Part of Woodruff’s ability lay in picking the right men, those he esteemed as the best in their respective fields. “He can take a man’s measure so rapidly,” wrote one Woodruff-watcher in 1930, “that the man does not realize he is being observed.” Many of the men who would guide the destiny of the Company came on board during the twenties: Eugene Kelly, who took over the Canadian operation; Lee and John Talley, who would rise to executive levels; Al and John Staton, Georgia Tech football heroes and scholars; William “Pig Iron” Brownlee, a determined, fair, but tough manager. Many of Woodruff’s recruits were Georgia natives whose soft-spoken Southern drawl charmed clients wherever they went—whether in New York, Montreal, or Paris—while their quick eyes missed no business opportunity.
If Woodruff was impressed with an opponent, he often hired him. Arthur Acklin, a Georgia-born IRS agent who tried to pry back taxes out of Coca-Cola, soon joined the Company to do battle from the other side. John Sibley, the aggressive young attorney for King & Spalding who had fought Coca-Cola in the recent Bottler Case, shortly thereafter began to work for the Company he had so bitterly opposed. Sibley became a lifelong Woodruff friend and adviser, gradually accruing power as Harold Hirsch’s authority diminished.
ADVERTISING FOR THE ROARING TWENTIES
One of the reasons that Coca-Cola was no longer maligned by the end of the twenties was that Woodruff recognized that a defensive, negative posture was poor policy and forbade any further pamphlets quoting Dr. Schmiedeberg on caffeine. The Boss set a modest, gentlemanly tone that is still echoed at the Company. The drink, he said, had no earthshaking importance—a small thing, really, serving to make life a bit more relaxed and pleasant, that’s all. By such “aw-shucks” false modesty, he assured Coca-Cola more importance; the stress on taking a moment for a pleasurable, sociable drink fit the hedonism and energy of the times.
Archie Lee and Robert Woodruff, who shared the same attitude toward the drink, quickly became close friends. Lee was one of the few people besides Sibley who actually dared address Woodruff as Bob. The ad man had the talent to translate Woodruff’s groping thoughts into gracious, unassuming slogans—direct contrasts to most period advertising, which utilized wordy negative copy as never before, playing on consumers’ fears. A hand cream featured “The Tragedy of Nan—Domestic Hands.” Hoover Vacuum ads proclaimed that “Dirty Rugs Are Dangerous.” Ads for Gillette Blue Blades showed a man with stubble admitting, “I was never so embarrassed in my life!” Postum depicted a boy tutored after school who was “Held Back by Coffee.” The prize for the genre, however, went to a Scott Tissues ad featuring a surgeon and nurse bent over an unseen patient. The copy read, “. . . and the trouble began with harsh toilet tissue.” In an era increasingly concerned with outward appearances and social status, most ads exploited a fear of appearing a misfit—unless, of course, the ad’s particular product was used.
Coca-Cola advertising must have been a refreshing change for the harassed, anxious consumer of the 1920s. No longer did the ads show a tyrannical sun beating down on despondent, wilted shoppers. Instead, Archie Lee’s message in 1923 was to “enjoy thirst at work or at play.” Coca-Cola was “always delightful” and was found in a “cool and cheerful place.” Copy was kept to a minimum, while pictures conveyed the message that active, contented, good-looking, successful young men and women enjoyed the drink.
The D’Arcy agency hired some of the best artists of the day—N. C. Wyeth, McClelland Barclay, Fred Mizen, Haddon Sundblom, Hayden Hayden, and Norman Rockwell, among others. Their oil paintings for Coca-Cola were often genuine works of art, but the illustrators were never stupid enough to put their egos above the product. “The idea in an illustration,” McClelland Barclay said in 1924, “must hit [the viewer] like a shot. It ought to force the exclamation from them—What a peach of an idea! Not only that, but they must remember that it was Coca-Cola that was refreshing and good to drink.” Barclay was particularly pleased with his Ladies’ Home Journal ad of that year, a well-dressed socialite standing at a soda fountain, lifting her veil to sip a glass of Coca-Cola. Everything about the picture denoted classy restraint—the woman in white, the clean-cut soda dispenser, the understated copy that appeared underneath: “Refresh Yourself. The Charm of Coca-Cola is proclaimed at all soda fountains.”
