Coca-Cola's Centennial Marketing History (Part 2)

In the last article on Coca-Cola’s 100-year marketing history (Part 1), it was mentioned that after the failure of formula innovation, Coca-Cola made the brand a “street celebrity product” in the 19th century by tapping into the “addictive” nature of the product itself, using free drinks to attract people to try it while using advertising bombardment to boost sales. So in addition to actively exploring advertising forms, constantly updating product packaging, and building a global business model, what surprises can it bring us in the new chapter? Looking forward to your discovery.

Chapter 2 Coca-Cola Brand Strategy: Becoming a Source of Happiness

Legendary recipe story

In 1919, Candler's son sold Coca-Cola's formula, trademark, good reputation and other brand assets to an investment consortium led by banker Ernest Woodruff for US$25 million. The balance sheet showed that the total value of Coca-Cola's real estate, buildings, machinery and equipment was less than $2 million at the time.

Among Coca-Cola's brand assets, the most legendary is the secret formula that has always been kept as Coca-Cola's top secret. Starting in 1925, his son Robert Woodruff, the true founder of the Coca-Cola empire, stored the world's only copy of the formula in a safe at SunTrust Bank. It remained there for 86 years until 2011, when it was moved to a 3-meter-high safe at the Coca-Cola Global Headquarters Museum in Atlanta, USA. Visitors to the museum will first be monitored by 16 high-definition cameras covering 360 degrees, and detailed information such as height, gender, skin color, and clothing will be recorded before they can approach the safe.

To this day, a story passed down by word of mouth is that there are only three people in the world who truly master the secret formula. Their identities are kept absolutely confidential, and they will never reveal even one third of their formula to anyone else. Coca-Cola also strictly requires that the three people cannot appear at the same time or in the same place, and cannot take the same car, train or plane, in order to prevent terrible accidents from happening and causing the loss of top-secret information.

Although Coca-Cola tries hard to keep its recipe mysterious, it is not difficult to mix a carbonated drink that tastes similar to Coca-Cola.

Ever since Coca-Cola left Atlanta, its imitators have emerged in large numbers. More and more manufacturers and brands are trying to produce "Coca-Cola" with different dosages, different uses and different flavors, so much so that Coca-Cola Company has even resorted to legal prosecution. The most famous of these is naturally the blue Pepsi-Cola.

Pepsi Cola

In 1894, Caleb Bradham, a pharmacist in North Carolina, invented a cola drink containing the enzyme pepsin and sold it as a tonic to relieve the symptoms of indigestion. It was originally known simply as Bradham's drink. In 1898, Bradham changed the name to Pepsi-Cola and began to take advantage of the popularity of Coca-Cola. However, due to operational problems, the company experienced two bankruptcies in 30 years. It was not until the 1930s that New York businessman Guth acquired Pepsi-Cola.

Gus had run a candy store and a soda fountain, and had witnessed the huge influence of Coca-Cola. He originally hoped to reach an in-depth cooperation with Coca-Cola, but Coca-Cola rejected Gus' invitation to purchase goods at a lower discount. In a rage, Guth ordered all his stores to remove Coca-Cola and never allow them to enter again. He then acquired Pepsi, which had gone bankrupt again, and deleted the pepsin ingredient, modifying the product formula to be as close to Coca-Cola as possible.

At this point, the century-long feud between Coca-Cola and Pepsi officially began.

In the early days, Gus deliberately avoided the identity of Pepsi as a substitute for Coca-Cola. Due to the lack of clear positioning, consumers were unwilling to pay for a bottle of cola that was of the same price and tasted similar but was not Coca-Cola. As expected, the business was bleak. Gus was even prepared to sell it to Coca-Cola for $50,000. When Coca-Cola rejected him again, Guth had an epiphany and discovered that the cost of selling a 12-ounce can was not much different from that of a 6-ounce can. In 1934, Pepsi-Cola began selling 12-ounce bottles of Coke in old beer bottles for 5 cents, and launched the slogan "Spend the same money, enjoy double the Coke" - the price was equivalent to 50% off and quickly became a hot seller across the country. In the same year, PepsiCo began to make a profit. At this point we have to sigh that Coke is really a good business.

