Fizz

by Tristan Donovan

  The following year a tiny group of green activists in London called Friends of the Earth did the same to Schweppes, after the company announced that it would only sell its drinks in throwaway bottles in future. The activists spent weeks gathering up empty Schweppes bottles only to find, as the second Earth Day approached, that they were still short of the target of two thousand bottles that they had set for their “Many Happy Returns” stunt. “We had about a week to go and simply couldn’t find enough of the damn things, or couldn’t find enough hours in the day to collect them,” Pete Wilkinson, the activist charged by the group’s leader Graham Searle with collecting the bottles, recalled in Robert Lamb’s book Promising the Earth. “We had to go out and buy loads of Schweppes drinks, which we promptly poured into plastic containers. Graham produced a lot of gin and we drank it with tonic in order to justify our purchase.”

  On Earth Day 1971 the badly hungover environmentalists drove their collection of two thousand bottles to the headquarters of Schweppes in Uxbridge and dumped them at the entrance in front of a gaggle of newspaper reporters and photographers. The stunt made the group famous, turning it into one of the leading environmental campaign groups in Britain. “Nonreturnable bottles were a step toward the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ culture we now have and dumping the bottles really helped raise the issue up the agenda in Britain and launch us,” says Neil Verlander, spokesperson for Friends of the Earth. “But ultimately Schweppes went ahead anyway.”

  The green movement was too late. The battle over returnable bottles and cans had already been won, and the supermarkets were the winners. Back in 1947 every bottle of fizzy pop in America was returnable, but in the 1950s the soda industry found itself under pressure from all sides to move away from returns and to adopt throwaway cans and bottles. The success of beer sold in cans and nonreturnable bottles had demonstrated that many consumers were happy to pay a bit more for the convenience of being able to dump the container rather than return it. The canning industry was doing its very best to persuade soda companies to adopt disposable cans. Glassmakers were also keen on throwaway bottles, knowing that a move to nonreturnable bottles would boost their sales. The US military wanted canned soda too. For years US Army bases had been dealing with returnable bottles, but in 1956 the sprawling Fort Greely base in Alaska decided it was tired of losing warehouse space to empty containers that were awkward to stack and left behind broken glass. It announced it was only going to take soda in cans. Keen not to lose the base’s business, the local 7Up, Canada Dry, and Coca-Cola bottler obliged and set up a canning plant. Other US military bases followed Fort Greely’s example, switching to a can-only policy to reap the benefits of more durable, easier to stack, and disposable containers that were also lighter and faster to cool.

  But the strongest pressure of all came from retail and, in particular, the new and increasingly influential supermarkets. Supermarkets didn’t want returnable bottles and the hassle of processing deposits and collecting empties. They wanted convenience—one-way containers that shoppers could buy and throw away. To underline the point, supermarkets launched their own sodas in cans and nonreturnable bottles that ate into the sales of established soda brands. As the 1960s began, the tipping point came and the soda industry finally embraced throwaway packaging. By 1965 12 percent of soda sold in America came in disposable containers and by 1970 non-returnable packaging accounted for 40 percent of the market and an estimated 5 percent of the nation’s solid waste. Coca-Cola held out the longest. Even in June 1967 the company was debating how it should respond to the rise of throwaway packaging. “There is a definite feeling on the part of the food chains that soft drinks in returnable bottles are unprofitable, and are stocked only because of consumer demand,” Coca-Cola executive Eugene Smith wrote in an internal memo. “We must determine what our overall attitude is to be—stay out of the fastest growing market (convenience packages) or get in with the idea of continuing to dominate every part of the soft drink market. Do you perform in the main arena, or do you become a speciality drink?”

  Coca-Cola opted for the main arena. In March 1970, a few weeks before the Earth Day protestors dumped their trash outside its headquarters, the company’s chief executive Paul Austin admitted that returnable bottles were on their way out in a speech to a group of Atlanta bankers: “Even though it’s far more economical for consumers to buy our products in these returnable packages, some of our dealers—supermarkets and convenience stores—find it more desirable to handle one-way bottles and cans.” The environmental movement’s objections to soda waste would only grow as glass gave way to plastic bottles formed from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a synthetic fiber that not only offered the durability and lightness of cans but was cheaper to make and could be recycled into other products including bags and pants.

