The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank

Author:Thomas Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

chapter eight

CARNIVAL AND COLA: HIP VERSUS SQUARE IN THE COLA WARS

Pepsi and other such companies have been more interested in the term segment as a verb than as a noun. They have segmented markets, rather than merely responded to a market segment that already existed. There was no such thing as the Pepsi Generation until Pepsi created it.

—RICHARD S. TEDLOW, NEW AND IMPROVED

One of the most dramatic confrontations of the new hip consumerism with its predecessor took place in the 1960s on the battlefields of what has been called “the cola wars.” While the near-universal hegemony of Coca-Cola was a product of an earlier marketing paradigm, the rapid rise of Pepsi during the 1960s was made possible by an ad campaign that made skillful use of the subversive, anarchic power of the carnivalesque and of the imagery of youth rebellion. Ever since the invention of the Pepsi Generation in the early 1960s, Pepsi has offered not just a soda but a vision of its consumers as impudent insurrectionaries, sassy upstarts flouting the dull, repressive mores of the past. As with 7-Up, enlisting youthful vitality and insurgency was a natural strategy for Pepsi, locked in a difficult battle with longstanding market leader Coca-Cola. The Pepsi-Cola Company wanted Americans to question the “establishment” in the most real sense of all, to turn away from established tastes and preferences.

Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi were invented in the American South in the late nineteenth century, and both were originally dispensed as patent medicines in soda fountains. Both are made from similar ingredients, namely, sugar, water, and a flavoring derived from the African kola nut; and both taste remarkably alike. But owing to its earlier start and its more aggressive marketing, Coca-Cola long dominated the soft-drink world, with Pepsi-Cola, the imitation beverage, lagging far behind. Pepsi only became a real competitor in the 1930s, when, with the colorful Walter Mack as its president, the company began to offer twelve-ounce bottles for the same price as Coke’s six-ounce package (backing the effort with a catchy radio jingle). But in the meantime, Coca-Cola had become a veritable symbol of all things American under the guidance of its deeply religious founder Asa Candler and his successor, conservative Southerner Robert Woodruff.

Both giants of the soft-drink industry are and have long been very much concerned with the production of advertising. Since soda is not a basic necessity or a traditional beverage choice, and since the soda consumer chooses between many brands with almost indistinguishable flavors, advertising alone must make the product appealing.1 Image—established with massive advertising campaigns—is the name of the game in the soda industry. So much so that officials associated with both cola giants have made almost identical public statements attesting to the priority of advertising to product at their companies.2 But it was not until the 1960s that Pepsi hit upon the images that would make them the second soft-drink superpower.

Since the sixties, Pepsi’s advertising strategy has aimed to identify the drink with a certain model consumer, an ideal with which the viewer was encouraged to identify himself.

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