Faced with the aggressive Pepsi, Coca-Cola took legal action and sued Pepsi for trademark infringement. The lawsuit lasted for several years, and was finally settled through out-of-court mediation in 1942, settling the "copyright dispute" between the two brands. Finally, Coca-Cola lost the patent for "Cola", and any brown carbonated soft drink containing caffeine could be named "Cola". Pepsi chose the red, white and blue logo to distinguish Coca-Cola.

Someone once asked me, how to let consumers know about a product in the shortest time possible? The answer I gave is two words: "fighting". Creating controversy with the market leader in the field can not only generate topics, attract media attention, and generate multiple dissemination, but also cleverly establish an association with the market leader in the minds of consumers.

In 2012, JD.com vigorously promoted its home appliance project. Liu Qiangdong used his personal Weibo as a media platform to post 5 Weibo posts directly challenging Gome and Suning. That evening, Suning.com's executive vice president Li Bin followed up with a comprehensive promotion. Later, Gome and Tmall joined the battlefield, triggering a climax in the price war.

This move not only attracted the attention of mainstream media accounts, technology media, and financial media on Weibo, but also traditional media represented by CCTV and China National Radio also joined the reporting camp. News of the price war quickly seeped down to third- and fourth-tier cities. In some areas that require high-intensity, large-budget advertising to reach, platforms such as JD.com, Suning, and Gome have received great attention.

On August 15, 2012, Suning, Gome and JD.com, which explicitly participated in the price war, all saw a substantial increase in traffic compared to the same period on the 14th. JD.com's Baidu Index even reached a peak, more than five times the usual level.

The same is true of the "Red vs. Blue" battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The court debate quickly made the two brands gain widespread attention from the media and society. The affected writers, cartoonists and other creators used their powerful creative abilities to enable Pepsi's insignificant advertising budget to achieve unlimited communication effects.

Pepsi used a patented mechanical device to write Pepsi's words in the sky, which inspired a cartoonist: a cartoon titled "Coca-Cola's anti-aircraft gun tries to shoot Pepsi's words in the sky" was born, establishing a strong connection between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Two anti-traditional writers, Allen Kent and Austin Crumb, used Do You Know John Pearson? 》, he wrote a light-hearted advertising song - "Pepsi is good":

Pepsi is good, Pepsi tastes really good, and twelve ounces is not a small amount. The same five-pack is double the size, Pepsi is really affordable. The five-five-cent jingle goes off, and the Pepsi-Cola drips out.

Pepsi made this song into a 30-second radio advertisement. After it was played on the radio and achieved good results, it was adapted into an orchestral record, which actually sold 1 million copies. After that, the song was adapted into a march, waltz, rumba and country song, and was circulated repeatedly, and was once praised as "a disaster to the American continent", just like "The Most Dazzling National Style", "Little Apple" and "Wild Wolf Disco" in previous years... As this song became popular, Americans remembered Pepsi and put a label on it for 5 cents for 12 ounces.

At the same time, Pepsi-Cola also tried to buy the patent rights of Popeye, hoping to replace the "magic spinach" with the "magic Pepsi-Cola". After the failure, Pepsi chose the path it had successfully taken: it once again created the comic "Pepsi and Pete" to tell the story of two policemen who defeated the devil by drinking Pepsi.

It is obvious that all of Pepsi's advertisements are trying hard to establish a strong association with Coca-Cola, which has already established a foothold, and it turns out that this strategy is really effective: in 1941, Pepsi's market share rose to 14%.

However, Coca-Cola is still the leader in the entire soft drink market, accounting for 46% of the market share. Some media even commented: "Coca-Cola is the essence of the American soul. It is a good life companion that is authentic, widely spread and constantly innovative." This is mainly due to Coca-Cola's successful brand strategy in the early 20th century, especially during the Great Depression in the United States.

