The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [19]
If those rigid images of upper-class refinement seemed an odd choice for a mass-market product such as Coke, contemporary economist Thorstein Veblen offers a reason for their success in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he invented the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe the consumer pretenses of the upper classes. The high-Victorian style of top hats and walking sticks had nothing to do with functionality, but were rather “evidence of leisure,” he wrote, a message sent to onlookers that a person wasn’t involved in “any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use.” By associating Coca-Cola with such refinement, Coke in effect created the first “aspirational” advertising campaign, sending the uniquely American message that success could be achieved simply by buying the right brand.
And in Coke’s case, the cost of admission to that “brand community” was remarkably low—a nickel, or a price that even the lowliest worker could afford. As Andy Warhol would later say: “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.”
Whether Coke realized it or not, it was on the vanguard of a new form of advertising. Just as Coke was establishing its new identity, Northwestern University psychologist Walter Dill Scott revolutionized the advertising field by applying the newly in-vogue principles of psychology. In his 1903 book The Psychology of Advertising, he argued that “the effect of modern advertising is not so much to convince as to suggest.” So-called reason-why advertising was a blunt instrument compared with “atmosphere advertising,” which would associate a product with the viewer’s subconscious desires: to be well liked, to be healthy, to possess, to succeed.
In fact, the history of advertising might be seen as a pendulum swinging constantly back and forth between the “hard sell” advertising that spelled out specific reasons why a consumer should use a particular product and “atmosphere” advertising that emphasized the idea behind a product. Dill’s principles were especially adopted by makers of luxury items such as cars and pianos, who increasingly crafted ads displaying how products would fit into their customers’ desired lifestyles. Despite being one of the cheapest products on the market, however, Coke branded itself as the ultimate lifestyle symbol.
Looking for a way to distinguish himself when he took over advertising from the older Frank Robinson, Sam Dobbs dumped Massengale in 1906 in favor of up-and-coming St. Louis adman William D’Arcy. In D’Arcy’s ads, the men and women shook off their top hats and petticoats to engage in golf, tennis, swimming—sports that were still out of reach of the vast majority of people in an industrializing society. The Coke bottles in the scenes, meanwhile, became a subtle part of the leisurely lifestyle, and sometimes weren’t even pictured at all. Instead a simple tagline promised that “Coca-Cola provides a refreshing relish to any form of exercise.” D’Arcy further created an aspirational lifestyle for Coke with celebrity endorsements—before Bill Cosby, Christina Aguilera, and “Mean Joe” Greene, there were actor Eddie Foy, opera star Lillian Nordica, and baseball legend Ty Cobb.
More than anything, however, D’Arcy pioneered Coke’s main selling point for the next hundred years—pretty girls. “Sex sells” may be the oldest cliché in advertising, but until the turn of the century, sex was used only in sleazy products—circuses, cigarettes, and, of course, patent medicines. With the improvement of photography and color printing in the 1890s, companies began using pictures of women