For God, Country, and Coca-Cola

by Mark Pendergrast

  While the Company had always targeted children, they now had an added incentive because of the postwar baby boom. The Adventures of Kit Carson, starring clean-cut, well-spoken Bill Williams—the star never uttered “He went that-a-way”—lit the TV screen in 1951. Delony Sledge, the Company’s in-house advertising chief, studied demographic figures closely, though his attitude toward life and death was somewhat skewed by his devotion to Coca-Cola. “In 1951,” Sledge told one audience, “1,535,406 people died in the United States. In spite of our best efforts, this large group has been eliminated as consumers of our product.” Fortunately, he observed, almost four million potential Coke guzzlers had been born during the same year.

  Sledge recognized that Coca-Cola advertising had to reach virtually every consumer group. “Our product appeals to the entire population without consideration for race, color, economic status, geographical location or religious preference,” he said. “We believe to the depths of our collective hearts that Coca-Cola is the best beverage buy in the world. Our work is a religion rather than a business.” Consequently, “anybody, anytime, anywhere, is a fruitful prospect for Coca-Cola.” The trouble with such a messianic, universal approach, Sledge noted ruefully, was that it made specific campaigns aimed at particular consumer groups impossible. The Company continually searched for a spokesperson to appeal to all age groups. In 1953, with Eddie Fisher, they thought they had found him.

  Twice a week, the twenty-four-year-old Fisher sang hits such as “Oh! My Papa” and “I’m Walking Behind You” to adoring living room audiences whose members ranged from toddlers to grandparents. The boyish crooner had “the sort of face that middle-aged ladies want to put through college,” according to one critic, but his artfully tousled hair appealed to the bobby-soxers, who were “swooning for Eddie, not Frankie”—and who were an increasingly distinct market for soft drinks and other consumer products. On Coke Time, Fisher personally praised Coca-Cola in soft-sell commercials. His handsome likeness appeared in life-size cardboard cutouts, holding out the hobbleskirt bottle and coaxing shoppers to “Have a Coke.” In drugstores across America, teenagers began to order “Eddie Fishers” when they wanted a Coke. No one knew that Fisher’s effervescent personality was fueled not only by Coca-Cola—he really did drink twenty Cokes a day—but also by hypodermic shots of vitamins and amphetamines, administered by Dr. Max Jacobson, otherwise known as Miracle Max, Dr. Needles, or Dr. Feelgood.*

  Like Morton Downey, the Irish tenor who had just retired from his professional career in order to devote the rest of his life to Coca-Cola, Fisher and his new wife, Debbie Reynolds, attended Company conventions as part of the Coca-Cola family. In 1955, they spent their honeymoon at an Atlanta bottlers’ convention, where fresh-faced Debbie Reynolds, holding her new husband’s hand, stepped to the microphone and announced, “I don’t drink Coke. It’s bad for your teeth. I drink milk.” And she smiled beatifically. After a moment of stunned silence, the bottlers burst into laughter. They thought Reynolds was just being funny. It was inconceivable to them that anyone would seriously make such a statement in such a place. (She was serious, and she didn’t like Fisher’s amphetamine addiction either. They divorced a few years later, after Fisher’s Coke contract ran out and in the wake of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor.)

  Nor did Coca-Cola’s Hollywood agents neglect the movies, though it was no longer simply a matter of supplying the back lots with soft drinks. Now a “buried plug,” as it was called, cost $250 per mention for most companies. To avoid such expense, Coca-Cola arranged for payment through “reciprocal publicity,” as with the 1950 film, Destination Moon, which featured four astronauts drinking Coca-Cola in their spaceship.

  Such efforts were augmented with all of the traditional point-of-purchase advertising, blanket distribution, local bottler under-the-crown promotions, and the numerous other ploys familiar by that time. Nonetheless, Coca-Cola’s share of the market slowly eroded in the early 1950s, while the share price tumbled from a high of $200 in 1946 to $109 in 1952. That year, Woodruff fired Bill Hobbs, a sort of Millard Fillmore president who never made much of a mark. Rumor had it that he tried to assert his independence of Woodruff, which was a cardinal sin.* In his place, Woodruff placed Burke Nicholson, a dedicated, lifelong Coca-Cola executive who had overseen the Export Corporation. Woodruff never took Nicholson seriously as a president, however, regarding him as an interim caretaker.

