For as long as most consumers in the West can remember, it’s been Coca-Cola versus Pepsi-Cola, vying for the public’s preferred carbonated soft drink. Just how long is that? Well, the Pepsi-Cola Company was established in 1902, ten years after Coca-Cola did, so the rivalry got going pretty much early on in the 20th century. It was a long gestation period however for Pepsi before it got close to being competitive with Coca-Cola✱. PepsiCo struggled so much in the early years that in 1923 the company was even declared bankrupt – basically due to WWI sugar rationing in the US. Eight years later it filed for bankruptcy again! Pepsi never actually went away though, slowly and methodically rebuilding itself as a significant player in the industry, albeit for a long time it remained as one observer put it, a “persistent gadfly” in a lake dominated by Coca-Cola (Kahn).
In its early days Coke was marketed both as a medicinal drink and as a “refreshing tonic”
While Coca-Cola powered on with innovatively marketing (using high profile sportsmen) its product to kids with Santa Claus’ help, and expanding Coke overseas, Pepsi didn’t really get its act together until the middle of the 20th Century. PepsiCo shifted its branding and marketing (moving from bottles to cans and adopting patriotic red, white and blue colours for the product). Another direction Pepsi goes in at this time is product diversification … the company’s 1965 merger with Frito-Lay Inc marks Pepsi’s foray into the snack food field. It also acquired other soft drink brands like Mountain Dew in 1964. Coca-Cola on the other hand confined itself to the beverage field with the introduction of TaB (a sugar-free diet version of Coke), then Sprite and Fresca.
Pepsi’s watershed year was 1975 when it mounted the “Pepsi Challenge”, a series of filmed blind-taste tests in which the majority of participants chose Pepsi over Coke as their preferred soda. This boosted Pepsi sales and escalated the rivalry between the two “Big Sodas”, kicking off what became known in America from the Sixties on as the “Cola Wars” or the “Soda Wars”. Until the Pepsi Challenge happened Coca-Cola had been coasting somewhat, complacently presenting itself as “the real thing” in contrast to the upstart pretender. Coca-Cola’s response to PepsiCo’s move was to promote the then most popular personality on US TV Bill Cosby as “the face of Coke”.
Pepsi embarked on a marketing campaign which depicted itself as a younger, hipper brand than its outmoded rival. Drinking Pepsi was a cool thing to do (so proclaimed the marketers), when stacked up against the tired, same old, same old Coke alternative. Integral to PepsiCo’s campaign was the recruitment of celebrities to endorse the beverage, the centrepiece of which was Michael Jackson. Other pop music icons followed the success of Jackson’s involvement with the product – David Bowie, Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, etc. Ad men heralded Pepsi as “the choice of a new generation”.
In the early Eighties, under pressure from Pepsi’s inroads into the market, Coca-Cola introduced diet Coke, a caffeine-free soda, followed by a complete redesign of Coke—given the secret codename “Project Kansas”—the outcome in 1985 was a sweeter Coke, New Coke. To counter Pepsi’s sweeter, more syrupy taste, Coca-Cola replaced sugar with corn syrup (which also reduced the production cost). New Coke however proved a disaster for the company, provoking a huge backlash from loyal consumers, some described the new taste as like “two day old Pepsi”. Southern fans of Coke, where Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) had its origins, were especially offended.
Faced with an avalanche of criticism, Coca-Cola brought back the old formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic”. New Coke for its part got rebranded but never really took off and was eventually discontinued. Disappointment that it was, New Coke did provide one unanticipated positive – it managed to reawaken in many Coca-Cola drinkers suffering from a bout of ennui a new craving for the original taste (Little).
The feud between Pepsi and Coke has continued to the present, in contemporary times reaching social media and outer space. In 2011 the hardball rivalry saw PepsiCo target Coke’s famous, family-friendly mascots, the polar bears and even every child’s favourite stranger Santa.
Vintage 1950s ad: “Pepsi-Chic” before it went “Pepsi-Hip” (Robt Levering)
The battle between the brown carbonated sugar beverages has seen Pepsi and Coca-Cola go tit-for-tat. Coke had the contour bottle so Pepsi introduced the swirl bottle, Pepsi had Gatorade so Coke had Powerade, Coke had Fanta so Pepsi had Tropicana, and so on. Only the decision by Pepsi to branch into non-beverage fields has not seen Coca-Cola follow suit. Some industry observers attribute Pepsi’s declining market position commensurate to Coke (2008–2018: Pepsi’s market share fell from 10.3 to 8.4 per cent, while Coca-Cola’s rose from 17.3 to 17.8 per cent) to it’s preoccupation with diversification leading to the company losing its focus on its flagship product (Weiner-Bronner; Beverage Digest).
