegemonic ideology has led to frequent criticism of Coca-Cola’s globalising strategy with accusations of cultural imperialism, i.e. the importation and normalisation of US values regardless of existing cultural norms. For example, in the Indian context, Coca-Cola can be perceived as alienating people from their traditional Indian identity, especially through ‘continuously creating new and sexy advertisements’ (Varman & Belk 2009, p. 686). Thus, it is also important to recognise that this worldview and associated ideology of femininity permeates Coca-Cola’s female portrayals, resulting in the normalisation of particular gender identities and roles. And it is fair to say that Coca-Cola – certainly during this post-war period – embraced a stereotypical, traditional idea of femininity and the concomitant objectification that goes with it, portraying women from a masculine, heterosexual point of view (termed the ‘male gaze’ by Mulvey, 1975).

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1970s–2000s: Diversity and female empowerment The wartime had unquestionably enabled Coca-Cola to build its iconicity around traditional gender roles and the men-of-action heroes it portrayed (Thompson & Holt, 2004). Yet, although in the immediate post-war years this iconicity flourished as Coca-Cola championed a settled suburban life based on the nuclear family (Holt, 2004), by the latter half of the 1960s these ‘apple-pie celebrations’ of Americana were wearing thin (Holt, 2004, p. 23). The 1960s were the heyday of the hippie revolution, generating a counterculture that questioned the status quo. Coca-Cola’s previously close association with mili­ tary and the war effort now worked against it in view of the unpopularity of America’s role in the Vietnam War. The Coca-Cola image threatened to become severely tainted if it continued to reinforce its links to US national identity. This period also reflected a wider ‘creative revolution’ in the adver­ tising industry with marketers appropriating values from the 1960s counter­ culture (Frank, 1998) to better connect with youth markets. As Holt (2004) meticulously documents, Coca-Cola’s famous Hilltop television advertisement in 1971 reinstated its iconicity and marked a significant change in its commu­ nications strategy, one that sought to embrace a more nuanced global approach in tandem with an acknowledgement of cultural differences. Significantly, the Hilltop advertisement – with its famous refrain of ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ – featured a group of young men and women from around the world (as denoted by their varied dress styles and physical features). According to Holt (2004, p. 24), this advertisement con­ structed Coca-Cola as ‘an elixir of universal harmony’, creating a new identity myth that Americans could use as a symbolic resource. A nation of young people, beleaguered by adverse publicity from the Vietnam War, could feel good about itself again. Importantly for this chapter, the advertisement por­ trayed a wide range of diverse ethnicities, including women of colour. Although Coca-Cola’s advertising had first featured a black woman in 1955, Mary Alexander, she was portrayed more as what Tom Burrell1 describes as a ‘dark-skinned white person’ (Hautzinger, 2018). Hilltop also reflected the public pressure exerted on advertisers from the 1960s onwards to show greater diver­ sity in relation to ethnic minorities and gender differences. Hence, from Hilltop onwards, Coca-Cola would show more cultural awareness and sensitivity in its advertising, alongside a recognition of women’s increasing social and economic independence. The latter, fuelled by feminist activism targeting advertising’s limited representations of women and their bodies, led to many themes of female empowerment reflected in advertising throughout this period (and to the present day). Companies were increasingly recognising women’s purchasing power, wanting to keep them onside for the many market opportunities they represented. Keeping up with changing ideals of femininity was now a crucial factor in any successful communications strategy. The most iconic Coca-Cola advertisement in this respect is surely the Diet Coke commercial produced in 1994 – ‘Diet Coke Break’ – that supplants the

84 P. MacLaran traditional male gaze with a female viewer, objectifying men instead of women in a challenge to traditional sexist depictions of gender roles. Looking out their office windows, a group of women ogle a gorgeous construction worker below as he takes a break to remove his shirt and drink a Diet Coke. With looks of longing and barely contained desire, the women gaze lasciviously down from their superior vantage point, soaking up his toned body with their eyes. All the while, the powerful voice of rhythm and blues singer, Etta James, belts out the advertisement’s soundtrack, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’. With its reversal of stereotypically passive female portrayals, the campaign became a hugely successful cultural phenomenon, generating many copycat advertise­ ments and continuing the series in 1997 (the window washer); 2007 (the ele­ vator engineer); and 2013 (the gardener). This period saw images of female empowerment proliferate in advertising more widely, with the repackaging of ‘feminist quests for freedom, choice and opportunity as images, desires, lifestyles, and emotions that can be attained through consumption’, as McDonald (2000, p. 38) so succinctly puts it. The celebration of the marketplace as a site for female emancipation also coincided with the emergence of third-wave feminism in the 1990s. Unlike their feminist sisters (or mothers) in the 1960s and 1970s, this new generation revelled in displaying their own sexuality, portraying themselves as active sexual subjects and dismissing myths of passive femininity. The Diet Coke advertisement resonated perfectly with this zeitgeist. Just how committed to female empowerment the Coca-Cola company actually was remains to be seen, given the strong criticism of several Coke Zero advertisements during the same period. Launched in 2005, Coke Zero was aimed at a male market, research having revealed that Diet Coke was perceived as a very feminine drink and men avoided its potential ‘gender contamination’ (Avery, 2012). Positioning the drink as a ‘defender and celebrator of guy enjoyment’ (Nobel, 2013), Coca-Cola released a series of internet advertise­ ments with laddish themes that had sexist undertones. One featured a woman casually dressed in jeans and a top with an accompanying quiz. If questions were answered in a particular way, she would then appear beside a bed, dressed only in her scanty underwear. The Swedish advertising watchdog (ERK) took exception to this and scolded Coca-Cola for treating women as pure sex objects (The Local, 2009).