  KING-SIZE HEADACHES CALL FOR KING-SIZE SOLUTIONS

  “Coca-Cola can hardly be said to be foundering,” reported one Wall Street analyst in 1955. “Yet it is faltering.” It seemed obvious to almost everyone except Robert Woodruff that “the only thing wrong with Coca-Cola is Pepsi-Cola,” as a veteran observer pointedly remarked. For the first time, Coca-Cola’s primacy as the leading soft drink was challenged, and until Coke matched Pepsi ounce for ounce and penny for penny, the gap between the two would continue to narrow. Lee Talley, the short, freckle-faced Alabama boy who had joined the Company in 1923 and now ran the Export company, confronted the Boss in the fall of 1954. “Mr. Woodruff,” he said, “I’ve never been on the losing side of a business in my life, and I’m not going to start now. Unless you allow me to increase the bottle size, you’ll have to accept my resignation.” The next day, Woodruff succumbed to the inevitable. While he wouldn’t officially grant his permission, he didn’t withhold it.

  News of Coke’s plans to test-market larger sizes in the United States rocked the industry. While the soft drink giant had troubles, it still dominated, accounting for 40 percent of domestic soft drink consumption. Digesting the “awesome scope and ramifications” of Coke’s decision, a trade journal editor noted, competitors registered “a maximum of interest, anxiety, speculation, and . . . trepidation,” and they were not alone. Although many Coke bottlers had been howling for a larger container, others resisted the change, which meant massive capital investment in new equipment. Besides, the emotional attachment to the diminutive standard bottle was overwhelming. “Bringing out another bottle,” Ed Forio noted, “was like being unfaithful to your wife.”

  The plans for test-marketing couldn’t come soon enough for Lee Talley, who desperately wanted a bigger bottle overseas, too. At the beginning of 1955, the Export head spelled out his troubles around the world in a long memo to the board of directors. In the Philippines, where Coke bottlers were “very aggressive,” sales had still declined by 40 percent over the previous year. The same was true in Thailand, while Egypt was experiencing a “long downward trend.” The only real bright spot was Europe. The fault, Talley said, lay in “our dark, scuffed little bottle,” which made “a miserably bad showing” alongside the bigger, brighter Pepsi bottles on shelves around the world. Coke needed an applied color label like its competitor, he said. And most important, it must have a twelve-ounce bottle.

  In February, Coke test-marketed a twenty-six-ounce Family Size and two nearly identical King Size bottles of ten and twelve ounces, all in the familiar hobbleskirt design. The package suited the times, as Americans reveled in oversized cars and consumption. Coca-Cola executives insisted that research indicated “the majority of the public prefer the standard size bottle”; they were offering alternative sizes only for “group refreshment in the home.” Pepsi knew better, jubilantly taking out ads declaring, “It’s fun to be followed—to be recognized as the leader.” While the 6.5-ounce bottle indeed constituted the majority of sales for a few years, the shift to larger sizes was inexorable.* By 1958, King Size Coke was available to 81 percent of the U.S. population, though the traditional small bottle still accounted for 80 percent of Coke sales.

  Pepsi responded to Coke’s King Size drink by attacking with a 6.5-ounce size, but they had little chance in such familiar Coca-Cola territory. Now on the offensive, Coke men got wind of competitive launches, flooding the markets to prevent the new Pepsi size from gaining cooler space. In the United States as well as in foreign markets, the cola wars became intense by the late fifties. Coca-Cola men obsessively spied
on Pepsi and its plans; the Coke archives are filled with reports on the Imitator’s conventions, telephone polls, and Nielsen market ratings of the period.

  The decision to change the bottle size opened the floodgates of change. In his message to the Export board, Lee Talley recommended a “second line of products” because his bottlers were “finding it difficult to keep their businesses going on Coca-Cola alone.” Consequently, he sought permission to resurrect the Fanta trademark, which Max Keith had providentially registered in several Nazi-controlled countries during World War II. In April of 1955, Fanta Orange was introduced in Italy, but Woodruff resisted offering “rainbow flavors” in the United States. “Competition has successfully used the multi-flavor approach to take exclusive accounts from us,” wrote a harried Coke executive to the Boss in 1957, “and the trend is increasing.” The next year, Woodruff authorized the test-marketing of a whole new line of Fanta flavors for the United States, finally providing other Company drinks for vending machines.