Coca-Cola brand concept: the source of happiness

In 1923, Robert Woodruff succeeded his father as president of Coca-Cola. Under his management, Coca-Cola went through the Great Depression, World War II, and post-World War II globalization, and eventually grew into one of the most well-known brands in the world.

In fact, Woodruff encountered a thorny problem when he first took office: Is Coca-Cola a healthy family drink or a mild alternative to alcoholic beverages? This problem stems from the fact that more and more people are beginning to pay attention to the side effects of long-term drinking of Coca-Cola, such as damage to the brain and digestive function, affecting people's mental state and women's fertility.

Instead of taking a defensive and passive approach, Woodruff repositioned Coca-Cola:

The drink Coca-Cola has no earth-shattering importance - it is just a very humble thing that does little more than make people's lives a little easier and more pleasant.
Coca-Cola advertiser Archie Lee interpreted Woodruff's idea as: "Enjoy the feeling of thirst while working or playing", and gradually iterated it into the famous phrase "The Pause That Refreshes".

In the 1920s, with the economic recovery after World War I, the pace of work and life of Americans accelerated, and the pressure continued to increase. Many advertisers were willing to use scare marketing, creating copywriting such as "Not going to bed before 11 o'clock at night is chronic suicide" and "Eating these foods is equivalent to eating poison" that are circulating in the circle of friends today, attracting consumers' attention by causing anxiety.

Coca-Cola's advertisements, however, are contrary to the norm. They use pictures of positive, contented, good-looking young and successful people enjoying Coca-Cola drinks, accompanied by as brief text as possible, to express the unique feeling that Coca-Cola always appears in "cool and happy places" and "always makes people feel refreshed."

There was once a rural nostalgic style advertisement which was a Coca-Cola promotional film. A freckled little boy is standing next to an old fishing hole, holding a dog and a Coca-Cola. A lively country girl is comfortably sipping Coca-Cola from a glass bottle with a straw, cleverly establishing a connection with the field life that busy people yearn for in their hearts. In addition, Coca-Cola often makes advertisements showing office workers drinking Coca-Cola and taking a break, so that Coca-Cola products can be associated with "taking a break". It also holds advertising competitions on a daily basis, and has gained a large amount of advertising materials that emphasize the taste, vitality, and likeability of Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola will then place these carefully prepared advertising materials on major traffic arteries throughout the United States, on iconic buildings such as New York's Times Square, and in newspapers and magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. As these advertisements were seen by more and more consumers and spread by word of mouth, people began to agree with the idea that "Coca-Cola can bring relaxation and happiness."

In the 1930s, the United States entered the Great Depression. In addition, in 1933, alcoholic beverages were finally legalized, and people could once again use alcohol to drown their sorrows and get through difficult times. A media outlet once commented: "The repeal of Prohibition was a huge blow to Coca-Cola. When people can legally get real beer and 'men's whiskey', who would drink 'soft drinks'? It was obvious that Coca-Cola was going to be finished."

However, Coca-Cola continued its growth trend through effective marketing. How did he do it?

First, Coca-Cola continued to deepen its "happy" brand image and created the image of Santa Claus which is still popular today.

Ice-cold and refreshing Coca-Cola is a typical cyclical product, which is usually popular in the summer, but its sales will drop sharply in the winter. Coca-Cola has also run advertisements several times in this regard, but the results have been mediocre. It wasn't until 1931 that it became clear that the Santa Claus chosen by Coca-Cola made a huge contribution to Coca-Cola's sales that year - the Coca-Cola Company began to regard Christmas as a key marketing node. A Christmas where the whole family gathers together and shares their joy is exactly in line with the brand symbol of "happiness" that Coca-Cola has worked hard to create. So Coca-Cola contracted artist Haddon Sundblom to create an image of Santa Claus drinking Coke.