Woodruff and Lee continued the tradition of avoiding overt sexuality in ads while remaining suggestive. A 1923 effort verged unusually close to outright sex appeal, showing a pretty blonde with a low-cut white dress and an almost sultry look. “There’s nothing like it when you’re thirsty,” the double-entendre caption proclaimed. In the ensuing years, however, more brunettes than blondes were portrayed, and while they were undoubtedly buxom, they weren’t nearly so blatantly sexual. “We used to call the Coca-Cola girls the Atlanta Virgins,” one ad man recalled. “They were sexy only above the hips, offering sex without sweat.”
In 1923, Archie Lee first toyed with the phrase that would be his greatest creation. “Pause and Refresh Yourself,” he wrote. “Our nation is the busiest on earth. From breakfast to dinner there’s no end of work.” This ad was actually a throwback to the negative hurry-hurry, worry-worry ads of 1905, and Lee soon abandoned it. But the idea of a magical way to stop time, to take a breather in a hectic day, was valid and useful if divorced from its negative connotations.
Already hectic at the turn of the century, the pace of life in America now appeared downright frantic. “Talk about the tempo of today!” wrote one twenties commentator, describing a typical office worker’s schedule. He suffered from “speed-desire-excitement,” an endless cycle that “whirs continuously in his brain, his blood, his very soul.” Everything had to be accomplished in a huge hurry, according to another writer, with “quick lunches at soda fountains . . . quick cooking recipes . . . quick tabloid newspapers.” In 1929, Lee first coined the phrase “The Pause that Refreshes.” Over the next twenty years, this “pause” became synonymous with Coca-Cola, as harried businessmen made the luncheonette a standard part of their day.
Another interesting motif entered advertising in the 1920s: a nostalgic appeal to rural America. “Every day in every way life is getting speedier, jazzier,” wrote one commentator in the twenties, calling for a return to “the simple life.” In response, a 1923 Coca-Cola Ladies’ Home Journal spread portrayed a down-home girl in sharp contrast to the upper-class models usually found in the ads. A fresh-scrubbed rural beauty with boyishly short hair and a straw hat around her neck enjoyed her drink from a bottle through a straw. “You’ll like it as surely as sunshine and fresh air make you thirsty,” Lee wrote. Soon, subscribers enjoyed Norman Rockwell’s ads with freckle-faced boys at the old fishing hole, complete with dog and Coca-Cola bottle, just as the United States increasingly industrialized. These clever appeals to a mythical peace back on the farm have continued to produce some of Coca-Cola’s best advertising.
Lee’s slogans and Coca-Cola’s fine new artists soon were on display along the six hundred thousand miles of new highways built in the twenties. On twenty-four-poster billboards, the first of which went up in 1925, the “Ritz boy,” a white-clad bellhop, held a tray with a single bottle of Coca-Cola and a glass. The simple caption read: “6,000,000 a Day.” The billboard was joined by the “Spectacular,” the name Coca-Cola men applied to huge electric signs strategically placed in the heart of a city. The first neon extravaganza was created in 1929 in New York’s Times Square, which one Coca-Cola man gleefully reported to be “the busiest spot in the world . . . the mammoth parade ground of the universe.” Researchers estimated that over a million pairs of eyes saw the signs there every twenty-four hours. The same writer noted that Times Square was “plebeian to the core. The masses flock to the Main Stem. They eat more, talk more, see more, dress better . . . than anywhere else.” Presumably, they also drank more Coca-Cola.
Finally, in an ingenious effort to attain “scientific” advertising, the Company initiated the “Six Keys to Popularity” contest. A variety of ads stressed diff
erent reasons to buy Coca-Cola: Taste, Purity, Refreshment, Sociability, Price, and Thirst-Satisfaction. Consumers could win one of 635 prizes by writing in to explain why their favorite “key” was the most important. The 1927 campaign was in reality a massive market research tool, but it also allowed consumers to participate and feel part of the advertising itself. The $10,000 grand prize was not coincidentally given to a perfect representative of middle America: Mabel Millspaugh, a stenographer in Anderson, Indiana.