  At the same time, “pre-mix” Coca-Cola was introduced, precipitating a crisis between the Company and bottlers. In large stainless-steel containers, Coke syrup was mixed with carbonated water. The pre-mix machines were useful at small fountain outlets, baseball games, and other special events, where salesmen with modified backpacks could dispense individual drinks. Recognizing the bottlers’ superior distribution system, the Company allowed them to handle pre-mix, but created a special “B-X” syrup and charged ten cents a gallon more for it than regular bottlers’ syrup. Company officials admitted that the B-X cost them exactly the same to produce. The price differential resulted, Lee Talley wrote, because they were “free to negotiate on this” and could finally escape the dead weight of the old contract. Minneapolis bottler Tom Moore sued the Company over the pre-mix issue, claiming with some justice that the original contract applied to all bottled, carbonated Coca-Cola, regardless of its size. The large stainless steel container was, in effect, a huge bottle. Afraid that he would lose his suit, Moore finally settled out of court. Al Steele and his Pepsi men were, of course, delighted with the internecine strife, thankful that they were not saddled with the cumbersome contract that continued to plague Coca-Cola.

  The rise of national supermarket chains also caused friction between the Company and bottlers. In order to combat Pepsi, the Company’s national sales representatives often offered price incentives to a store without first consulting the local bottler. “Every man that called on national accounts wasn’t an angel,” one Coke man recalled, “and they did whatever they had to do.” As a result, the autonomous franchise owners fumed, chafing under Atlanta’s high-handed supervision. At the same time, Coke abolished the antiquated parent bottler organization—at least the portion under Company control. Woodruff had already bought all but the Thomas Company, and now he eliminated the extra layer of bureaucracy, replacing it with the “Bottle Sales” department.

  Unfortunately, the Thomas Company, which covered 40 percent of the United States population, remained stubbornly independent. When Woodruff encouraged his executive and friend DeSales Harrison to assume control of the parent bottler in 1941, the Boss had expected his troubles to be over. After George Hunter, the long-time head of the Thomas Company, died in 1950, however, Harrison refused to sell; he had come to enjoy his kingdom, and Company representatives who set foot in Thomas territory without permission were in dire trouble.

  THE ROBINSON REGIME

  During the same February of 1955 that King Size Coke was introduced, Robert Woodruff announced the appointment of Eisenhower’s friend Bill Robinson as the new president of The Coca-Cola Company. Loyal Company men were shocked. A rank outsider, a marketing and public relations man, Robinson had very limited experience with Coca-Cola and was—God forbid—a Yankee. Not only that, but Woodruff apparently intended to give Robinson real power. Just turned sixty-five, Woodruff officially retired, assuming the chair of the newly created Finance Committee.* Later in the year, Woodruff also brought in Curt Gager from General Foods as first lieutenant. Robinson and Gager, working primarily from Coke’s New York offices, made a formidable team. The new president at least conformed to the Coca-Cola mold: a big, bluff, red-faced promoter, he valiantly tried to adjust himself to the prevailing culture, touring the country to meet skeptical bottlers. Gager, on the other hand, was a small ferret-like man who spoke a strange new bottom-line language. Worse, he was rumored to have been a hatchet man at General Foods.

  About the same time Gager came on board, Robinson switched ad agencies, curtailing the long-standing D’Arcy relationship in favor of McCann-Erickson, a bigger, more sophisticated New York outfit with worldwide offices—in fact, McCann had already produced Coke’s South American programs. The agency switch symbolized the formal end of the gracious golden age of Coca-Cola advertising. Its poet, Archie Lee, had died in 1950, and now the new agency abruptly abandoned the classic oil paintings of Haddon Sundblom and Norman Rockwell in favor of color photography highlighting socialites and glistening King Size Coke bottles. A “devil-ridden” workaholic and fierce devotee of social science research, McCann’s Marion Harper Jr. brought a contemporary “scientific” bent to Coca-Cola commercials. Harper assigned Murray Hillman to work with Curt Gager, jettisoning old dogma in an all-out effort to reverse the Pepsi gains.