Shanbu found inspiration from the famous poem "The Night Before Christmas", which describes Santa Claus as a warm, friendly, and big man full of human radiance. At first, Shanbu created the Santa Claus based on a salesman friend. After his friend passed away, Shanbu looked in the mirror and created the Santa Claus based on himself. Therefore, the early Santa Claus image more or less has the shadow of Shanbu. At the strong request of Coca-Cola, Shanbu changed the image of Santa Claus in a green robe and used the red and white iconic colors of Coca-Cola to design a red coat for Santa Claus for the first time.

Thus, the first image of Santa Claus was born in the Saturday Evening Post, an old man wearing a red robe, a white beard, and always smiling. He took off his hat with one hand, raised a glass of Coca-Cola with the other hand, and read out the famous slogan: "The Pause That Refreshes".

Since then, this Coca-Cola advertisement has appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, National Geographic, The New Yorker and other magazines and newspapers, and has been very popular. Coca-Cola's sales have also increased several times during the Christmas season.

More advertising exposure not only made the image of Santa Claus popular, but also made red replace green as the main color of Christmas in the United States. However, Coca-Cola did not protect the Santa Claus IP back then, which resulted in more brands, organizations and individuals joining in the creation of Santa Claus-related products. As a result, when we mention Christmas now, we can only think of the bearded old man in red clothes, riding a elk, and giving gifts with a smile.

Secondly, Coca-Cola seized the dividends from the rapid development of film and radio.

Just as the 2020 epidemic impacted offline industries but became an important development opportunity for online industries such as games, e-commerce, and online education, the Great Depression in the 1930s brought vitality to the American film industry. As an advertiser, Coca-Cola has become one of the beneficiaries of the development of the film industry.

Coca-Cola sent special photographers to Hollywood to work with the film team to design the segments where Coca-Cola would be implanted in the movies. It also hired special agents to distribute Coca-Cola on the film sets—two boxes a month for major stars and five boxes a day for all on-site production staff. As a result, Coca-Cola gained a lot of exposure opportunities, and consumers would "subconsciously buy it" when they saw stars drinking Coca-Cola in and out of the movies.

Coca-Cola also seized the benefits of not only movies but also radio broadcasting. In 1930 alone, Coca-Cola spent $400,000 on radio broadcasts. In addition to advertising, they sponsored string orchestra performances, appealing to a generation that loved listening to the radio.

Third, Coca-Cola began to carry out personalized marketing for different user groups.

For male users, Coca-Cola will cleverly use sexual attraction, letting Coca-Cola girls wearing more revealing clothes strike various sexy poses while drinking Coca-Cola, thereby more effectively attracting the attention of male users.

Targeting female users, especially housewives, Coca-Cola launched a six-pack of Coca-Cola that is easy for family drinking, and sent special female employees to install Coca-Cola bottle openers in every household and distribute free coupons for new packaged drinks. For the first time, Coca-Cola paired food with Coca-Cola in its advertisements, portraying Coca-Cola as "a good partner for any food." In addition, Coca-Cola also invited Ida Allen, the host of the "Housewives Radio Club" program, to help promote the product. Allen once suggested that all housewives who trusted her could use Coca-Cola as a drink to go with every meal.

For children, Coca-Cola provides them with a variety of school stationery such as cards, notepads, pencils, pencil sharpeners, as well as cardboard cut-out toys with Coca-Cola elements such as miniature circuses, small towns, airports, and the Olympic Games. When targeting some preschool children, Coca-Cola even distributed a large number of free redemption coupons, hoping to make them addicted to the taste of Coca-Cola from an early age.

After continuous large-scale advertising and marketing, by the end of the 1930s, Coca-Cola had become a national enterprise in the hearts of the American people. As mentioned earlier, Coca-Cola has become a symbol of the essence of the American soul. It is no longer just a drink that brings people happiness, but has become a part of American culture. It is precisely because of this that Coca-Cola’s legend during World War II and its globalization after World War II were achieved.

