I don’t actually fancy Coca Cola that much. The fizzy drink that makes us burp all the time and supposedly keeps us wide awake and filled with energy is not really my type of drink, but I must confess that Coca Cola ads are among the best ones I’ve ever seen. Solid and resourceful marketing strategies have dictated the success of Coca Cola. The brand became iconic and global. The bottles and cans are easily recognised everywhere, even where water is scarce there’s a bottle of Coke speckled in the desert as the Jamie Uys 1980 film “The Gods must be Crazy” so well exemplifies (see figure 1).
The intention was to get rid of the strange artefact that fell from the sky, but this metonymical icon, thought to be sent from the Gods, the way I see it, represents in fact the Western globalised world in opposition with a very untouched territory with no contact with the outside world. I could also mention many other films such as Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and the James Bond film Casino Royale (2006) that feature Coca Cola in some of their scenes. Or more recently, what I find a very clever appropriation of the brand, the bottle has been used for fashion purposes, as figure 2 shows.
You may be wondering about the title. What is the relationship between Santa Claus and Coca Cola? Well, the connection at this time of the year is obvious, as we are surreptitiously announced that Christmas is coming and Santa Claus always features in the Coca Cola advertisements. It is now difficult not to conceive Christmas without Coke and Santa. The colour of the cans change to a glowing silver red and the advertising campaigns become stronger. In the UK, the Coca Cola truck is already touring some cities announcing that Christmas is coming to town (fig. 3), obviously transporting Coca Cola for everyone.
Consumerism has therefore surpassed the religious concept of the birth of Jesus Christ and Coca Cola became an icon associated with consumerism. Taking an existing idea and improving upon it, in the 1930s Coca Cola set the idea of Santa Claus. The artist Haddon H. Sundblom (1899-1976) created and designed from 1931 to 1964 the
(Figure 4) (1931 ad) http://www.prweek.com/uk/news/1108708/
(Figure 5) (1952 ad) http://jipemania.com/coke/1950/index2.html
Coca Cola managed to reinvent the tradition of Christmas by featuring Santa Claus in its Advertising Campaigns since the 1920s, based on a new social and economic paradigm: consumerism. Like all traditions, Christmas has also been invented. I’m not going here to expand on the origin of Christmas. If I did, I would have to go back to Constantine the Great and the establishment of Christianity. I’m mainly interested in the commercial aspects of Christmas and its impact on popular culture. As John Storey (2008: 20) puts it: “Christmas was invented first and foremost as a commercial event. Everything that was revived or invented –decorations, cards, crackers, collections of carols, going to a pantomime, visiting Santa Claus and buying presents – all had one thing in common: they could be sold for a profit. (…) it was invented as a commercial festival.” These were actually the achievements of industrial capitalism.
(Figure 6) (1964 ad) http://www.georgeladas.blogspot.pt/
Storey (22) upholds the idea that Christmas became in 19th century industrial Britain a commercial event invented by the new urban middle class with a firm emphasis on commercialism, backed up by the notion of charity driven by the kind of utopian nostalgia, the desire to return to a lost golden age, Merry England. Therefore, Santa Claus turned out to be the central figure of nativity, not Jesus Christ. Before the illustrations of Sundblom, Santa Claus might appear dressed in any colour. Red was not the official colour of Santa’s clothes. Between 1860 and 1930, Santa’s image gradually emerged and was developed until 1931. Sundblom’s coca cola advertisements represent the firm consolidation of a market economy that appropriates and reinvents traditions with a sole purpose, profit.
The phenomenon of “Coca-colonisation”, as Mckay (2008) describes it, transformed the image of Santa and perpetuated it as a normal part of our popular culture, making it something we take for granted, the inevitable association between Santa and coke.
Elisabete Mendes Silva
References:
Mckay, George (2008). “Consumption, Coca-colonisation, Cultural Resistance – and Santa Claus.” in Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 50-70.
Storey, John (2008). “The Invention of the English Christmas” in Christmas, Ideology and Popular Culture. Edited by Sheila Whiteley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 17-31.
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