The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [21]
A lackluster student who was forever failing the test for his father’s affections, he dropped out of Emory after just two years to work as a manual laborer, and then salesman at a truck company, White Motor Works. As bad as he was as a student, Woodruff proved to be a born salesman, encouraging an easy liking from clients and a reflexive loyalty from subordinates. By 1922, he was first vice president of the White Motor Works and a member of the board. Watching from afar, Ernest Woodruff both resented and admired his son’s success. After canning Sam Dobbs, and knowing Howard Candler was not suited to be president forever, Ernest decided he’d rather see his son succeed him than succeed without him, and tapped him to be president of the Coca-Cola Company that year.
Whatever the elder Woodruff’s motives, he made the right choice, at least as far as the company was concerned. By the 1920s, Coke had established itself as the national brand of soft drink, with a monopoly that few companies could ever hope for. As it became more and more a part of the landscape, lifestyle started imitating advertising: Films began incorporating the drink into scenes, music started spontaneously referring to it in lyrics.
The 1920s was also the decade advertising came into its own. As Europe cleaned up the wreckage from World War I, a newly confident American marketing machine churned countless new products off the assembly lines. “The chief economic problem today,” wrote ad executive Stanley Resor at the time, “is no longer the production of goods but their distribution. The shadow of overproduction . . . is the chief menace of the present industrial system.” To sell all of the new radios, telephones, and refrigerators, advertising increasingly seemed a necessary part of the industrial process. A new generation of ads took the psychological techniques of “atmosphere advertising” and ran with them to exploit the unconscious needs of consumers, probing for consumers’ soft spots to promise the health, happiness, comfort, or love that a product would bring—or conjuring the anxieties of not owning a product, creating new afflictions such as “halitosis” and body odor, and then providing their solutions in Listerine and Lifebuoy soap.
Coke retained its positive outlook—and why shouldn’t it? Coke was tailor-made for the Jazz Age, the first American generation of young people to rebel against their parents in a fast-moving culture of jitterbug and gin. As the Roaring Twenties roared in, D’Arcy’s Coca-Cola girls strutted their stuff in flapper dresses and bathing suits, always with a beading bottle or glass at the ready. A brief attempt to increase rural sales with homey images of farms and storefronts was a flop—sales pointed upward only when the ads featured the young and rich.
Even so, Coke hadn’t even begun to saturate its potential market. Robert Woodruff immediately set out to increase the company’s profits and its share price with one word in mind—growth. If consumption of Coke increased just a few drinks per person per month, the company calculated, it would translate into millions in profits. The key to that, he reasoned, was making sure that people had access to a bottle of Coke whenever the urge to drink one struck them. It was Robert Woodruff’s sales chief Harrison Jones, a six-foot-two gregarious redhead, who first coined the phrase of putting Coke everywhere “within an arm’s reach of desire.” Woodruff liked the phrase and repeated it so much that he adopted it as his own.
In order to further make that vision a reality, he enlisted a new ally with a gift for stoking that desire. Archie Lee started out as a newspaper reporter in North Carolina—but his ambition led him to advertising. “A man who can see life in its