  But if these battles with environmentalists, racists, sugar producers, and supermarkets suggested soda was an industry under fire, nothing could have been further from the truth, for fizzy pop was going from strength to strength. By the time Al Steele died suddenly from a heart attack in 1959, Pepsi was back in the game and on a mission not just to survive but to do what would have seemed unthinkable only a decade earlier: to topple Coca-Cola. What would follow would be one of the highest-profile marketing struggles ever seen in corporate history: the Cola War, a contest for American taste buds that would captivate the world, pioneer new promotional practices, turn retail space into an invisible battlefield, and flood the country with fizz.

  9

  A Better Mousetrap

  A trumpet blast. Then, over aerial scenes of open roads, the clarion call of jazz starlet Joanie Sommers punctuated by bursts of sassy brass. “Come alive! Come alive!” she sang. “You’re in the Pepsi Generation!”

  As the brisk jazz soundtrack swept Sommers’s buoyant vocal along, TVs across America showed a young and beautiful carefree couple speeding through the countryside on a Honda motorcycle. As they zoomed through the winding roads to the hilltops, a helicopter towed a Pepsi-Cola vending machine through the skies to deliver a bubbly dose of refreshing cola as the carefree couple reached the summit. “Who is the Pepsi Generation?” asked the narrator. “Just about everyone with the young view of things. Active, livelier people with a liking for Pepsi-Cola, the light refreshment with the bold, clean taste. Generous in flavor and sparkle. Pepsi belongs to your generation.”

  It was fall 1963 and, after years of hunting, Pepsi had found an identity of its own. Ever since it dropped the value-for-money campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Pepsi had lacked a distinctive promotional image. Al Steele might have delivered sales of more than $157 million by the end of the 1950s, moved its headquarters to Manhattan, and even sprinkled the drink with the glamour of his wife Joan Crawford, but Pepsi remained the kitchen cola—the drink people served to their guests in glasses while claiming it was Coca-Cola. If Pepsi was ever going to knock Coke off its perch, it needed to be more than just “the other cola.” It needed an identity consumers could rally around.

  The first step toward the Pepsi Generation came in 1960 when the cola superpower asked its advertising agency BBDO to come up with a new campaign. BBDO homed in on the huge crop of young Americans born in the postwar years. This great demographic bulge was reaching its teens, heading toward the prime soda drinking ages of sixteen to twenty-four. Figuring that this generation was still too young to be loyal to a particular soda, BBDO reached out to them with the slogan “Now it’s Pepsi for those who think young!” The slogan didn’t set the world on fire, but the idea of capturing the new generation took root at Pepsi. The New York beverage company started to see that maybe, just maybe, Coca-Cola’s position as the established market leader could be turned against it. Maybe Coke with its Norman Rockwell nostalgia and homely Santas could be painted as the drink of the status quo and Pepsi recast as the choice of tomorrow.

  The Pepsi Generation campaign was the result. It bombarded America with images of Pepsi as the accompaniment to a life of youthful fun and
frolics. A drink for happy, hopeful teenagers who played volleyball on the beach, surfed the waves, carved up the ski slopes, and drove motorcycles on mountain back roads. The assertion that Pepsi was for the young at heart, and the subtext that Coca-Cola drinkers were old and tired, resonated with the rise of the new generation. “After the Second World War there was, obviously, the baby boomers but the words baby boomers and the whole notion of that was not obvious at that particular moment,” recalled Alan Pottasch, Pepsi’s advertising director, in an interview for Yahoo!’s Giants of Advertising series. “As it unfolded, people were searching for a name for this group and the Pepsi Generation campaign broke about that time. So for us to name and claim a whole generation after our product was a rather courageous thing that we weren’t sure would take off…. But it did and cartoonists and editorialists and people generally were referring to what we now call the baby boomers, at that time, as the Pepsi Generation. And that, of course, is a dream for a product. It made Pepsi part of everything that was going on.”

