Hillman wasn’t alone in discovering that consumer behavior is often irrational, based on subconscious psychological motives. By mid-decade, “the depth boys,” as they were known, had brought motivational research (MR) into the mainstream. Suddenly, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists were jumping out of their ivory towers to tender expert advice to businesses like The Coca-Cola Company. For the first time, the Company attempted to plumb the depths of the subconscious mind. In long tape-recorded interviews, as Delony Sledge explained, the psychologists “probe long enough and deep enough to find out (almost, in some instances, against the will of the interviewee)” what motivated representative consumers to choose either Coke or Pepsi. The unrelenting question, according to Sledge, was “Why? Why? Why?”
While Coca-Cola men may have welcomed the depth boys, many critics were alarmed at this manipulative approach, which turned social scientists into “super hucksters” advising on how to write copy with “sell appeal.” In The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard sounded the alarm about this exotic new approach in which people were swayed subconsciously. Typically, he said, the MR men “see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes.” People were “image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts.” To a large degree, however, the jargon-ridden academics were simply recognizing what Coca-Cola men had known for years. The Color Research Institute discovered that red was “hypnotic” and particularly attractive to female shoppers. Without articulating it in the same way, Archie Lee had long ago realized that image was more important than substance. Nonetheless, for the first time Coca-Cola men moved beyond mere “nose-counting” surveys to a more sophisticated positioning of the drink.
In the late 1950s, sensational reports on “subliminal advertising” inflamed public fears of nefarious subconscious manipulation. For six weeks, on alternate nights, a New Jersey movie theater projected “Coca-Cola” and “Eat Popcorn” on the screen every five seconds for three-thousandths of a second—too fast to register on the conscious mind. The directors of the Subliminal Projection Company claimed that Coke sales went up 18.1 percent as a result. At special screenings, journalists then viewed a short film about underwater life in which 169 hidden Coca-Cola messages swam amongst the fish. One New York Times reporter wasn’t impressed, since he had no urge to drink a Coke after watching the groupers and mackerel. Nor, he reported, did he have any “visions, dreams, drives, images, trances, inclinations or hangovers that were not directly attributable to conscious guzzling of something else than Coke the night before.” While Coca-Cola men may have been initially intrigued by subliminal advertising, it turned out to be a hoax, and the impressive increase in Coke sales in the lobby a fiction.
A BLAND NEW WORLD
The eager motivational researchers were symptomatic of fifties America during the “age of affluence,” as John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it, in which a sales executive exulted that “Capitalism is dead—consumerism is king!” The question was no longer how to produce enough goods to satisfy needs, but rather, how could consumers be induced to absorb the flood of products? By the mid-fifties, the gross national product had increased over 400 percent in just fifteen years. “We must consume more and more,” wrote one commentator, “whether we want to or not, for the good of our economy.”
On the surface, at least, Americans appeared to be a complacent, conformist lot, nestling into identical little houses in Levittowns across the country, compliantly purchasing ever-increasing numbers of cars, TV dinners, and soft drinks. To Mochtar Lubis, a visitor from Indonesia, the United States was a garish hell: “Mass advertisements in newspapers, radio, TV, billboards, for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year, telling people to go to the same places, buy the same cars, gadgets, dresses, build the same house, read the same pulp literature, to feel the same, think the same.” This resulted in a leveling of taste, a uniformity in food and politics. “Everybody liked Eisenhower,” Lubis noted, because “he’s a nice guy.” It was, as Vance Packard wrote, a “bland new world” in which the American per capita soft drink consumption swelled from 177 in 1950 to 235 drinks per year by decade’s end.
“Bland” is the only word to describe McCann-Erickson’s early TV spots featuring Johnny, a chunky fourteen-year-old with slickly combed hair and a double chin—a dork even by 1958 standards. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Sis,” he exclaimed as he burst through the door with his schoolbooks. “Got any ice-cold Coke?” Looking up from her ironing, Mom answered, “Why, Johnny King, you know we have. Only this morning you brought in a whole case of Coca-Cola,” and the charming family scene closed on the bliss of simultaneous Coke consumption, as the announcer affirmed that “everyone likes Coke.”
