The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [22]
By the time Lee took over in the 1920s, Coke was taking advantage of new four-color printing techniques to run increasingly lavish advertisements painted by some of the best artists of the day—Hayden Hayden, Haddon Sundblom, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell. Before Lee, the company had never been big on slogans. He not only started to introduce them, but also came up with some of the most memorable slogans of the twentieth century. Unlike the increasingly hard-sell and negative advertising of the day, Coke stood apart as a small pleasure as simple as it was inevitable. Beginning in 1923, Lee started rolling out a new slogan every few months, all of them intentionally restrained—“Enjoy Thirst,” “Always Delightful,” and “It Had to Be Good to Get Where It Is.”
The biggest breakthrough, however, came on July 27, 1929, when Lee coined the simple slogan “The Pause That Refreshes.” The idea that Coke could be a momentary time-out captured the public imagination in the frenetic 1920s, when a booming economy and the new environment of fast-paced city life, motion pictures, and jazz were overwhelming the senses. Unlike Coke’s initial pitch to soothe jangled nerves a generation before, the slogan promised that relief could come not through a secret formula of medicinal herbs but just through the simple momentary pleasure of drinking a cold beverage in the midst of a busy day.
Coke’s ad slogans might have used the soft sell, but behind the scenes, its selling tactics were anything but subtle. In his quest to put Coke “within an arm’s reach of desire,” Woodruff created a Statistical Department to analyze highway car traffic and supermarket foot traffic to determine the most effective placement for ads. The department’s research also identified a new market, home consumption, and created new cardboard “six-boxes” for housewives to take bottles home.
Meanwhile, the legions of Coke Men unleashed upon retailers around the country were told not to accept no for an answer. “Salesmen should keep calling unremittingly on their prospects,” wrote sales chief Harrison Jones. “Continual chewing will enable you to digest your food.” Ad exec William D’Arcy repeated the mantra: “No matter how many times you have talked to a dealer about Coca-Cola, there is always something new to say. Repetition convinces a man.” By 1928, Woodruff could boast, “We can count on our fingers the soda fountains that do not serve Coca-Cola.” Stock price increased along with sales, quadrupling from $40 to $160 in the decade since Ernest Woodruff’s syndicate first took over the company. As the bull market roared, the elder Woodruff made a fortune—$4 million—in Coke stock, while Robert stashed a cool million.
But even when the market crashed, Coke continued to grow. In many ways, the Great Depression was Coke’s finest hour yet, Archie Lee’s “pause that refreshes” offering a temporary respite from the grinding headlines of job losses and bread lines. Buddy might not have been able to spare a dime, but he could always spend a nickel on a Coke. Coke pushed the point with new ads exhorting “Don’t Wear a Tired Thirsty Face” and “Bounce Back to Normal.”
The Depression was a hard time for advertising, with a backlash against the lifestyle ads of the 1920s and a return to hard-sell ad copy. Coke barely blinked, churning out an even more scantily clad parade of bathing-suited Coca-Cola girls, and adding celebrity endorsements from Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and other Hollywood stars. As far as Coke’s ads were concerned, there was no Depression; a better life was only the pop of a bottle cap away. In 1933, Woodruff blithely announced the company was putting an extra $1 million into its ad budget; during the period, it was one of the top twenty-five advertisers in the country.
Of all Coke’s ads, however, some of its most successful