2014–present: Moving beyond gender binaries Although Coca-Cola had advertised Diet Coke to the gay community in the LGBT magazine Instinct for several years preceding this period, its Super Bowl advertisement in 2014 certainly marks another turning point for the brand’s gender strategy. As the first Super Bowl advertisement to feature a gay family, it marked a more daring period in Coca-Cola’s gender strategy and an attempt to be seen as fully embracing gender diversity and inclusion (objectives also now strongly emphasised on its website). Whereas Coca-Cola had tended to follow

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cultural trends, now we see it more boldly leading them. The Super Bowl commercial told the story about a male couple who take their daughter rollerskating. The same advertisement – which also ran at the opening ceremonies of the 2014 Winter Olympics – was enthusiastically received by the LGBT com­ munity (Emery, 2014). Continuing this trend to present times, Coca-Cola has now become some­ thing of a champion for gender diversity, not only sponsoring the 2018 Gay Pride, but also featuring more LGBT themes in its advertising. In 2016 its ‘pool boy’ commercial was once again widely heralded as positively promoting inclusion of the LGBT community. It featured a sister and brother both lusting after the pool boy. They both rush to grab him a Coke from the fridge only to start fighting about who gets to him first. Finally, they both arrive to find that their mother has beaten them to it! This short overview of Coca-Cola’s recent gender portrayals brings us neatly to where we began this chapter: with Coca-Cola’s 2018 Super Bowl adver­ tisement that represents a pinnacle for Coca-Cola’s strategy of gender diversity, encapsulated in ‘The Wonder of Us’. Referring to this as a ‘beacon of opti­ mism’ and harking back to the Hilltop advertisement with its inclusive and harmonious message, Coca-Cola’s website currently stresses the values of togetherness that the brand has long embraced.

Discussion To conclude, I briefly discussed Coca-Cola’s gender strategies in terms of Butler’s (1990) heteronormative matrix, a tool she uses to explain how culture normalises certain masculinities and femininities while marginalising others. She sees the concept of heteronormativity as being the way our society makes sense of gender identity, with its matrix relying on three key binaries and their interrelationships – male-female, masculine-feminine, and opposite-sex desire. For Butler, a multitude of institutional and cultural practices that go unques­ tioned in our daily lives sustain the discourse of heteronormativity. Importantly, however, because gender is something we do rather than have, our ideas of masculinity and femininity can change because of actions that subvert rather than reinforce particular gender norms. Re-signifying practices requires con­ stant repetition to be truly effective over time as, for example, Thompson and Üstüner (2015) illustrate in exploring re-signifying practices in the sport of women’s roller derby and what they term ‘ideological edgework’. Advertising, because it continually transmits repetitive images and messages to a wide audi­ ence, also has the power to re-signify meanings (and of course, to reinforce stereotypes). If we now consider Coca-Cola’s gendered history across the four identified periods above, we can see that in relation to the first (1895–1930s), the con­ tinual emphasis on models of progressive American femininity in Coca-Cola’s advertising most certainly contributed to changing notions of femininity during this period, a femininity that was more individualistic and realised through

86 P. MacLaran consumption. Yet, the second phase (1940s–1960s), on account of the war years, proved retrogressive in terms of women’s progress with more con­ servative gender norms and values portrayed in the plethora of Coca-Cola’s images connoting perfect housewives and mothers. Apart from a small number of images that suggested the contrary (e.g. women in uniform), most of Coca­ Cola’s advertising seems to have firmly emphasised very traditional models of masculinity: the conquering breadwinner hero juxtaposed against a domes­ ticated, family-focused femininity. It is only in the third phase (1970s–2000s) that once again more challenging images appear in Coca-Cola’s advertising, images that promote a more empowered version of femininity that questions gender norms, and reverses the ‘male gaze’. Yet, the commitment to gender equality seems contrived and potentially hypocritical with Coca-Cola’s simul­ taneous reinforcement of very traditional notions of masculinity to promote Coke Zero. In other words, what it gives with one hand in respect of chal­ lenging traditional norms of femininity, it takes away with the other hand, in reiterating the norms of hegemonic masculinity. I argue, therefore, that any significant change to gender binaries and norms implicit in the heteronormative matrix has minimal input from Coca-Cola’s gender strategies during this third period. Consequently, it is really only in the fourth phase (from 2014 onwards) that Coca-Cola’s gender strategy has started to make waves (or rainbows!) and it remains to be seen how long this bolder approach to gender diversity will last or the inroads it will make in disrupting the concept of heteronormativity and its associated norms of masculinity and femininity. Because norms are natur­ alised or contested through repetition, it takes time and many iterations for any lasting change to occur (Chambers, 2007). For example, in other media spheres, celebrities like Lady Gaga and David Bowie who play with gender roles in norm-deviating ways challenge traditional binary divisions of sex, gender, and sexuality, percolating culture and helping to change broader soci­ etal attitudes. Yet, Butler herself admits that it is very difficult to predict which deconstructions may be effective and it is only with the passage of time that we are able to judge which iterations have contributed to wider cultural changes. So, in relation to the impact of Coca-Cola’s progressive gender diversity strategy, only time will tell the extent of its influence on contemporary culture and its overall contribution to shifting binary gender norms – but that is another chapter!

Note 1 Tom Burrell made his mark as the first black person working in a Chicago advertis­ ing agency in 1961 and went on to open his own agency. He is noteworthy for successfully overcoming the ignorance about black culture and history that prevailed at the time.