Nowhere was the uniformity of the age more obvious than at “the new jungle called the supermarket,” as one critic put it, where housewives, children in tow, dutifully filled their shopping carts. Coca-Cola and Pepsi fought over optimal locations at eye-catching levels with ingeniously designed portable display racks. The battle for supermarket shelf space called for heroic measures from devoted Coca-Cola salesmen like Charlie Bottoms. Wearing his Coke uniform, he entered a store with a big Pepsi display, telling the manager he was compiling a merchandising survey. “The smart-ass said, ‘Let me buy you a Pepsi, they’ve got this new sixteen-ounce size.’ I told him I’d like that, since I’d never tasted Pepsi.” Bottoms upended the bottle and guzzled it until he gagged. “I threw up all over the damn display and kept saying, ‘I didn’t know it tasted so bad.’ The women with their carts all scattered, and the store manager was just mortified. He didn’t know what to do. He took the Pepsi out to the dumpster and bought enough product from us to make a beautiful Coca-Cola display.” Out in the car, Bottoms’ companion turned to him and said, “Can you do that again?”
The housewife, who typically ruled her nuclear household roost with an iron hand while her husband wore his gray flannel suit to the office, busied herself at the heart of American consumption. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson provided role models for millions of fifties’ families on their Coke-sponsored television show. Like Eisenhower, Ozzie was a nice guy, but he was endearingly fuzzy-headed and lost without his efficient wife. In a typical commercial, Ozzie got hopelessly confused over which hamburgers were rare or well-done while presiding over the backyard grill. Harriet saved the day by bringing on the Coke.
Advertisers approached this newly powerful woman with some trepidation. As Coca-Cola’s adviser Charlotte Montgomery warned, “Mrs. 1956” was a new consumer who could be “wooed away by a more convenient package, a big promotion, a slightly more interesting presentation.” The insecure young homemaker, anxious for excitement in her circumscribed round of shopping and child-rearing, also yearned to impress the neighbors. Mrs. Montgomery advised Coke men to “jump on the bandwagon,” depicting the soft drink as an integral part of TV parties and barbecues. When Mrs. 1956 went to the supermarket, she might think she was “a completely independent agent,” but with good promotions, Mrs. Montgomery assured the Coke men, “you hold her in the hollow of your hand.”
The housewife was really only a conduit to the fastest-growing market of the decade—children. During the fifties, the total population jumped by almost 30 million, the largest increase in American history. Significantly, 83 percent of that growth occurred in the suburbs, nicknamed “Fertile Acres.” As one historian of the period put it, “never in American history had a generation of children been so much the center of attention and so catered to.” If children were spoiled anyway, why not spoil them with Coca-Cola?
One new way to reach the kids arrived in the fifties. In 1954, Ray Kroc bought a small chain of California hamburger stands from the McDonald brothers. By the end of the decade, his fast-food golden-arched franchises were sprouting across the country. Kroc offered his customers Coca-Cola, a relationship the Company has jealously guarded ever since. The McDonald’s beckoned motorists from nearby interstate highways, the dazzling new arteries where chrome-polishing,
car-happy Americans found high-speed travel addictive. Always aware that filling stations provided perfect “use occasions”—McCann-Erickson jargon—Coke revved up promotions for fifties dealers. Murray Hillman’s booklet, entitled Automobilus Americanus, conveyed a basic message: “Get the guy out of his car, and he’d spend money,” Hillman recalled. “It was a great cycle. He’d stop to fill ’er up and go to the bathroom, have a Coke, and drive on. Then he’d have to find a rest room again.” Company researchers, spying on over twenty thousand gas station customers, concluded that Coca-Cola accounted for 14 percent of all transactions.
Presiding over the materialistic era was a benign consumer-oriented God who blessed the enormous outpouring of American goods, toasting it with a Coke. In the mid-fifties, Congress passed legislation to include the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. “Religious emphasis weeks” sprang up on college and high school campuses. Billy Graham, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Norman Vincent Peale prayed their way into American homes through the print media and the TV screen.