DESCENT OF THE SURVEY CREWS
In 1923, Robert Woodruff had expanded the former Information Department into the Statistical Department, which soon performed what would now be called pioneering market research. During the decade’s last three years, this department frenetically laid the foundation for a scientific approach to selling more Coca-Cola. By that time, there were practically no new outlets. There was a bottling plant in nearly every town. Coca-Cola was sold in each of the 115,000 soda fountains in the United States. In the title of a 1929 article, one of the few he wrote, Woodruff posed the question, “After National Distribution—What?” Could it be that the drink had reached its saturation point?
Of course, Woodruff didn’t want to answer that question affirmatively. In 1927, he assigned Turner Jones,* the head of advertising, to oversee a massive survey. Over a three-year period, Coca-Cola’s field workers studied fifteen thousand retail outlets to determine whether there was a relationship between traffic flow and sales volume. Sure enough, the dealers with highest sales turned out to have the largest number of potential passing customers. They also tended to pay the highest rents, since they were in desirable locations. Roughly a third of the outlets accounted for 60 percent of the sales volume, while the bottom third sold only 10 percent of the total. The survey revealed that many of the high-volume outlets had few Coca-Cola signs either outdoors or inside the store. As a result, salesmen began to visit these dispensers four times a year (twice had been the standard), offering special service, aids, and encouragement. After this initial effort, the survey crews followed up with observations of forty-two thousand drugstore customers across the country. They discovered that 62 percent of all shoppers made purchases first at the soda fountain. Of those, 36 percent asked for Coca-Cola. Twenty-two percent of customers sipping the right soda went on to a secondary purchase at some other counter.
Armed with this information, Woodruff not only directed a more intelligent distribution and sales effort but an innovative public relations campaign based on a series of soft-sell movies with names like Soda Fountain Service; Come In, Customer; and These Changing Times, using professional actors in the role of druggist and dispenser. The films were shown to retail dealers and chain store managers, who learned the benefits of serving the drink correctly. Coca-Cola was best served at thirty-four degrees with perfectly chipped ice in a thin-sided bell-shaped Coca-Cola glass, which had a convenient mark for the appropriate syrup level. Coca-Cola men came equipped with special thermometers to take the temperature of a possibly ailing drink. They also gave away six-pronged ice forks, explaining that the single pick was clumsy and that an ice shaver was out of the question. Finally, the carbonated water should be poured down the side of the glass to avoid losing fizz, and the drink shouldn’t be over-stirred. The films also emphasized methods of maximizing profit and reducing overhead. Soda fountain items offered fast turnover, low inventory costs, and a high profit margin. As a finale, the Coca-Cola representative handed out a free manual to help individual outlets estimate a storewide departmental breakdown in gross sales and costs.
This kind of effort did not go unnoticed. Trade associations, other corporations, and the press were impressed with the quality of Coca-Cola’s research and the way the Company used it. “COCA-COLA GETS UP AND GOES TO BED WITH THE CONSUMER,” one headline asserted. While such behavior would probably be somewhat sticky, there’s no question that the devoted soft drink man would do almost anything to get his drink down one more throat. “Follow the crowds” became the Coca-Cola battle cry, and, with the new surveys, those crowds were easy to find.
SERVICE STATIONS, SIX-BOXES, AND BLACK WIDOWS
One of Woodruff’s earliest decisions was to push the bottle. Woodruff had none of the Candler defensiveness about this separate wing of the business, and it was clear to him that the future lay in the portable green bottles. As a former White salesman, he knew that Americans were more restless and mobile as paved roads and highways crisscrossed the country. It was Woodruff who insisted that Coca-Cola be available literally anywhere in the United States, and he identified the service station as a major new outlet. Company dogma asserted that the soft drink should always be “within arm’s reach of desire.” By 1929, 1.5 million American filling stations offered perfect outlets for soft drinks. These “elaborate, attractive oases for the motorist,” a Coca-Cola journalist pointed out, provided a golden opportunity to snag the driver who has “paused for an interval and is gazing leisurely around with ready cash in hand.”