World domination through the prism of “Coca-colonisation”
Both Coke and Pepsi are deeply embedded in American culture and psyche as national icons. Coca-Cola’s brand recognition goes beyond this, embodying a universality that is global in reach. Mid-century Coca-Cola officials gleefully crowed that the drink is the “most American thing in America”. Robert W Woodruff, Coca-Cola president for over three decades, declared it to be “the essence of capitalism”. World War II enabled Coca-Cola to spread the word via US servicemen by cleverly promising (and delivering) them the sugary product in overseas theatres of war. The seemingly unstoppable postwar expansion of Coke as the company sought to extend its market to all corners of the world met with some international pushback. Certain European states like France (spurred on by agitation by the French Communist Party) staunchly resisted the drink’s introduction to their domestic markets, an attempt as they saw it to “Coca-colonise” other sovereign nations. In such countries the arrival of Coca-Cola bottles on their city shop shelves was seen as a pervasive evil, a symbol of American cultural imperialism, an all-consuming Americanisation which undermines the way of life and values of their society⍟.
Footnote: the Big Sodas rivalry had ad companies of second-half 20th century working overtime to come up with the jingle or tagline that would give their client the edge … from Coca-Cola’s early go-to “The pause that refreshes” to the TV age’s standards “Things Go Better with Coke” and “It’s the Real Thing” (the words “real” and “real thing” recur over the decades in Coca-Cola’s ad campaigns). Pepsi for its part, went from “more bounce to the ounce” in 1950 to its 1960s accent on youth, “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” and numerous variations over the years on this theme (“young” and “generation” are the key Pepsi words that recur through the jingles and slogans).
Photo: George Marks/Retrofile/Getty
Postscript: The taste difference!
Most people know that Coca-Cola originally used small amounts of cocaine in the famous beverage (scandalous as that may seem to modern sensibilities), but what is it that makes the two brown-coloured soft drinks taste a bit different? They both have carbonated water, sugar, colour Caramel E150d, phosphoric acid and natural flavourings. Well, according to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, 2005), its the hints of citrus acid that is added to Pepsi that sets the drinks apart – cf. Coke’s citrus-free, sweet vanilla and raisin flavours.
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✱ Pepsi was always coming from behind in the formative period, by the time PepsiCo was founded the Big Coke was already selling about one million gallons a year
⍟ the familiar bottle of Coke is boundless as well as ubiquitous, having been carried under the North Pole and into outer space
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Articles and sites consulted:
‘Why Coke is winning the cola wars’, (Danielle Wiener-Bronner), CNN Business, 21-Feb-2018, www. money.cnn.com
‘COKE VS. PEPSI: The Amazing Story Between the Cola Wars’, (Kim Bhasin), Business Insider, 02-Nov-2011, www.businessinsider.com
‘Ever Wondered What’s The Difference Between Coca-Cola and Pepsi? It’s Literally ONE Ingredient’, (Bobbie Edsor), Delish, 03-Dec-3020, www.delish.com
‘The Universal Drink’, (E.J.Kahn Jr), The New Yorker, 06-Feb-1959, www.newyorker.com
‘The Cola Wars’, (Melissa Santore), Ranker.com, 20-Feb-2020, www.ranker.com
Summer Hill, seven kilometres west of the Sydney CBD, is a small suburb with a village feel to it. Since the 1970s it has seen an increase in the concentration of medium density apartment blocks, though many Federation-era houses have been retained. One of the largest heritage properties, 46–56 Liverpool Road, a historic mansion converted into an exclusive estate, represents one of the suburb’s most interesting back stories.
In 2014 this former grand residence-cum-hospital underwent redevelopment as the Carleton Estate, the mansion, stables and grounds, were converted into 78 individual apartments located in four buildings. The gated estate offered residents a communal garden (and the option of garden plots to grow vegetables), billiards room, swimming pool, gymnasium and parklands.
What interests us though is the one hundred and thirty years preceding the creation of Carleton Estate. In 1879 Summer Hill got its own railway station on the main suburban line, prompting an influx of new residents to the suburb✱. One of these was Charles Carleton Skarratt, a prominent local hotelier (Royal Hotel, Sydney) with diverse business interests in transport, mining, insurance and a brewery. After the land here (part of the Underwood Estate) was subdivided, Skarratt amalgamated nine of the suburban lots and built the original mansion (1884) on this 12,000 sq m block on the corner of Liverpool and Gower Streets (RPA Heritage News , Vol III, Issue III (Oct 2012).