Chapter 3: Coca-Cola's World War II Legend

Coca-Cola's Globalization Before World War II

As early as when Ernest Woodruff acquired Coca-Cola, globalization was one of the goals of business expansion. The last sentence of the Coca-Cola press release in 1919 was: "The new management will expand the business more widely than before... not only in the United States, but also in other countries."

By 1922, Coca-Cola had invested approximately $3 million to open bottling franchises throughout Europe and also put a considerable number of cold drink cabinets with Coca-Cola brand elements into use. However, traditional Europeans did not seem to be interested in new things with eye-catching and exaggerated labels. At the same time, the cork used to seal Coca-Cola reacted with the liquid to produce toxic substances, causing a continued downturn in European business.

Coca-Cola managers then realized that Coca-Cola was a completely new thing in Europe and that the way it was expanded needed to be like that in Atlanta in 1885. However, due to the lack of sufficient funds on the one hand and the inability to quickly find a role positioning similar to the "alcohol substitute" during the "Prohibition" period on the other hand, Coca-Cola's European expansion did not seem smooth.

In addition, different languages ​​and cultures also caused many problems. The universal slogan "Coca-Cola restores your strength" means "wash your hands with Coca-Cola" in Dutch, forcing the company to redesign its slogan.

Coca-Cola's expansion in other American countries was also not smooth. Coca-Cola rented a plane in Cuba and wrote the Coca-Cola slogan "Tome Coca-Cola (Drink Coca-Cola)" with smoke in the air, but the words were blurred due to strong winds and people who saw it mistook it for "Teme Coca-Cola (Fear of Coca-Cola)". Therefore, Coca-Cola completely abandoned the method of hanging advertisements in the air on airplanes. What’s interesting is that Coca-Cola’s arch-rival, Pepsi, gained a lot of attention in the early days with this advertising method and quickly grew into a strong competitor of Coca-Cola. This is a story for later. There were also cultural issues in Cuba, where a Coca-Cola ad showed a fighting bull, but because bullfighting is banned in Cuba, the ad caused a lot of controversy.

Overall, before World War II, compared with its heyday in the United States, it is not an exaggeration to say that the promotion of Coca-Cola around the world outside the United States was difficult. This situation continued until the outbreak of World War II.

World War II Strategy, Link to the United States

As the saying goes, "The right time is not as important as the right location, and the right location is not as important as the people", but the fact is that most great companies have encountered the right time, place and people. For example, Huawei in recent years has outstanding technology, but it also stands out because it has become a pawn in the game between China and the United States.

The same is true for Coca-Cola. If there had been no World War II and the United States had not entered the game, Coca-Cola would not have become the blood of American soldiers, would not have become the "global code" during the war, and would not have become a global trend after World War II.

Soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, the United States began sending 16 million troops to various parts of the world. The patriotic Woodruff keenly seized the opportunity and issued a special order that went down in history: "No matter where our troops are, no matter how much it costs our company, we must ensure that every soldier can buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for only 5 cents."

Through lobbying, the U.S. military and Congress finally decided to send Coca-Cola to the front lines as a military supply like chocolate, chewing gum and cigarettes, and also exempted the sugar quota limit. However, its competitor Pepsi-Cola had to buy sugar at a high price, and even took the risk of smuggling sugar from Mexico.

Due to problems in transporting military supplies, the original method of directly exporting bottled Coca-Cola was changed to exporting concentrate, and local factories were built to can the product. So wherever the US military was stationed, Coca-Cola would build bottling plants there and produce Coca-Cola on a large scale.