By far the most popular religious figure of the period, Peale preached an easy gospel of success based on “the power of positive thinking,” the title of his best-selling book. Named one of the “Twelve Best U.S. Salesmen” in 1954, Peale agreed with Billy Graham that “I am selling the greatest product in the world; why shouldn’t it be promoted as well as soap?” Peale told his audiences that they could overcome any obstacle and obtain peace of mind, social acceptance, and wealth by simply believing in themselves and avoiding negative, unpleasant thoughts. In the words of one critic, he “turned God into a friend and business partner.” Robert Woodruff concurred. Stirred by Peale’s comforting message, the Boss provided major funding for the evangelist’s Guideposts magazine and urged Eisenhower not only to invite him to one of Ike’s famous stag dinners for influential men but to publicly endorse the publication.
FLAWS IN THE FABRICS
Still, devils lurked in God’s country. Armageddon was only the push of a button away, so that the typical upper-middle-class home not only had two cars but a bomb shelter. Children routinely drilled for nuclear war by crouching under their school desks. In the 1959 movie On the Beach, an American submarine commander, hearing a persistent but random Morse code message, searched for its source in a post-holocaust world. He discovered that a windblown Coke bottle, tangled in a curtain cord, was the sole “survivor,” tapping out its feeble message. Under the placid surface of American consumption, then, lay a constant dread so awful it had to be ignored.
Perhaps in part as a sublimated response, other anxieties emerged. While the indulged children gorged themselves on candy, Coke, and Frosted Flakes, their teeth were riddled with cavities. Coca-Cola, always vulnerable to attack from health faddists, received an inordinate share of the blame. Clive M. McCay, a Cornell professor, led the charge against the soft drink. Testifying before James J. Delaney’s Congressional committee on food additives, McCay made headlines with his allegations that Coke would eat away the marble steps of the Capitol Building and soften teeth placed in a glass of the beverage. “The molar teeth of rats were dissolved down to the gum line,” McCay told the politicians, when “given nothing to drink except cola beverage for a period of six months.”
In response, Coca-Cola’s head chemist, Orville May, testified that McCay offered a “distorted picture” intended to frighten unsuspecting consumers. May pointed out that the.055 percent level of phosphoric acid was far below the 1.09 percent acid content of an orange and that McCay’s studies ignored the neutralizing effect of saliva. Finally, he noted that orange juice or lemonade would also dissolve ten-penny nails and eat holes in the Capitol steps. Bill Robinson was more forceful. “The only way our product could harm children,” he said, “would be for a case of Coke to fall out a window and hit them.”*
RESTIVE HOUSEWIVES, REBELLIOUS TEENS, UNHAPPY BLACKS
Company officials expected health issues to crop up periodically. Other signs of social unrest were more confusing, however. Women, for instance, were restless and bored in their suburban kitchens. In fact, increasing numbers of them bolted the confines of the home and went to work. By 1960, women constituted a third of the American work force, although they were underpaid and underemployed as secretaries, teachers, nurses, and assembly-line laborers. As in the home, the women often actually ran the office and made executive decisions without receiving credit. At The Coca-Cola Company, this pattern was particularly common, as bright young secretaries like Claire Sims and Mary Gresham ran important sales campaigns.
The docile, spoiled children of the fifties also displayed signs of discontent. Social commentators labeled these inexplicably violent youths “juvenile delinquents.” Mystified and alarmed by critical adolescents, Robert Woodruff unsuccessfully sought a solution to a problem that was transforming some of his best consumers into hoodlums. In 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets performed “Rock Around the Clock” in the movie Blackboard Jungle, sparking the new reign of rock ’n’ roll. Parents were appalled by Elvis Presley’s suggestively grinding hips and the driving rhythms of their teenagers’ music. Even Ozzie and Harriet’s cute son Ricky grew a ducktail and became a rock star. While Woodruff insisted on the satiny sounds of the McGuire Sisters for his Coca-Cola ads, Chuck Berry and Ray Charles introduced a generation to black soul and funk.