  This was soda as a generational statement. If Coke was Americana, Pepsi was America and the cola of cool. The Pepsi Generation wanted to change the world. It was a generation of optimism and postwar wealth that had everything to look forward to. It was also the throwaway generation, as Pepsi made clear in 1966 when it declared that its new nonreturnable bottles were “made to order for the Pepsi Generation.” While most people couldn’t tell the difference between Pepsi and Coke, they instinctively knew whether they identified with Coca-Cola’s traditionalism or Pepsi’s youthful future.

  Pepsi set out to align itself with the hopes and dreams of the baby boomers. When the Summer of Love turned sour in a cocktail of Vietnam and drugs, Pepsi was there, running reassuring ads that promised “You’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give.” For the accompanying 1969 TV commercial, Pepsi gave director Ed Vorkapich free rein—on the condition that there were no jeans, no hippies, and no men with long hair. Vorkapich found inspiration in avant-garde German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s use of backlighting in her Nazi propaganda picture Triumph of the Will. Flouting filmmaking convention, Vorkapich shot the commercial in the late afternoon to capture the flares of dusky yellow sunlight that are now a staple of TV advertising. On seeing the result one outraged Pepsi executive moaned that Vorkapich had delivered an art film when he was supposed to be making an ad. The commercial ran anyway and pushed exactly the same buttons as the original Pepsi Generation ads, reinforcing Pepsi’s image as the baby boomer cola. Coca-Cola’s warm and gentle scenes of suburban life and things going better with Coke seemed tame and conservative by comparison.

  Pepsi wasn’t the only soda maker tuning into the rebellious spirit of the age. While Pepsi drew the line at hippies with hair down to their jeans, Germany’s Afri-Cola embraced them with its “sexy-mini-super-flower-pop-op-cola” campaign of 1968, while 7Up embraced the Haight-Ashbury vibe and wrapped itself in psychedelia. 7Up’s embrace of hippie culture was fueled by fear. The lemon-lime soda might have been the number-three soft drink in America but as the clash between Pepsi and Coca-Cola intensified, 7Up found itself losing market share even as its sales grew. Worried it was losing out to the colas, 7Up ordered a study to identify the problem. The results made uncomfortable reading. The market researchers reported that people thought of 7Up as an occasional drink and cola as an everyday beverage. Even worse, 80 percent of people didn’t list 7Up among their five favorite sodas. When asked why, they replied that they had forgotten all about 7Up. The message was painfully clear: 7Up was a casual and forgettable drink.

  The company responded with a head-on attack on its cola rivals, presenting itself as “the Uncola.” To tap into the baby boomer generation, 7Up created ads of trippy fantasy that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Cream album cover or on the streets of San Francisco, the epicenter of hippiedom. By 1969 7Up was commissioning contemporary artists to produce bold billboard posters that smacked of LSD and counterculture. There were primary-colored, Yellow Submarine-inspired people playing spraying 7Up bottles like guitars. A spaced-out butterfly with a 7Up bottle for a body and wings decorated with exploding fireworks, a bottle cap sunrise, flowers, and the stars and stripes. Artist Bob Taylor came up with “The Big Un,” a bizarre poster that turned an eight-pack of 7Up into the body of a giant bird that was flying over cartoon mountains to its chicks. “No doubt, it’s a rather unusual graphic interpretation of an 8-pack,” Taylor explained, “but that’s what the whole Uncola thing is all about.” 7Up’s magical mystery tour of psychedelia did the trick. Within a month of launching the Uncola campaign sales were up 20 percent.

  With its rivals getting down with the kids, Coca-Cola started to worry about its promotional efforts. While Pepsi and 7Up’s eye-catching promotions became conversation topics, no one seemed to register Coke’s efforts. “We have become part of the environment,” Ira Herbert, Coke’s vice president of advertising, wrote in a company memo. “The public is so accustomed to seeing Coke that it literally isn’t seeing it.” Coca-Cola had become too ubiquitous for its own good. People would walk down streets plastered in Coca-Cola signs and not register a single one. Coke responded with a new logo that encased its Spencerian script trademark in a red box and added a wavy white line called the Dynamic Ribbon that recalled the contours of its famous glass bottle. It also started emphasizing its authenticity, pitching itself as “The Real Thing” before embracing the peace and love vibe of the times with its hit TV ad, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” But if the big three thought they could carve up the new generation between themselves with their advertising positioning, they hadn’t reckoned on Texas.

