Free The Coke Machine by Michael Blanding Page A

Holland, Belgium, and France. At the same time Woodruff was securing special treatment for Coke as an essential item to keep up American troop morale, Keith was reserving the last bottles of Coke to succor wounded Nazi soldiers and using Coke trucks to deliver relief supplies to bombed-out enemy cities. When supplies of concentrate ran out, he created a new grapefruit-flavored beverage, naming his new concoction “Fanta,” and using forced labor from concentration camps to produce it. He stopped short only of changing the name of the company, risking death at the hands of a Nazi general when he refused.
    After the war, Coca-Cola investigators from the United States concluded that Keith himself had not been a Nazi. Nevertheless, during each of the years he had sold Fanta in Nazi Germany, he had made a modest amount of profit. The Coca-Cola Company was now only too happy to cash the checks, despite the advertising blitz assuring consumers it was leading America to victory against a ruthless enemy. The discrepancy, virtually unnoticed at the time, only shows how malleable Coke’s allegiances were—and how, whatever genuine patriotism the company’s executives might have felt in support of the American war effort, it paled before the image of that patriotism. In fairness, it might be said that Coke had no choice to but to play both sides of the war effort. Legally, its true allegiance was its shareholders, who required only one thing: that the company continue to churn out a profit. If the company had an enemy, it wasn’t a foreign country or tyrannical government, but the competition of a home-grown adversary that had been slowly growing to challenge Coke for years. Now that World War II was over, Coke went to war against its real opponent: Pepsi.
     
     
     
    By the end of the war, Coca-Cola’s supremacy seemed unassailable. Where decades of marketing had failed, American military might had succeeded overnight in cracking open the foreign market. By war’s end, the company had sixty-three overseas bottling plants, financed for $5.5 million—just 20 percent of one year’s net profits. And everywhere the GIs went, the natives seemed to develop a taste for the sugary beverage. In 1950, Time magazine published a cover image of a smiling planet Earth being suckled with a Coca-Cola bottle, praising without irony Coke’s “peaceful near-conquest of the world.”
    In this new era, the company increasingly thought internationally in its advertising, shifting from D’Arcy to a new agency, global giant McCann-Erickson, to handle its accounts. Not that the ads themselves changed much; Coke did little more than translate the copy, producing a remarkably homogenized image as the quintessential American product. The ads worked for the same reason Coke’s images of “conspicuous consumption” had worked half a century earlier—creating an idealized vision of luxury at a time when the war-torn world hungered for U.S. prosperity. Just at its moment of global triumph, however, Coke lost its way back at home. When Archie Lee died suddenly of a heart attack, the company was unexpectedly rudderless, floating a string of clunkers such as “Have a Coke and Be Happy.” Halfhearted attempts at patriotic slogans were abandoned—the jingoism that worked in the epic battle against the Nazis falling flat in the messier conflict with Korea.
    Fact is, advertising itself was changing after World War II. Faced with another postwar boom, Madison Avenue again turned to the hard sell, emphasizing the bells and whistles that made new cars, stoves, TV sets, and other durable goods indispensable. “Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpiece? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?” said ad guru Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Co., who encouraged companies to think of their “unique selling proposition,” or USP—the one, and only one, attribute that sets a product apart. Suddenly there were as many products as