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6

Coke and the digital age Tao Deng, Daradirek Ekachai and Jean M. Grow

Introduction Coca-Cola is the quintessential American brand. The story of its rise to global prominence parallels the growth of American capitalism and expresses Amer­ ican capitalistic values. For as ‘consumerism and democracy spread, the fizzy brown drink is never far behind’ (Standage, 2005, p. 265). And with the rise of social media technologies, Coca-Cola’s ability to reinforce its brand messaging around the world is greater than ever before. In this chapter, we explore Coca-Cola’s global brand presence on Instagram, and the degree to which their gender portrayals differ when catering to differ­ ent cultures. This study encompasses Coca-Cola’s global account as well as regional accounts from six individual countries: Brazil, Canada, Italy, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Russia. The Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model is engaged to tease out patterns, while the analysis is shaped by social and gender theories. We tell the story of Coca-Cola’s dynamic balancing act: an iconic brand adopting a globalised yet specialised approach to spreading their bubbly beverage across the globe.

Literature review Capitalism and gender: An uneasy pairing Gender portrayals in mass media have been studied extensively for more than 50 years, with research interest stemming from the rise of feminism in the 1960s (Grau & Zotos, 2016). Communication researchers have extensively examined how men and women are portrayed in mass media, particularly in advertising, to see whether they conform to gender stereotypes or traditional roles. Often using content analysis as a research method, gender roles studies have looked at various parameters of gender portrayals, such as physical char­ acteristics, occupational status, leadership roles, and personality traits. While discussing the role that advertising plays in society, particularly where stereotypes are concerned, Grau and Zotos (2016) mentioned two opposing views: the ‘mirror’ versus the ‘mould’. The ‘mirror’ view argues that

90 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow ‘advertising reflects values that exist and are dominant in the society’, while the ‘mould’ view sees advertising as ‘a reflection of society and its prevailing values’ (Grau & Zotos, 2016, p. 762). However, Grau and Zotos suggested the two views should be seen as a continuum, because gender roles can both reflect social values as well as construct gender identity. Findings from Levy’s (2007) research support Grau and Zotos. Levy examined the role of women in adverts and the effect of marketing strategies on consumers through the lens of social learning theory, and found that advertising plays a role in our retention of information as well as our attitudes toward products. Further, they discovered that portrayals of women in advertising can reinforce gender perceptions and the roles women and men should play in society. They con­ cluded that advertisements both mirror and mould society, indicating that while adverts reflect societal norms, they also reinforce existing stereotypes. Researchers have also conducted meta-analyses of gender roles in attempts to identify themes portrayed in advertisements. Whipple and Courtney (1985) reviewed nine studies conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s that examined female role portrayals, product category interactions, and communication effectiveness as perceived by consumers. Based on the findings, they suggested four strategies. First, advertisers should match the gender of the model with the image of the product. Second, the setting should be appropriate to the product use. Third, non-traditional role depictions are more effective than traditional ones. Fourth, any depiction should be realistic and natural, avoiding stereo­ typed portrayals. More recently, Eisend (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of 64 studies on the effects of gender stereotypes in advertising and discovered that stereotypes are still salient in advertising, particularly concerning the portrayal of female occu­ pational status. However, the results also indicated that the degree of stereo­ typing had decreased over time as advertisers and companies reacted to changes in society, and was also often dependent upon the culture in question. As such, Eisend’s work indicates that adverts mirror rather than mould societal expectations. Another longitudinal study by Grau and Zotos (2016) found similar results. The researchers reviewed a range of gender stereotypes studies conducted in several countries and cultures over the previous decade and found that gender stereotyping in advertising still persists and is prevalent in many countries. They also outlined the need for more gender stereotypes research into social media advertising. Scholars have also looked at how a product category might alter gender stereotypes. Hatzithomas et al. (2016) conducted a longitudinal content analysis of Super Bowl commercials from 1990–1999 and 2000–2009, evaluating a total of 447 commercials. The results found that stereotypes of both men and women were present in the majority of Super Bowl commercials across both decades. However, the authors also found that men were more likely to be stereotyped. This was attributed to the underrepresentation of women in Super

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Bowl commercials. The results also demonstrated a slight shift away from the traditional stereotypes used to depict both men and women. Extensive research has also been conducted into how portrayals of women in advertisements could be affected by target audience. Plakoyiannaki and Zotos (2008) explored the portrayal of women in advertisements from three different categories of magazines in the United Kingdom: women, men, and general audience. They examined whether the representation of women differed between magazine categories as well as product categories. Their content ana­ lysis of 3,830 adverts found that women were most likely to be portrayed in decorative roles across all three categories of magazines. However, women’s magazines were more likely to depict women in non-traditional roles, while men’s magazines more often depicted women in decorative and traditional roles. In addition, general audience magazines tended to show women in roles equal to men. In terms of product categories, hedonic products tended to be associated more with women in decorative roles while utilitarian products portrayed women in a variety of roles. Skorek and Schreier (2009) analysed gender roles across the same three categories of magazines, but drew the 1,861 adverts for their study from three different countries: Germany, Poland, and the United States. The results of this study showed that, while the proportions of men and women portrayed in working, family, and recreational roles are lower than in previous years, there has been a dramatic increase in the proportion of women in decorative roles. Furthermore, the results revealed that a gap has widened in that more women are portrayed in family roles while men are more frequently portrayed in sports and athletic roles. Findings also suggested that the representation of gender in Germany and Poland is much more balanced than that of the United States, which appears to favour more stereotypical gender representations. This is of note, in that American brands play a dominant role in the global landscape, as do the American advertising agencies that support them. Odekerken-Schroder et al. (2002) analysed advertisements from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, investigating the relationship between per­ ceived masculinity, as proposed by Hofstede (discussed in detail below), and gender stereotyping in print advertisements. Analysing a total of 946 adverts from six different British (high masculinity) magazines and six different Dutch (low masculinity) magazines between October 1999 and December 1999, the results show that adverts in the United Kingdom portrayed female characters less frequently in working roles and more frequently in decorative roles. This study indicates that there may be some direct associations between a country’s perceived masculinity and gender stereotyping in advertising. Expanding on the scope of earlier studies, Matthes et al. (2016) conducted research examining gender roles using 1,755 adverts from 13 countries across Asia, Europe, and the United States. They used Hofstede’s masculinity/femi­ ninity index and GLOBE’s gender egalitarianism, while taking into account each country’s culture in respect to gender. The researchers discovered that stereotypes were alive and well. However, they also found that local culture

