I have come across this feature article on Coca Cola from 1950. I wonder where we would be without this colossal marketing giant’s influence over the last 100 years.
Some corporate brilliance here. Not good for our health long term but we have grown up with this media surrounding us and now we are paying the price.
Read on how Coca Cola influenced the world.
“Coke’s peaceful near-conquest of the world is one of the remarkable phenomena of the age. It has put itself (in the phrase of a Coca-Cola executive with a literary bent) “always within an arm’s length of desire.” And where there is no desire for it, Coke creates desire.”
“… to keep the young man from harm, the girl had—as a special sacrifice—given up her daily quota of a dozen Cokes. “She has become as thin as a nail,” wailed her mother, “and I have been afraid she would die” – So we had the observation that obesity was related to soft drinks in 1950.
“In most places Coke has blended into the local scene as if the brown-green of its bottles and the fire-brigade red of its advertising were some kind of protective coloring.”
“..out of good American common sense, Coca-Cola is in the business of creating business wherever it goes.”
“It’s the start of a carefully planned program which is going to affect the lives and pocketbooks of everyone in this room . . . Let’s stop and think for a moment about happiness.”
“One of Woodruff’s smartest moves was his policy of supplying U.S. soldiers anywhere in the world with nickel Cokes, no matter how much money the company lost in the process. The Coke bottling plants which moved along with the invading U.S. armies and brought the sight and taste of Coke to millions of people who had never heard of it before were actually the biggest impetus of Coca-Cola’s present international boom.”
And all of this was in 1950!
The Coca Cola branding was the ONLY advertising I found in the townships in Cape Town in 2015. It was pervasive. It is a long battle to regain this ground.