After the end of World War II, when the U.S. military withdrew, these bottling plants were retained and became the local production base of Coca-Cola. Not only that, because of the influence of the US military, under the demonstration of American soldiers, drinking Coca-Cola will often be sought after by the locals. The Coca-Cola produced by local bottling factories will be continuously spread to various local places through various means and gradually become popular. Take Iceland as an example. Coca-Cola, which was previously unknown, gained recognition from the entire Icelandic civilian population in a very short period of time because of the construction of the US Air Force base and the personal promotion of the Icelandic Prime Minister. By the beginning of the 21st century, the average annual per capita consumption of Coca-Cola in Iceland had reached 446 bottles - more than any other country in the world, including the United States.

Data shows that during World War II alone, Coca-Cola built 64 new bottling plants and sold more than 10 billion bottles of Coca-Cola in total. Compared with this terrifying sales volume, what is more meaningful is that Coca-Cola began to establish a stronger emotional connection with the American people through the interface of World War II.

Build emotional dependence

I have discussed with many people, "Why do companies invest so much money in branding?" The answers I got were surprisingly similar: to build trust and lower the consumer's cognitive threshold.

In my opinion, brand building should be divided into three stages: awareness building stage, trust building stage, and emotional dependence stage.

In the stage of building visibility, the key issue to be solved is the issue of going from obscurity to being known.

A commonly used method is to repeatedly expose core elements such as brand name, logo, slogan and product style, so that potential consumers can recognize and gradually understand the existence of the product. The "splitting the mind" often mentioned in brand marketing is this stage.

Because they are created from scratch, simple, direct and controversial advertisements tend to be easy for people to remember quickly. For example, "I won't accept any gifts this year, the only gift I will accept is Melatonin", "Hengyuanxiang, Sheep Sheep Sheep", "Platinum Travel Photography! Go wherever you want to take photos!", "Looking for a job! Talk to your boss directly!", "Before traveling, go to Mafengwo first!"...

By the time of building trust, many target consumer groups already have a certain understanding of the brand. Therefore, on the one hand, it is necessary to continue to consolidate this understanding and continue to maintain advertising efforts: Social psychology research shows that humans have a special preference for things that are familiar to them, and the degree of liking will increase with the frequency of occurrence. Social psychology calls this phenomenon the "exposure effect", also known as the law of familiarity. On the other hand, they will hire spokespersons to build consumer trust in the brand through the spokespersons’ endorsement.

When it comes to the emotional building stage, the brand needs to establish a closer relationship with the users, better than friends and like family. This goal cannot be achieved with simple brand exposure and the trust endorsement of spokespersons. Brand owners also need to have deeper communication with their users and establish a relationship similar to that between friends and family beyond buying and selling. This stage certainly requires correct marketing strategies, large-scale advertising expenditures, and the favor of historical opportunities.

The brand building process of Coca-Cola in the US market also conforms to these three stages. At the end of the 19th century, Coca-Cola was born, mainly attracting consumers' attention through product features such as "Refreshing! Invigorating! Refreshing!" and "Combining the characteristics of the wonderful coca leaves and the famous cola nuts!"

In the early 20th century, Coca-Cola used large-scale advertising, personalized marketing, and the reshaping of the Santa Claus IP in order to further increase its visibility, build trust with consumers, and get more and more people to buy Coca-Cola.

The outbreak of World War II seemed to open up Coca-Cola's Ren and Du meridians, truly allowing Coca-Cola to establish an emotional connection with the American people.

The caffeine and soda water in Coca-Cola can refresh the mind, and the sugar can not only quickly replenish energy but also quickly bring happiness to the drinker. In addition, there are no similar competing products in the military, so drinking Coca-Cola soon became a common hobby within the US military.

One soldier once wrote in a letter to his family, "If someone asked us what we were fighting for, I think nearly half of us would say it was to be able to buy Coke again." Another soldier wrote, "For me, suffering is for two equally important things: first, so that the people of our country can enjoy the welfare provided by the country without worries; second, we can drink Coke happily like before."