92 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow played a smaller role in advertising than previously thought. This is a very important finding when we consider the power of global brands. They explained that this may be because advertising often lags behind societal chan­ ges and developments. We suggest that this lag in adverts embracing societal change may be driven, in part, by the lack of diversity, gender, and otherwise, within multinational advertising agencies. While all the previously discussed studies help us understand explorations of gender stereotypes, we also need to be clear that feminist theory tells us that organisational structures, including advertising agencies and brand holding companies, are not gender-neutral (Acker, 1990). In fact, we should view ‘bureaucracy and hierarchy as male-created and male-dominated structures’ (Acker, 1990, p. 141). These structures often require women to enact and support masculine ways of working, being, and expressing themselves (Lewis, 2014). Further, advertising creative departments, the very place where these advertisements are created (including social media brand images such as those on Instagram) are often dominated by men. We know that globally only 23.5 per cent of all those working within advertising creative departments are women (Deng & Grow, 2018). Thus, it should come as no surprise that gender stereotypes are alive and well in global advertising imagery. Nor should it sur­ prise us that many adverts still employ images that minimise and/or subvert the power of women, while sexualising and celebrating women as decorative objects. Gender, power, and aspiration through a symbolic lens Clearly, advertising is intimately intertwined with consumption. At the same time, consumption has evolved to become the symbolic exchange of signs, including gendered signs, rooted in culture. In this sense advertising takes cul­ tural and social experiences and uses them to create symbolic referents, spinning brands into global aspirational cultural icons that usurp local culture as they march across the globe. In the process, brands take on greater and greater degrees of significance, outstripping the actual material products themselves. Advertising creates a structure of meaning that allows for the consumption of brands as part of our social relationships (Elliot & Wattanasuwan, 1998; Domzal & Kernan, 1993; Dyer, 1982). Contemporary consumption is all about ‘the expression of identity through the display of sign values’ (McFall, 2004, p. 4). These aspirational values are ‘rooted in, and perpetuated by, consumption; and with the pervasive nature of technology their influence spreads across interna­ tional borders’ (Grow, 2017, p. 59). Signs are selected and organised into codes or bundles that create a paradigm, ‘a set of signs from which the one to be used is chosen’ (Fiske, 1990, p. 56). These series of signs create chains, which form paradigmatic structures. Branded signs are often bundled and simplified as they move across cultures, making them easily chosen and thus easy to integrate into local culture. Thus, it is not surprising that Coca-Cola positions its brand under simple, unifying, and

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aspirational paradigmatic codes, supported by taglines and images that can be embraced the world over. With just the slightest changes to their branded messages, brands like Coca-Cola create meaningful and relevant messages that fit well within local social and cultural contexts, while maintaining, in the case of Coca-Cola, the brand’s uniquely American aspirational values. Tracing branded semiotic expressions within Western brands, we often see expressions of power and privilege. These expressions of power tend to privilege one type of culture, often shaped by Western male identities, over other expressions which typically lack power, often female and non-Western cultural expressions. Thus, it was not surprising to us as we surveyed the content analysis literature to see gender representations so profoundly defined across time. The paradox of practice and its muting of non-Western, non-male culture (McFall, 2004), was well demonstrated in the previous section. Further, Goldman (1992) argues that social realties are often corrupted by advertising because of its inher­ ent and historical development within a capitalist political economy that privi­ leges Western masculinity over all other identities. In this sense, advertising is just as hegemonic as it is sexist, as was also demonstrated by the studies in the pre­ vious section. As a successful global marketer, Coca-Cola has mastered the dynamic balancing act that allows their brand messaging to be simultaneously globalised (maintaining the same overall advertising theme) and specialised (tai­ loring messages to local preferences) as its adverts roll out across the world. Culture values through the lens of Hofstede Internationally based cultural dimensions models are frequently used by global marketers as tools to examine and compare cultural variations from one market to another. The Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model is one of the most used large-scale worldwide models by marketers and researchers. Originally designed to understand culture’s impact on values in the workplace, the Hofstede’s model (Hofstede, 2001) has since developed into an important framework in analysing consumption motives and advertising. Established in 1963 and replicated by scholars around the world, the Hofstede’s model now contains dimensions values for 76 countries (Hofstede-insights.com, no date). The value scores (ranging from 0 to 100) indicate the relative differences between cultures regarding a given cultural dimension (such as individualism, indulgence, or masculinity), which in turn impacts both the content of the paid messages and the creative strategies employed by advertisers when targeting that culture. Our discussion of the Hofstede’s model mainly focuses on the social implications of gender roles as a tool that helps explain variances of gender portrayal across cultures, and as such we will be focusing exclusively on the masculinity dimension. Hofstede’s masculinity dimension measures the degree of gender role differ­ entiation attributed by the society (as opposed to biology), as well as the degree to which a society values achievement and assertiveness over caring for others and quality of life. Cultures that score high on masculinity are driven by ste­ reotypical ‘masculine’ traits – competition, achievement, material success,

94 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow assertiveness, and status. Cultures that score low on masculinity emphasize ‘feminine’ traits – relationships, caring for others, quality of life, overlapping roles, and modesty. Gender role differentiation is strongly presented among high masculinity societies. Men in these societies are presented as having ste­ reotypical male traits such as being strong, outgoing, and bold, while women are presented as soft, nurturing, and accepting. By contrast, feminine societies value minimum role differentiation. For example, males and females can share household roles such as child care, cleaning, and shopping. Advertisements in a particular culture reflect the culture’s dominant masculinity/femininity values. In addition, Milner and Collins (2000) also found that adverts designed for consumers in feminine countries feature a greater proportion of characters in relationships than those for masculine countries.