  At the end of the 1960s Dr Pepper was still a regional drink with 60 percent of its sales confined to Texas and the surrounding states. But as the 1970s approached the Dr Pepper Company was ready to take the soda from Waco nationwide. The turning point for the Texan drink came in 1966, when the Food and Drug Administration agreed to accept the company’s claim that Dr Pepper was not a cola but something unique—a pepper drink. This might sound like a debate about semantics, but the decision flung open the doors of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Royal Crown bottling plants across the United States. The bottlers’ deals with the cola companies banned them from producing rival colas but now that Dr Pepper was a pepper and not a cola, they could produce it without breaching their contracts. By the time Woodrow Wilson Clements became Dr Pepper’s president in 1970, the company was primed to leap into the national soda wars.

  Clements was born in 1914 in Windham Springs, Alabama. His mother named him after the US president in the belief that she had given birth to a future White House resident. His father felt the same, and trained his son to introduce himself as “Woodrow Wilson Clements, future president of the United States.” Clements never reached the White House, but he did make it to the top of the Dr Pepper Company, where he used its new network of bottlers to turn the drink into a national, and then a global, brand. Dr Pepper presented itself as “America’s Most Misunderstood Soft Drink,” making its indefinable fruity flavor a selling point rather than a source of confusion. Sales rocketed. In 1974, Dr Pepper promoted itself as “The Most Original Soft Drink,” and the company landed deals with supermarket chains that resulted in a tenfold jump in sales. By the launch of its “Be an Original—Be a Pepper” campaign in 1978 it was no longer a regional soda but a national player that was now being sold in Wendy’s hamburger restaurants. The company had even successfully boosted its winter sales by pushing the idea that it was the only soda that could be drunk hot. Hot Dr Pepper, the company advised, should be made by heating the soda in a saucepan until it steams vigorously without boiling, before being served in a carafe with a slice of lemon and, optionally, a stick of cinnamon.

  As Dr Pepper became America’s number-four soda, 7Up found itself facing the distinct possibility that the Waco soda would soon overtake it in sales. Feeling that it needed more marketing muscle, 7Up sold itself to Philip Morris, the marketing giant
that had turned Marlboro from an unpopular ladies’ cigarette into an icon of male America and made Miller the nation’s second favorite beer. Coke and Pepsi also responded to the rise of Dr Pepper. Coke launched a pepper drink of its own called Mr Pibb in a bid to stop its bottlers from producing Dr Pepper. But for one Pepsi executive it was the entrenched popularity of Dr Pepper in Dallas that was the problem. Larry Smith was the vice president of Pepsi’s bottling plants and part of a new, more aggressive band of MBA-qualified executives who were rising up the ranks of PepsiCo, the beverage and snack giant formed when Pepsi-Cola took over Frito-Lay in 1965. The leading light of this gang of rising stars was John Sculley, who became the vice president of marketing at Pepsi-Cola in 1970. “All of us badly wanted to beat Coke,” he wrote in his autobiography. “This wasn’t just a marketing war; it was a civil war, and the South kept winning.”

  As Sculley took his marketing job the idea that Pepsi could beat Coke was looking like more than a pipe dream. On the back of its Pepsi Generation campaigns, the company had made solid gains in the supermarkets, narrowing Coke’s lead. Pepsi knew that if it could displace Coca-Cola as the number-one cola in the supermarkets that would open the doors of the Coke-dominated fast-food chains. In short, win in the supermarkets, win everywhere. But the Coca-Cola loyal southern states were a problem. Pepsi seemed invisible in these Coca-Cola heartlands, so much so that many southerners called all soda Coke and market research suggested that people in the South gave so little thought to Pepsi that they didn’t even have a view about it.