  The $15 million ad campaign actually bore a noticeable resemblance to Steele’s efforts, relying on the same upper-crust appeal to young moderns. Layouts showing sophisticated couples drinking Coke in front on the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramids flopped with the folks back home, however. “You can sell all the Coke you want in Pakistan,” Delony Sledge complained of the McCann efforts, “but we want to sell it in Punkin Center.” Even though it took a while for the new ad agency to produce a winning approach, however, Harper’s willingness to butt heads with competition stimulated the stodgy soft drink firm. The first campaign slogan, “Almost Everyone Appreciates the Best,” marked a clear revolution, since it was a competitive ad, at least implicitly acknowledging Pepsi’s existence.

  Up until that moment, Coke men had haughtily ignored Pepsi. Inside the Company, the “P-word” was never mentioned. Instead, memos referred to the Competition, the Imitator, or the Enemy. Drinking a Pepsi constituted a capital crime. If a Coca-Cola man and his family pulled into a motel and saw a Competitor’s vending machine, they righteously moved on. One Coke bottler, enraged at encountering a Pepsi vending machine in his territory, hauled out his hunting rifle and shot it. In the fifties, a Coke bottler’s son hid in the attic with friends on his seventh birthday to smoke cigarettes and clandestinely drink Pepsi. When his father discovered this perfidy, he lectured him sternly, not on the evils of smoking, but on drinking the wrong soda.

  Morton Downey, the crooner who appeared everywhere for Coke in the fifties—at druggists’ meetings, bottlers’ conventions, American Legion affairs—was one of Robert Woodruff’s best friends. “Every week the Coke man would drop off six or seven cases,” his son remembered, “and whenever we went out we were all required to have a Coca-Cola bottle in front of us for a picture. My father was the best PR they ever had.” Such pressure on children could backfire, however. Years later, Morton Downey Jr. would exact revenge on his father. As “Mortification Mort,” he consciously developed an obnoxious, obscene talk-show persona in direct contrast to this father’s schmaltz. “My father wanted me to run one of his bottling plants,” the son recalled. “The last thing I wanted to do was work for Coke. To this day I only drink Pepsi.”

  In the fifties, however, there were no such rebels. The immense pride and loyalty to Coca-Cola occasionally stood in the way of necessary business decisions. Gager and Hillman agreed that simply offering a larger bottle wasn’t sufficient. There wasn’t enough of a difference between Pepsi and Coke to warrant charging more for Coca-Cola. In fact, to their horror, they discovered in blind taste tests that Pepsi had a slight edge, and they unsuccessfully petitioned Woodruff to increase the syrup throw to produce a sweeter drink. Th
e reaction to the secret taste tests at Coke headquarters was swift: “Don’t ever do that again.” In general, the Boss resisted any change in advertising and marketing.

  Setting the price for the King Size was problematical, since bottlers tended to boost it considerably beyond the standard size drink, putting it above the equivalent Pepsi price. McCann man Murray Hillman persuaded bottlers to cut the King Size price while raising the price of the traditional bottle. “The regular bottle sales were on a steady downhill trend anyway,” he said. “People who drank it were loyal regardless of price.” The maneuver worked. At the same time, Hillman suggested charging a premium for the twenty-six-ounce Family Size bottle in the New York City area, where the huge Jewish population accounted for most sales. “Typically, Jewish consumers wanted a big bottle to put on the table and pour at mealtimes,” Hillman remembered. “They appreciated quality and demanded a brand name product.” Consequently, rather than playing up the savings in price—which would have been difficult, since it cost more per ounce than the smaller sizes—ads for the large bottle bragged: “There’s a giant in my house.”

  Elsewhere, however, King Size purchases fell inexplicably after an initial surge. Sample consumers complained that their Coke didn’t taste as good in the big bottle. “You must have diluted it,” they reasoned. “How can you afford to offer it at such a low price otherwise?” In response, the McGuire Sisters saturated TV and radio with a lilting jingle in the late fifties: “King Size Coke has more for you, / King Size Coke has more for you, / King Size Coke has more for you: / Flavor, Lift, and Value too.”*

  PROBING THE SUBCONSCIOUS WITH THE DEPTH BOYS