Research questions Building on past studies and literature on gender norms and stereotypes in advertising, this study explores the extent to which Coca-Cola, via its various international Instagram accounts, portrays stereotypical gender roles. Providing cultural context, the study also examines whether Hofstede’s masculinity/fem­ ininity dimension affects gender stereotyping in masculine and feminine coun­ tries. The overarching question we explore is how Coca-Cola has or has not employed gender stereotypes within the online world, specifically on Insta­ gram, to maintain its prowess as the quintessential aspirational American brand. More specifically, we aim to answer three questions: RQ1: What are the differences between men and women’s portrayals within each of Coca-Cola’s seven international Instagram accounts? RQ2: What are the differences between Coca-Cola’s global Instagram account and six of its regional accounts in terms of men’s and women’s portrayals? RQ3: How is gender stereotyping depicted differently in Coca-Cola’s Insta­ gram posts between masculine and feminine cultures?

Methods Content analysis is used in this study because it is a widely used method in the investigation of gender stereotypes (Neuendorf, 2011; Plakoyiannaki et al. 2008; Zotos and Lysonski 1994; Lysonski, 1985). Sample We chose the photo and video sharing platform Instagram as our sampling media because it is a valuable social media marketing tool for global brands. With over one billion monthly active users worldwide, Instagram is one of the

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most popular social networks (Instagram, 2019). Due to its visual nature and interactive features, Instagram is also popular among businesses. An estimated 75 per cent of US companies were on Instagram in 2019 (eMarketer, 2017). As of January 2019, Coca-Cola owns one corporate Instagram account, one offi­ cial global Instagram account and 35 regional accounts dedicated to different countries and regions around the world. For this study, we chose six countries from across five continents (so as to best represent the major regions of the world) that have high and low scores on Hofstede’s masculinity/femininity index. We also chose countries for which the corresponding official regional Coca-Cola Instagram account had more than 100 posts. In order of decreasing masculinity value, the six countries whose Instagram accounts we chose to sample were: Italy (70), the Philippines (64), Nigeria (60), Canada (52), Brazil (49), and Russia (36). For the purposes of this study, the former three were designated as high masculinity countries, while the latter three were designated as low masculinity countries. Additionally, we also examined Coca-Cola’s global Instagram account to provide a global context and baseline for analysis. Of the seven Instagram accounts included in our study, the Coca-Cola global account has 1,075 posts and 35,000 followers; the Brazil account has 1,243 posts and more than one million followers; the Canada account has 1,756 posts and 5,427 followers; the Italy account has 849 posts and 83,000 followers; the Nigeria account has 2,864 posts and 138,000 followers; the Philippines account has 1,164 posts and 111,000 followers; and the Russia account has 1,621 posts and 93,000 followers (as of January 2019). Internet addresses for each of the above accounts are listed at the end of the references. Research on Instagram is skewed (in terms of literature produced) toward user-generated content and hashtags rather than marketing messages. We chose to focus on Instagram not only because of its popularity, but because of its global reach, its standardised user interface across nations, and its high advertis­ ing potentials. Traditionally, gender role researchers have used print adverts or television commercials as media to analyse gender roles and stereotypes. Insta­ gram is the closest social media platform to print or TV advertisements that would allow us to explore our chosen research questions. In order to derive the sample used in our study, we began by retrieving all of the posts made by our chosen six regional Coca-Cola Instagram accounts, as well as Coca-Cola’s global Instagram account, between January 2014 and January 2019. We only used official, Instagram-certified accounts (as indicated by the tick mark and the account description) because fan-made or imitated accounts do not necessarily reflect Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies. From the initial five-year sample period, a total of 100 Instagram posts were selected for each of the seven accounts, which were then screen-captured in high-resolution and saved in JPG format for analysis. This led to a total of 700 posts for the study’s sample.

96 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow Intercoder reliability Three independent coders (two female and one male, all unaware of the pur­ pose of the study) were recruited and trained to content-analyse the Insta­ gram posts from the seven accounts, with each coder analysing approximately 233 posts. To ensure intercoder reliability, the three coders analysed a subsample of 70 Instagram posts from Coca-Cola’s global account (unused in the main study), which represented 10 per cent of the total sample of 700 posts (Wimmer & Dominick, 2013). Codes were entered into Microsoft Excel sheets and reliability coefficients were determined by using ReCal (Reliability Calculator), an online utility that computes intercoder reliability coefficients (Freelon, 2013; Freelon, 2010). The average measure of agreement for the initial 13 variables was .69, which was considered unsatisfactory, so we revised and clarified our coding definitions to the coders. Another subsample of posts was then analysed by the coders for which the average pairwise percentage agreement reached .88, which was deemed satisfactory (Krippendorff, 2004). Coding procedure Building on prior studies into gender stereotypes, this study investigates the various types of female and male stereotypes depicted in Coca-Cola’s Instagram posts and how these stereotypes vary across countries. The unit of analysis was the primary or central character or model shown in each Instagram post. If two primary characters were present in a single post, each character was coded separately. If there were more than two characters, only the two most primary characters were coded. The following guidelines were used to identify the primary character in a given post: the focus is on the body and/or activity of that person, the person holds the branded product, the person takes up more space, or the person is in the centre spot. Regarding coding schemes, the study adapted gender role categories used in previous research (Hatzithomas et al., 2016; Knoll et al., 2011; Eisend, 2010; Skorek & Schreier, 2009; Plakoyiannaki & Zotos, 2008). The following cate­ gories were used: primary character (yes, no, and appear as equal), gender (male, female), race (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and multiracial), age (child 12 years or younger, adolescent 13–19, young adult 20–39, mature adult 40–64, elderly 65 or older), location (workplace, home, social/trans­ portation, social/indoors, social/outdoors, and others), degree of dress (fully dressed, suggestive dressed, partially dressed, and nude), physical presentation (skinny, fit, full-figured, and obese), sexually suggestive poses (behaviours that arouse sexual desire or interest), female stereotypes (traditional roles, decorative roles, and non-traditional roles), and male stereotypes (sexualised man, and non­ traditional roles).