In 1924, the Company publication sponsored a contest with a small cash prize for anyone who sent a picture of bottled Coca-Cola being served in a new outlet. The contest was a real challenge, given the alphabetical list of already discovered outlets: bakery, barber shop, bowling alley, cafe, cigar stand, club, college, confectioner, construction job, dairy depot, dancing academy, delicatessen, fire station, fish-game-poultry-meat store, five and dime, fraternal order, fruit stand, garage, grocery, hat cleaning and shoe parlor, home, hospital, hotel, ice cream parlor, manicure parlor, market, military organization, news agency, park, place of amusement, police station, pool room, railroad office, railroad train, restaurant, tea room, telegraph office, telephone office, wiener stand.
At many retail outlets, Coca-Cola was hidden off to the side or in the rear. Some enterprising merchants cut the red syrup barrel in half, filling one half with ice and using it as an attractive cooler. Woodruff saw the need for an inexpensive, standard cooler. In 1928, John Staton, a young Coca-Cola executive, was assigned the task. Staton disassembled all available models, testing them for durability and efficiency, then designed his own cooler and put it out for bid. After extensive negotiations, the square metal box on a stand was manufactured by the Glascock Brothers of Muncie, Indiana, for only $12.50. Within a year, thirty-two thousand had been sold.
Woodruff encouraged bottle sales in other ways as well. In 1923, Harrison Jones sponsored the development of the first six-pack (called a “six-box” until the fifties) in a self-contained cardboard box with a “handle of invitation.” It really wasn’t promoted until late in the twenties, however, when Coca-Cola appealed to dealers with a picture of an attractive woman holding a carton in one hand while seductively pulling her dress above her knee with the other. The caption below read, “My Six Appeal.” Even so, the six-bottle carton failed to gain momentum until well into the next decade, when refrigerators became more common in the American home.
Meanwhile, nuisance suits continued to plague bottlers. In 1923, the Bottlers’ Association was a nearly bankrupt shoestring operation with a part-time secretary working out of Harold Hirsch’s office. When Hirsch resigned as the organization’s legal counsel that year to devote full time to the Company, the bottlers hired Ralph Beach, a large, humorless, bespectacled man with close-cropped hair who injected new energy into the organization. Realizing that he needed legal grounding, Beach studied for a law degree at night. Frustrated by the increasing number of foreign-ingredient suits, he created a massive filing system to catch repeaters. To defend exploding-bottle cases, he devised a demonstration to be used in court, dropping ball bearings from varying heights onto unyielding Coca-Cola bottles.
But the real star of the foreign-ingredient cases was Perry Wilbur Fattig, an Emory biology professor who studied the results of ingesting insects thoroughly marinated in Coca-Cola. In a 1933 article, Fattig wrote majestically in the royal we, noting that “all of the most poisonous insects and small animals that we have been able to obtain have been used. We h
ave tested the Black Widow Spider (Latrodectus mactans) not only upon ourselves but upon thirty-nine other people.” Not surprisingly, he wrote that “it was not so easy to get volunteers.”
Coca-Cola lawyers claimed, of course, that the bugs couldn’t have gotten into the drink until after it was opened. Even if by some miracle a bug had invaded the bottle, however, they called Fattig for the defense. He explained that the carbonated water in soft drinks acted as a germicide, rendering any bugs harmless. He then proceeded to give a personal demonstration. Juries must have been fascinated, if appalled, by Fattig’s culinary habits, as he calmly munched lizards, scorpions, blowflies, cockroaches, spiders, caterpillars, fleas, roaches, grasshoppers, beetles, snails, frogs, bees, praying mantises, centipedes, worms, and stink bugs, chased down by a black widow or two. While an undoubted phenomenon in court, Fattig was not quite so popular socially. Ralph Beach’s wife, for instance, refused to attend Fattig’s dinner parties, where he often spiked the drinks with roaches.
STANDARDIZING COCA-COLA
One of Robert Woodruff’s bedrock tenets was that Coca-Cola should be standardized. Every bottle and fountain drink should taste exactly the same across the United States. He knew from experience that the drink’s quality varied considerably from place to place, depending on the water, carbonation level, ratio of syrup to soda, and cleanliness. That, he declared, would change. In 1929, he established a Fountain Training School, where salesmen learned exactly how to mix the perfect drink, check carbonation levels, and the like. They were to convey this information to the dispensers, along with the all-important lesson of proper temperature. Coca-Cola had to be sold ice-cold, or it didn’t taste good. Lecturers coined homilies to help salesmen remember: “It’s gotta be cold if it’s gonna be sold.”
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 25