Prior to Skarratt acquiring the property it was part of the old Ashfield Racecourse, and going right back to origins this was part of Cadigal (Eora) land before 1788. The first white owner was ex-convict and jailor Henry Kable who was the recipient of early land grants (1794, 1804). Kable’s Farm was located on this property. Kable, like Skarratt, had diverse interests, merchant trading, other land holdings, a hotel, etc and was at one stage in partnership with James Underwood, an early owner of the Summer Hill estate.
CC Skarratt
After Skarratt’s death in 1900 ownership of the Victorian Italianate mansion and grounds passed from the family to leading Sydney surgeon Henry Hinder. Just after the Great War it was purchased by the Benevolent Society of NSW as the new site for its Renwick Hospital, to replace the old premises in Thomas Street, Ultimo. Officially opened in 1921 as a “lying-in hospital and a hospital for children whose parents could not afford to pay for their medical care” (‘Renwick Hospital for Infants, Summer Hill, 1921 – 1965’, https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/guide/nsw). Patient care centred round the main building and an auxiliary building in nearby Grosvenor Crescent (“Queen’s College”). Two more treatment buildings were added to the complex in 1928 and 1930. By 1937, it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, the hospital at Summer Hill had treated as many as 20,000 children (‘New Block at Renwick Hospital for Children, SMH, 24-June-1937).
In 1964 the state government bought the hospital from the Benevolent Society…from 1965 it was renamed the Grosvenor Hospital. It had a dual function – as an in-patients facility for children, and as an out-patients facility which “provided for the diagnosis and assessment of mentally retarded persons of all ages” (‘Find and Connect’).
There were sweeping changes to the institutional approach to the mentally ill in NSW following the Richmond Report and subsequent Mental Health Act in 1983. The new emphasis was on downsizing to small community resident units. The Summer Hill hospital was streamlined with a progressive reduction over the following years in the number of patient admitted. Renamed the Grosvenor Centre in 1985, the facility’s stated mission was the treatment of children with a “developmental disability of mind” (www.records.nsw.gov.au).
The NSW government was committed to a policy of deinstitutionalisation by 2010 and the writing was on the board for the Grosvenor Centre. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s responsibility for the Centre was shuffled from one government department to another – Health to Community Services to Ageing, The coup de grâce came in 2009…disregarding appeals by parents of the Centre’s 20 remaining child residents for a “stay of execution“, the government transferred the residents to purpose-built houses and the institution was closed (‘Find and Connect’). The path was now clear for redevelopment of the post-hospital space and the eventual creation of a gated community in the Carleton Estate.
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✱ the three decades from 1880-1910 saw the Summer Hill populace take on more of an upper class character with a stream of professionals especially from the fields of banking and finance moving to the suburb (‘Summer Hill’, Wikipedia)
If you take a stroll down the 1.7km-long Sussex Street in Sydney’s CBD, distinct commercial patterns soon become evident. From it’s starting point around Barangaroo South, Sussex Street has more than its fair share of old heritage-listed pubs, parking stations, convenience shops and serviced apartments, along with the occasional more upmarket accommodation providers like the Hyatt Regency and Crowne Plaza.
Starting from the north end the first of the heritage-listed pubs we come to is the Sussex (20 Sussex Street). Built 1913-15, the hotel went through a variety of names, New Hunter River Hotel, Big House Hotel, Napoleon’s Hotel, Moreton’s Hotel, before settling on its present and self-explanatory moniker. The pub’s outdoor beer garden is probably its most appealing asset.
At 81 Sussex Street we find the small but compact Bristol Arms Hotel, a Federation Free Classical building which dates from ca.1898 (an earlier “Bristol Arms Tavern” was located at 69 Sussex St). At different times it went by the name Keyes Hotel and then later the Welcome Inn Hotel. During the 1970s the Bristol Arms was notoriously known as a roughhouse pub. Close to the Bristol Arms is another pub which predates BA’s vintage, the Slip Inn (No 111). Originally called the Royal George Hotel (built ca.1858), the pub’s main claim to fame is that it was the venue where Mary met Frederick, the prelude to the Danish royal family acquiring an Australian connexion.