Coke and the digital age

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Data analysis Frequencies and percentages were calculated for each variable. Chi-square tests were performed in IBM SPSS to determine statistically significant differences between groups.

Results In the final sample of 700 Instagram posts from the seven official Coca-Cola Instagram accounts, 1,075 primary characters were coded. The majority of the primary characters were female (67.6 per cent), Caucasian/White (51.9 per cent), and young adults from 20–39 years old (82.9 per cent). The most common predominant setting was social/outdoors, representing 43.4 per cent of the total posts. There were two noticeable findings regarding the global Coca-Cola account. First, it had the most women as primary characters at 76.6 per cent. This is consistent with data that show women are the dominant Instagram users worldwide at 68 per cent (Aslam, 2018). Second, most of the posts were set in social settings with 40.6 per cent outdoors and 30.3 per cent indoors; the same applied to most of the other Instagram accounts. In terms of post setting/loca­ tion, the accounts from Brazil and the Philippines contained many images in a studio setting; thus many were coded as other. Detailed descriptions for each country can be seen in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Breakdown of Coca-Cola Instagram post demographics by country Characters

Women%

Predominant race/%

Predominant age/%

Predominant setting/%

Young adult / 82.3 Young adult / 87.1 Young adult / 83.2 Young adult / 94.2 Young adult / 81.7 Young adult / 74.1 Young adult / 79.4 Young adult / 82.9

Social, outdoors / 40.6 Other / 57.0

Global

175

76.6

White / 47.4

Brazil

139

63.3

White / 28.1

Canada

190

71.1

White / 77.4

Italy

137

65.7

White / 94.2

Nigeria

142

62.0

Black / 100.0

Philippines

166

62.0

Asian / 67.5

Russia

126

70.6

White / 88.9

Total

1075

67.6

White / 51.9

Social, outdoors / 55.3 Social, outdoors / 43.5 Social, outdoors / 51.5 Other / 47.7 Social, outdoors / 65.9 Social, outdoors / 43.4

98 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow Gender portrayals of men and women in the seven Coca-Cola accounts Research question one asks about the differences in gender portrayals within each of the seven Coca-Cola Instagram accounts being analysed. For each account, we compared the depictions of men and women in five aspects: (1) degree of dress (or undress), (2) physical presentation, (3) the setting/location, (4) primary positioning of characters within post, and (5) characters’ display of sexual suggestiveness. For most of the cases, men and women were portrayed differently. As shown in Table 6.2, women were depicted as skinny more often than men across all seven accounts. This was especially apparent for the global account (53.3 per cent women versus 7.1 per cent men), followed by the Philippines account (49.4 versus 9.6) and the Brazil account (45.6 versus 12.5). Similarly, data indicated that women were more likely to be shown in sugges­ tive clothing than men in most countries except Italy and Nigeria. In fact, in Nigeria, the majority of women were shown fully dressed in a non-suggestive manner (59.3 per cent). Our analysis found no difference in terms of the set­ ting/location of posts between men and women in all countries. Since most of the posts were set in outdoor environments, they offered more opportunities to show women with less clothing. Further, Brazil and the Philippines’ tropical climates may also have influenced the ways people dressed. However, there were also more women in suggestive dress in colder regions such as Canada (21.2 per cent women versus 4.2 per cent men) and Russia (30.2 versus 4.0), suggesting climate might not play a significant role in how characters dress. Finally, most accounts showed no significant difference between men and women when it came to characters being primarily featured or appearing in sexually suggestive poses. The only exception was the Brazil account, where women were both more likely to be depicted in sexually suggestive poses (13.8 per cent women versus 2.2 per cent men) and more likely to appear as the primary character (37.8 per cent women versus 14.8 per cent men). Portrayal of men and women across global and regional accounts Research question two aims to investigate the differences in the portrayals of men and women between Coca-Cola’s global Instagram account and its six regional accounts. Using the global account as the baseline, we compared female characters’ depictions in the regional accounts in terms of (1) primary positioning, (2) degree of dress, (3) physical presentation, (4) whether they are in sexually suggestive pose, and whether they are in (5) traditional female roles, (6) decorative roles, or (7) non-traditional roles. For male characters, we com­ pared the six regional accounts against the global account to see if they were portrayed as (1) sexualised, and (2) in non-traditional roles. We organised the following results by country. The Brazil account scored statistically significant differences in six out of nine variables when compared to the global account (see Table 6.3). Specifically, the

Table 6.2 Degree of dress and physical presentation between men and women Degree of dress Fully dressed Global

Canada

Skinny

Fit or muscular

Full-figured

Obese

0.0

0.0

0.0

7.1

17.2

0.0

0.0

Women %

57.1

19.4

0.0

0.0

53.3

22.5

0.0

0.0

ꭓ (N)

12.91*** (175)