From then on, Coca-Cola not only became a Christmas gift for the US military, but also became their most unique medal of military honor. Robert Scott, a pilot awarded the honorary title of "Ace Pilot" for shooting down five Japanese fighter planes, explained that his motivation for "shooting down the first Japanese plane" was derived from the ideas of "America, democracy, and Coca-Cola." When he was awarded the honorary title of "Ace Pilot", he also received a bottle of Coca-Cola as a reward. However, he felt that the bottle of Coca-Cola was too precious and he could not bear to drink it himself, so he gave it to a surgeon who had performed surgery on him when he was seriously injured.

A corporal named George Brennan wrote to his former boss at Coca-Cola that the war experience gave him a new understanding of the drink: "In the lives of ordinary civilians, if there is enough Coca-Cola, you are sure that everything is very good, and a little more or less does not matter, that's all. However, only when you experience a serious shortage of Coca-Cola or even suffer the misfortune of having no Coca-Cola, you will truly understand what Coca-Cola means to us Americans."

Coca-Cola was not only popular among soldiers and junior officers, but also famous generals of World War II such as Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, and George Patton were fans of Coca-Cola. Among the generals, the one who loved Coca-Cola the most was Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe. In June 1943, when inspecting the Allied combat situation in North Africa, he sent a telegram detailing the needs there: "3 million bottles of Coca-Cola (filled) and a complete set of equipment that can produce 60 million bottles of Coke per month (including bottling, bottle washing and bottle sealing equipment). Before the equipment is delivered, 10 machines that can work independently will be sent to different places. These machines are required to produce 20,000 bottles per day. In addition, enough syrup to produce 6 million bottles of Coke and a corresponding number of bottle caps must be delivered." Six months later, several Coca-Cola production lines were set up in North Africa. The following year, the Allied forces completed the famous Normandy landing on D-Day (the abbreviation for the scheduled date for the start of the operation), and Coca-Cola also entered Western Europe with the Allied forces. During the Battle of the Rhine, American troops even used Coca-Cola as a secret signal.

The emotional connection between Coca-Cola and World War II generals continued until after World War II. After the end of World War II, these famous generals not only became American heroes, but also became the pillars of the United States. There is evidence that Eisenhower was elected President of the United States with the support and planning of Coca-Cola Company. After that, Eisenhower also became the top spokesperson for Coca-Cola.

Once, Woodruff saw Eisenhower drinking Coca-Cola with a straw in a photo and angrily rebuked him because at that time only women used straws to drink Coke, while men blew it from the bottle. Eisenhower defended himself by saying, "If I blow into the bottle, I can finish it in a few seconds. But if I use a straw, I can walk a lot more and talk a lot more, so that photographers and journalists can capture more shots of me drinking Coca-Cola."

In fact, Eisenhower's relationship with Coca-Cola went beyond this. All the bottling plants in South America were owned by Eisenhower and his son.

The influence of Coca-Cola in the World War II army was also transmitted to the rear through various means. In the letters they exchanged, Coca-Cola was a word that appeared very frequently. It represented the desire for victory and the longing for hometown and family. Every veteran returning home brought Coca-Cola with him, which was a symbol of victory. A 1948 poll of veterans by The American Legion Magazine showed that 63.67% listed Coca-Cola as their preferred soft drink.

Coca-Cola also spares no effort to amplify this emotional connection through various advertisements, associating Coca-Cola with victory and joy.

Unpublished historical data from the Coca-Cola Company shows that World War II "enabled the company to make friends with 11 million American soldiers and turn them into Coca-Cola customers. In addition, the company conducted overseas sampling experiments and market expansion work. Without this plan, all this would have taken 25 years and millions of dollars in investment."

This victory can also be measured by business data. In 1948, the third year after the end of World War II, Coca-Cola's total sales profit reached 1.26 billion US dollars, while Pepsi's was only 25 million US dollars; compared with the net profit after tax, the gap between the two was even more obvious. Coca-Cola's net profit after tax was 35.6 million US dollars, while Pepsi's was pitiful, only 3.2 million US dollars.

Author: TopMarketing

Source: TopMarketing