The next heritage hotel in Sussex Street is the Dundee Arms (No 161, one down from the Corn Exchange – see below). The compact little Victorian Regency-style pub was built in 1860 at a time when Darling Harbour commerce was overwhelmingly industrial and maritime. The pub serviced the working class, locals and blue collar workers as well as sailors from the ships docked close by in the harbour (‘Dundee Arms Hotel’, Wikipedia). Thomas Ricketts was the best known of the early publicans (1870s-1880s). In modern times the Dundee Arms was incorporated into the Nikko Hotel and now operates as part of the Hyatt Regency Darling Harbour. The passageway on one side of the Dundee Arms has the name “Wharf Lane” imprinted into the ground, a further reminder of the street’s historic association with shipping. A block further south on the corner of Market Street is the Shelbourne Hotel (No 200). This pub with its once grand exterior now looking a bit tired was built in 1902. Architecturally, the building is “an elaborate example of commercial Federation architecture with elements of the ‘American Romanesque’ style popular in the 1890s” (Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority). For 25 years (1975-2000) the Shelbourne operated as a restaurant before reverting to its original, hotel purpose.
The Corn Exchange
A good number of the original Victorian warehouse buildings in Sussex Street survive, most notably the Corn Exchange (Nos 173-185), whose location afforded it easy access to the wharves of Darling Harbour. Designed by George McRae and built in 1887 in the Queen Anne style, this building is presently occupied by an urban planning company☯.
As we approach the southern end of the street Sussex’s complexion changes. We see a few modern semi-high residential suite complexes with names like Millennial Towers and Maestri Towers. There’s a Anthroposophy Society/Rudolf Steiner bookshop which seems philosophically a bit out of place in a street with such constant material hustle and bustle. Another educational property in this block with an interesting past is the public school building (1874), 320 Sussex St. In 1945 the Sussex Street Public School was acquired by Sydney Technical College. 45 years later it was sold to the Sydney Bethel Union who ran it as a home for retired seafarers (initially known unfortunately as the “Mission for Seamen”) till it closed permanently in 2011 (Michael Wayne, ‘Sussex Street Public School/Flying Angel Seafarers Centre/For Sale – Sydney, NSW’, Past Lives of the Near Future, 2011).
Increasingly we come upon noodle houses, hot pot eateries, Chinese bars and pubs like Charlie Chan’s, Chinese jewellery stores and dual language parking signs, all unequivocal signs that we are entering the Chinatown/Haymarket precinct. Appropriately, considering the concentrated Chinese commercial presence in this end of the street, at the junction where Sussex Street terminates, stands the Bank of China Haymarket branch. But the southern portion of Sussex Street is also organised labour turf. 377 Sussex Street is the stronghold of political labour in NSW. Here you’ll find Trades Hall and the Labor Council NSW and the headquarters of the state Labor Party⚘. Just further along Sussex Street is the famous Star Hotel, traditional drinking hole, discussion ground for labour politics and home away from home for generations of trade unionists (now under Chinese ownership).
Footnote: Sussex Street derives its name from a member of Britain’s ruling House of Hanover rather than from any direct references to the southern English county. It is named after the reformist-minded youngest son of George III, Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex.
Fmr Bank of NSW branch, cnr King & Sussex Sts (in the Victorian era it was the King Street Post Office)
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☯ the preserved Corn Exchange building has fared better than the Hawker and Vance Produce Exchange (95-99 Sussex St) which retains only its original facade after a 1989 demolition
⚘ “Sussex Street” is a metonym for NSW Labor, used especially when referring to the dominant right wing party machine on that side of politics
In 1937 the Nazi regime organised two art exhibitions in Munich concurrently, separated only by a park and a few hundred metres. One was intended to hammer home to the German volk the inequity of the type of art that the führer Adolf Hitler found abhorrent, ie, anything in art that even hinted of modernity. The other representing all that Hitler found good in art was the complete antithesis of this – a paean to traditional, realistic painting and sculpture and art that conformed to classical themes and forms.
⇧ A Hitler, landscape (Source: Widewalls)
Hitler’s early experiences and his perceived emotional pattern suggest a motive of personal revenge contributing to the Nazis’ fanatical war on the modern and the avant-garde in art. As a young man Hitler dreamed of a career as an artist but a double rejection by the Vienna art academy saw those aspirations dashed. His paintings were summarily dismissed as passe by the art establishment in favour of abstract and modern styles (Burns), leaving the future Reich leader with a bitter aftertaste and a grudge①.