Men %

28.1

7.9

.7

0.0

12.5

21.3

0.0

1.5

Women %

25.9

23.0

14.4

0.0

45.6

16.9

1.5

0.0

ꭓ2 (N)

19.07*** (139)

Men %

24.7

4.2

0.0

0.0

1.6

26.8

.5

0.0

Women %

47.4

21.1

2.6

0.0

23.2

47.9

0.0

0.0

ꭓ (N)

7.47* (190)

Men %

33.6

0.0

.7

0.0

0.0

34.3

0.0

0.0

Women %

61.3

.7

3.6

0.0

8.0

56.9

.7

0.0

ꭓ (N)

1.42 (137)

Men %

33.6

5.0

0.0

0.0

.7

36.9

.7

0.0

Women %

59.3

2.1

0.0

0.0

21.3

39.7

.7

0.0

ꭓ (N)

4.49* (140)

2

21.86*** (169)

22.46*** (136)

17.44*** (190)

6.87* (137)

20.69*** (141)

(Continued)

Coke and the digital age

2

Nigeria

Nude

23.4

2

Italy

Partially dressed

Men % 2

Brazil

Suggestive dressed

Physical presentation

99

Degree of dress Fully dressed Philippines

Partially dressed

Nude

Skinny

Fit or muscular

Full-figured

Obese

Men %

36.0

2.5

0.0

0.0

9.6

23.7

4.5

0.0

Women %

40.4

18.6

2.5

0.0

49.4

10.9

1.3

.6

ꭓ (N)

16.66*** (161)

Men %

24.6

4.0

.8

0.0

Women %

38.9

30.2

.8

.8

ꭓ2 (N)

10.75* (126)

2

Russia

Suggestive dressed

Physical presentation

46.47*** (156) 1.6

27.8

0.0

0.0

31.0

39.7

0.0

0.0

17.57*** (126)

Statistically significant chi-squares were bolded, meaning that men and women were portrayed differently for that variable.

100 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow

Table 6.2 Continued

Table 6.3 Comparing the regional portrayal of women and men against the global account Global%

Brazil%

Canada%

Nigeria%

Philippines% Russia%

Italy% FEMALE CHARACTERS As primary character (N)

(134)

(87)

(135)

(88)

(103)

(89)

(90) Yes

37.3

58.6

26.7

77.3

31.1

68.5

22.7

14.6

0.0

0.0

54.4

31.5

81.1 No

10.4

2.3

3.0 18.9

Appear as equal

52.2

39.1

70.4 0.0

ꭓ2

12.02**

11.62**

67.16***

1.51

25.03***

68.60*** Degree of dress (N)

(134)

(87)

(86)

(135)

(99)

(89)

(90) Fully dressed

75.6

40.9

66.7

96.5

65.7

55.1

0.0

30.3

42.7

3.5

4.0

1.1

0.0

0.0

1.1

93.3 Suggestive dressed

25.4

36.4

29.6

Partially dressed

0.0

22.7

3.7 5.6

Nude

0.0

0.0

0.0 0.0

ꭓ2

42.47***

6.01*

29.51***

6.57*

11.05*

30.02*** Physical presentation (N) Skinny

(128) 70.3

(87) 71.3

(87)

(135) 32.6

(90) 12.2

34.5

(97) 79.4

(89) 43.8

(Continued)

Coke and the digital age 101

1.1

Global%

Brazil%

Canada%

Nigeria%

Philippines% Russia%

Italy% Fit

29.7

25.4

67.4

64.4

17.5

56.2

1.1

2.1

0.0

0.0

1.0

0.0

86.7 Full-figured

0.0

2.3

0.0 1.1

Obese

0.0

0.0

0.0 0.0

ꭓ2

3.14

34.41***

27.63***

7.91*

15.28***

72.15*** Sexually suggestive pose (N) Yes

(134)

(88)

(135)

(88)

(102)

(89)

(90) 1.5

21.6

2.2

9.1

6.9

11.2

90.9

92.2

88.8

5.6 No

98.5

70.5

97.8 94.4

ꭓ2

38.13***

1.96

7.13**

5.94†

9.97**

2.94† Traditional roles (N)

(134)

(85)

(133)

(87)

(98)

(87)

(90) Yes

5.2

0.0

2.3

1.1

1.0

1.1

98.9

99.0

98.9

0.0 No

94.8

100.0

97.7 100.0

ꭓ2

4.59*

1.63

2.51 4.85*

3.00†

2.51

102 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow

Table 6.3 Continued

Global%

Brazil%

Canada%

Nigeria%

Philippines% Russia%

Italy% Decorative roles (N)

(134)

(87)

(133)

(87)

(98)

(87)

(90) Yes

3.0

23.0

6.0

0.0

5.1

51.7

100.0

94.9

48.3

0.0 No

97.0

72.4

94.0 100.0

ꭓ2

29.25***

1.43

2.65

.68

72.62***

2.74† Non-traditional roles (N)

(134)

(87)

(132)

(87)

(99)

(87)

(90) Yes

0.0

4.6

9.1

0.0

1.0

0.0

100.0

99.0

100.0

0.0 No

100.0

95.4

90.0 100.0

ꭓ2

6.27*

NA

12.76***

1.36

NA

NA Sex appeal (N) Yes No ꭓ2

(40) 0.0 100.0

(49) 8.2 91.8 3.42†

(52) 9.6 90.4 4.07*

(47) 0.0 100.0 NA

(52) 13.5 85.6 5.83*

(62) 3.2 96.8 1.32

(36) 63.9 36.1 36.65***

Non-traditional roles (N) Yes No ꭓ2

(40) 0.0 100.0

(49) 4.1 95.9 1.67

(51) 3.9 96.1 1.60

(47) 0.0 100.0 NA

(52) 0.0 100.0 NA

(62) 0.0 100.0 NA

(36) 11.1 88.9 4.69*

Statistically significant chi-squares were bolded meaning that the regional account was different from the global account for that variable.