African Americans themselves were causing trouble. On their television screens, they viewed a beckoning middle-class world of white affluence. In the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision, smoldering racial tensions flared in the South. Several conservative Coca-Cola bottlers served as prominent members of newly formed White Citizens Councils, vowing to close public schools rather than submit to integration. In response, local blacks staged Coca-Cola boycotts. At a black service station in South Carolina, an ominous sign on a Coke cooler read: “This machine has economic pressure. It is dangerous to insert money.”
For the first time, The Coca-Cola Company grasped the need to address African American consumers. In 1955, before a group of eager black business students, Export chairman James Farley described opportunities in the “15 billion dollar Negro Market,” explaining that “American business has of late discovered a vast, unexploited market-within-a-market.” By the time of Farley’s speech, Coke had initiated advertising efforts aimed at the African American market, featuring prominent black athletes such as Jesse Owens, Satchel Paige, Floyd Patterson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and the Harlem Globetrotters. Ads in Ebony portrayed wholesome black models in exactly the same poses as their white counterparts. “There’s nothing like a Coke,” both ads proclaimed. The messages were equal, but strictly separate.
The Company also hired Washington, D.C., public relations man Moss Kendrix, a light-skinned, articulate African American, as a kind of roving ambassador who appeared at an incredible number of black functions during the fifties—giving away prizes for guessing the correct number of Coke bottle caps at a National Negro Insurance Association meeting, hosting a career conference at Howard University, applauding the Tuskegee Institute Choir on Eddie Fisher’s Coke Time show, patting black children on the head at the National Baptist Sunday School Convention and meetings of Negro Scouts. Kendrix attended a hundred or more conventions a year for Coca-Cola. The Company encouraged its Southern bottlers to enlist special black representatives. Reluctantly, older white bottlers like Uncle Jim Pidgeon in Memphis and Dick Freeman in New Orleans hired their first executives of color. Given the explosive racial situation, Company officials had to walk “a very fine line where we’re friends with everybody,” Delony Sledge told an interviewer, adding that he had taped evidence of Pepsi men spreading rumors that Coke financed White Citizens Councils, while an opposing story claimed that the company had contributed $150,000 to the NAACP.
Everyone kept demanding the adoption of a firm moral stance, Sledge complained. “Sure, we’ll stand up and be counted, but we’re on both sides of the fence,” the advertising man said, noting that Afr
ican Americans constituted 30 percent of the Southern market. “For God’s sake, just let us go on selling Coca-Cola to anybody who’s got a gullet we can pour it down.” With care, the Company managed to avoid any major disasters, its public position determined by the bottom line, as always. Under pressure from Woodruff, Mayor Hartsfield, a staunch segregationist, modified his position, calling Atlanta “a city too busy to hate.” Nonetheless, he changed slowly: instead of removing the “white” and “colored” signs from airport rest rooms, the mayor reduced their size.
Woodruff himself had no love for the civil rights movement. In 1956, he betrayed his longtime ally, Senator Walter George, dumping him at the age of seventy-eight in favor of white supremacist Herman Talmadge. At Ichauway, he maintained what aide Joe Jones called “a traditional master-slave relationship.” Blacks were valued servants to Woodruff, and he treated them—as he treated most whites—with grace, kindness, and condescension. Ichauway field hands sang moving spirituals so beloved by Eisenhower that he called from the White House to hear them. In an unguarded moment, however, Woodruff revealed his resistance to black equality in a note to Ralph Hayes, sarcastically urging passage of “appropriate civil rights laws” that would protect “the right of a chimpanzee to vote.”
Finally, as if the trouble with women, juveniles, and blacks weren’t enough, the 1950s brought labor troubles. While no one at the paternalistic headquarters would consider joining a union, many of the Company-owned and independent bottlers faced severe agitation and strikes. In Tennessee, militant Teamsters took out ads in local papers saying: “Coca-Cola is being delivered by scab laborers.” Union men slashed and shot out Coke truck tires and dynamited local groceries that still dared to stock Coca-Cola. In Houston, on the other hand, the bottler hired union-busting Texas Rangers to ride the delivery trucks with directions to “shoot for the belly” if labor agitators appeared.
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola Page 41