In Mein Kampf Hitler avers that “Cubism and Dadaism are symptoms of biological degradation threatening the German people”, Werckmeister, O. K. “Hitler the Artist.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2, 1997, pp. 270–297. JSTORwww.jstor.org/stable/1343984. Accessed 2 March 2021.
The purging of so-called “degenerate art”
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (Entartete Kunst) in 1937 was the culmination of a concerted campaign waged by the Nazis to root out all manifestations of avant-garde art in Germany. The first efforts by Hitler’s henchmen were a reaction to the preceding liberal and permissive Weimar era which had embraced the modern style in art and especially Expressionism. In 1933 the Nazis held their first art exhibit of the supposed “degenerate art” in Dresden. Allied to this, the systematic confiscation of modern artworks from museum across Germany took place. Hundreds of thousands of the plundered art pieces including works by modern masters were sold by the Third Reich (some of the proceeds were siphoned off into armament production)②. Much of the minor, less marketable art works were ultimately burnt.
⇧ Beckmann: ‘The Night’
The “wrong type” of art
Hitler rejected the avant-garde and modernity in part for aesthetic reasons. Hitler like many of his Nazi followers had an innate conservative aesthetic taste in art. Politics and ideology also played a part, the führer associated modernism with Jews and communism, and by extension, with democracy and pacifism. Jewish influences, Hitler held, had contaminated the classical art styles so beloved by him. At the same time he denounced what he called “cultural Bolshevism” for weakening German society. Modern art, the Nazis believed was an evil plot against the German people, a “dangerous lie” which would poison German minds. In chilling words given the Nazis’ later unbridled lethal use of eugenics Hitler stated that “anyone who paints a green sky and fields blue ought to be sterilised”.
⇧ Kokoschka: ’Portrait of a Degenerate Artist’
“Sick art” and culture as a propaganda tool
Hitler and the Nazis believed that art played a critical role in defining society’s values. Expressionism③ and the group Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) and artists like Oscar Kokoschka and Ernst Kirchner got singled out for extra repressive measures. The Nazis depicted avant-garde art as the lowest of the low—”impure and subversive”, it’s artists ‘diseased’ specimens corrupted by mental, physical and moral decay—conversely they elevated classical Greek and Roman art to a sublime place, the highest of cultural planes.
⇧ Hitler viewing the ‘Degenerates’
The Degenerate Art Exhibition
The Nazis’ 1937 exhibition was carefully stage-managed as a propaganda vehicle to mock and deride the modern art Hitler so detested. The exhibition comprised Expressionist, Dada, Cubism, Abstract (allocated its own room designated the “Insanity Room”) and New Objectivity artworks. Paintings were hung in a careless, haphazard fashion, with graffiti scrawled on the walls which defamed the artists. Actors were hired to prowl through the gallery loudly denouncing the “Modernist madness”. Adolf Ziegler, the Reich”s top arts bureaucrat and Hitler’s favourite artist, declared the displayed works “monstrosities of insanity, insolence, incompetence and degeneration”. And to ram home the degeneracy point, the vilified artworks were juxtaposed alongside paintings by the enfeebled and the disabled, by psychotic patients and the like. According to the Nazis, degenerate art was the product of Jews and Bolsheviks, but interestingly only six of the 112 artists whose work was displayed in the exhibition were Jewish. The 650 paintings, prints and sculptures included works by Grosz, Dix, Klee, Beckmann, Nolde, Chagall, Picasso, Wandinsky, Marc and Mondrian.
⇧ Führer taking in the “good art”
Exhalting in the “pure Aryan art”
To provide Germans with a favourable point of comparison, the Nazis simultaneously held the Great German Art Exhibition in the same Munich neighbourhood. This displayed ‘Ayran’ art➃, the type of art Hitler approved of. Often gargantuan in scale⑤ – statuesque blond nudes, idealised heroic and duty-bound soldiers and imagined pastorals and idyllic landscapes (reflecting Hitler’s predilection for realistic paintings of outdoor rustic settings). Characteristically the favoured Nazis’ male figures in art represented the concept of the Übermensch (an idealised ‘superman’). Hitler’s intention was that the Groß deutsche Kunstausstellung propaganda would help mobile the German people behind the Nazis’ values.
Footnote: The outcome of the dual 1937 exhibitions was not anticipated by Hitler and the Nazis: Entartete Kunst proved wildly popular, attracting more than two million visitors, whereas Groß Kunstausstellung only managed less than a third of this number. The “Degenerate Art” show was such a hit that it was toured on display throughout the German Reich after the Munich premiere closed.