Coke and the digital age 103

MALE CHARACTERS

104 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow Brazil account had more women as the primary character (58.6 per cent versus 37.3 per cent), and they were more likely to be seen dressed in suggestive clothing (36.4 versus 25.4), partially dressed (22.7 versus 0), in sexually sug­ gestive poses (21.6 versus 1.5), and in decorative roles (23.0 versus 3.0). None of the women in the Brazil posts were seen in traditional female roles, com­ pared to seven in the global account, while four out of the 87 Brazilian women were seen engaging in non-traditional roles, compared to zero in the global account. However, despite the significant p values, these results should be taken with a grain of salt because of the small number of cases – this applies to other significant findings with small number of cases as well. Finally, there was no difference in the portrayal of men between the Brazil account and the global account. Women were more likely to appear as equal to men in posts from the Canada account (70.4 per cent versus 52.2 per cent). There were also more women in suggestive clothing in the posts from the Canada account than the global account (29.6 versus 25.4), but they were shown as more fit or mus­ cular than their global counterparts (67.4 versus 29.7). Similar phenomena were found in the accounts from Italy (86.7 versus 29.7) and Nigeria (64.4 versus 29.7), where women appeared more fit than skinny compared to the global account. The Italy and Nigeria accounts also shared other common findings, as both showed more women as the primary characters (81.1 for Italy and 77.3 for Nigeria versus 37.3 for global) and both accounts also showed more fully dressed women (93.3 for Italy and 96.5 for Nigeria versus 75.6 for global) than the global account. However, in posts from the Phi­ lippines account, women were more likely to be wearing suggestive clothing (30.3 versus 25.4) and appeared as skinny more often (79.4 versus 70.3) than the global account. Finally, in posts from the Russia account, there were more women in pri­ mary positions (68.5 versus 38.3 per cent), in suggestive clothing (42.7 versus 25.4), in sexually suggestive poses (11.2 versus 1.5), and in decorative roles (51.7 versus 3.0) when compared to the global account. Women were also portrayed as less skinny (43.8 versus 70.3), but more fit (56.2 versus 29.7) compared to the global account. Men from the Russia account were depicted as sexier than their global counterparts (63.9 versus 0), though this also held true for most of the other regional accounts, albeit to a lesser degree (ranging from 13.5 to 3.2 per cent). The Italy account was the only exception, with zero per cent of men depicted as sexualised. Differences between masculine and feminine cultures Research question three asks if there are differences between the gender portrayals from the accounts for the more masculine cultures and the accounts for the more feminine cultures. To answer this question, we grouped three countries which scored relatively high in Hofstede’s masculinity/femininity index – Italy (70), Nigeria (60), and the Philippines (64) – and compared them

Coke and the digital age 105 against a group of three countries with relatively low masculinity scores – Brazil (49), Canada (52), and Russia (36). The results indicated that although the accounts for the feminine cultures had more women and men sharing equal placement within posts than their masculine counterparts (50.5 per cent versus 19.9 per cent), women were less likely to be the sole primary character (47.6 versus 61.6). Women were also more likely to be dressed in suggestive clothing, and even be depicted partially dressed, in the accounts for the feminine cultures (35.3 versus 11.3). In addi­ tion, the accounts for the feminine countries tended to display women in decorative roles more so than those for the masculine countries (23.8 versus 1.8). Yet, there were slightly more women shown engaging in non-traditional roles in the feminine country posts than in the masculine country posts (5.2 versus 4). In terms of the physical presentation of female characters, whether they are depicted in sexually provocative poses, or whether they are depicted in traditional roles, there was no difference found between the accounts for mas­ culine and feminine cultures. However, male characters not only appeared as sexy and more macho (23.4 versus 5.6), but were also shown engaging in more non-traditional roles (5.9 versus 0) in the accounts for feminine countries than in the accounts for masculine countries (see Table 6.4). Table 6.4 Comparing the portrayals of women and men between masculine and feminine countries Masculine %

Feminine %

(281) 61.6 18.5 19.9 85.02*** (275) 84.4 11.3 4.4 0.0 56.30*** (274) 43.1 55.1 1.5 .4 2.65

(311) 47.6 1.9 50.5

FEMALE CHARACTERS As primary character (N) Yes No Appear as equal ꭓ2 Degree of dress (N) Fully dressed Suggestive dressed Partially dressed Nude ꭓ2 Physical presentation (N) Skinny Fit Full-figured Obese ꭓ2

(312) 56.1 35.3 8.3 .3 (311) 46.6 52.7 .6 0.0

(Continued)

106 T. Deng, D. Ekachai and J.M. Grow Table 6.4 Continued Masculine % Sexually suggestive pose (N) Yes No ꭓ2 Women in traditional roles (N) Yes No ꭓ2 Women in decorative roles (N) Yes No ꭓ2 Women in non-traditional roles (N) Yes No ꭓ2 MALE CHARACTERS

(280) 7.1 92.5

Sex appeal (N) Yes No ꭓ2 Non-traditional roles (N) Yes No ꭓ2

(161) 5.6 94.4 19.69*** (161) 0.0 100.0 9.73**

(275) .7 99.3 .48 (275) 1.8 98.2 64.92*** (276) .4 99.6 12.12***

Feminine % (312) 10.3 87.5 5.93† (305) 1.3 98.7 (307) 23.8 74.9 (306) 5.2 94.8

(137) 23.4 76.6 (136) 5.9 94.1

Note: *** p