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Postscript: German artists deemed ‘degenerate’ understandably were more at risk of persecution from the Nazis from those outside the country. Special attention was given to artists like George Grosz and Oscar Dix who were openly critical of the totalitarian regime. Grosz mocked Hitler on canvas while Dix earned the enmity of the Nazis for his excruciating depictions of the horrors of war. As one writer put it, “the Nazis labeled Dix a ‘degenerate,’ but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction” (Alina Cohen).
Dix’s ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ (1933)
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① Hitler’s own preference for subject matter as an artist was for painting buildings and largely unpopulated pastoral landscapes (the future “world leader” had no talent for capturing the human form)
② Hitler and the National-Socialists’ notion of modern art as being the product of entartung (degeneracy) can be traced to a Jewish Austro-Hungarian social critic Max Nordau who decried the new art and literature in 1890s Europe as being the work of diseased minds
③ the focus on Expressionism as a target for the Nazi “culture police” proved a particular problem for Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister had early on championed the Expressionist movement and had to backtrack swiftly on this to avoid the führer’s opprobrium
➃ Ayran art uniformly infuses a celebration of youth, optimism, power and eternal triumph
⑤ the Nazi taste for mega-scale art reached its apogee in architecture, massive structures like ‘Germania’. “Monumentality and solidity (exuding power), simplicity and timeless eternity” were the bywords of Nazi architecture
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Bibliography
‘Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism’, (Lucy Burns), BBC News, 06-Nov-2013, www.bbc.com
‘Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937’, (Jason Farago), The Guardian, 13-Mar-2014, www.theguardian.com
‘Degenerate art’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org
‘Nazi architecture’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org ‘Why “Degenerate” Artist Otto Dix Was Accused of Plotting to Kill Hitler’, (Alina Cohen), Art Sy, 11-Feb-2019,www.artsy.net ‘Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit’, Facing History and Ourselves, (Video, 2017)
‘Adolf Hitler’s war against modern art’, The Canvas, (Video, 2019)
In its early days Coke was marketed both as a medicinal drink and as a “refreshing tonic”
Pepsi’s watershed year was 1975 when it mounted the “Pepsi Challenge”, a series of filmed blind-taste tests in which the majority of participants chose Pepsi over Coke as their preferred soda. This boosted Pepsi sales and escalated the rivalry between the two “Big Sodas”, kicking off what became known in America from the Sixties on as the “Cola Wars” or the “Soda Wars”. Until the Pepsi Challenge happened Coca-Cola had been coasting somewhat, complacently presenting itself as “the real thing” in contrast to the upstart pretender. Coca-Cola’s response to PepsiCo’s move was to promote the then most popular personality on US TV Bill Cosby as “the face of Coke”.
Pepsi embarked on a marketing campaign which depicted itself as a younger, hipper brand than its outmoded rival. Drinking Pepsi was a cool thing to do (so proclaimed the marketers), when stacked up against the tired, same old, same old Coke alternative. Integral to PepsiCo’s campaign was the recruitment of celebrities to endorse the beverage, the centrepiece of which was Michael Jackson. Other pop music icons followed the success of Jackson’s involvement with the product – David Bowie, Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, etc. Ad men heralded Pepsi as “the choice of a new generation”.
In the early Eighties, under pressure from Pepsi’s inroads into the market, Coca-Cola introduced diet Coke, a caffeine-free soda, followed by a complete redesign of Coke—given the secret codename “Project Kansas”—the outcome in 1985 was a sweeter Coke, New Coke. To counter Pepsi’s sweeter, more syrupy taste, Coca-Cola replaced sugar with corn syrup (which also reduced the production cost). New Coke however proved a disaster for the company, provoking a huge backlash from loyal consumers, some described the new taste as like “two day old Pepsi”. Southern fans of Coke, where Coca-Cola (and Pepsi) had its origins, were especially offended.
Faced with an avalanche of criticism, Coca-Cola brought back the old formula under the name “Coca-Cola Classic”. New Coke for its part got rebranded but never really took off and was eventually discontinued. Disappointment that it was, New Coke did provide one unanticipated positive – it managed to reawaken in many Coca-Cola drinkers suffering from a bout of ennui a new craving for the original taste (Little).
Vintage 1950s ad: “Pepsi-Chic” before it went “Pepsi-Hip” (Robt Levering)
Photo: George Marks/Retrofile/Getty
