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Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a beverage with enormous global cultural resonance. It was invented by an Atlanta pharmacist, John S. Pemberton, in 1888, and first bottled in 1894. Originally, Coke was sold as a patent medicine. It has changed from being sold as a medicine to its current status as the world's most popular nonalcoholic beverage, available in more than two hundred countries. The Coca-Cola Corporation was formed in 1902. In 1915, the company adopted the iconic Coke contour bottle.

Coca-Cola can be described as a diluted narcotic (the Coca suggesting its relationship to cocaine) and an inexpensive way that people can reward themselves with a well-known drink, associated in the popular mind with pleasure and modernity. In a book on pop icons, material culture scholar, Craig Gilborn, wrote an essay, “Pop Iconology: Looking at the Coke Bottle,” pointing out that Coca-Cola is “the most widely recognized commercial product in the world” (in Marshall Fishwick and Ray B. Browne, 1970, 24). A survey in 1949 revealed that only one person out of four hundred could not identify what product was in a Coke bottle. Coca-Cola is now number one on a list of globally available products and has been for many years.

Perspectives on Coca-Cola

Raphael Patai, a folklorist, deals with the role of advertising and the pleasure provided by CocaCola in his book Myth and Modern Man. He writes (1972, 238–239):

It has been observed by critics of the American mass media that the method used in television commercials is never [to] present an ordered, sequential, rational argument but simply [to] present the product associated with desirable things, or attitudes. Thus Coca-Cola is shown held by a beautiful blonde, who sits in a Cadillac, surrounded by bronze, muscular admirers, with the sun shining overhead. By repetition, these elements become associated in our minds, into a pattern of sufficient cohesion, so that one element can magically evoke the others. If we think of ads as designed solely to sell the products, we miss their main effect: to increase the pleasure in the consumption of the product. Coca-Cola is far more than a cooling drink; the consumer participates, vicariously, in a much larger experience. In Africa, in Melanesia, to drink a Coke is to participate in the American way of life.

Patai suggests that Coca-Cola may be linked in people's imagination to mythological stories about heroes who perform Herculean labors. So when we drink a Coke, we are unconsciously associating ourselves with the “Coke-drinking, laughing divinities” and sports heroes found in many Coca-Cola advertisements and commercials.

A French Marxist, Henri Lefebvre, has suggested that advertising plays a major role in consumer cultures, providing valuation to the products that people purchase. From a Marxist perspective, Coca-Cola and all soft drinks are good examples of the way capitalist societies create false needs in people, so they can then be exploited. For Marxists, Coca-Cola becomes a signifier of alienation and self-estrangement. It may provide momentary gratification and pleasure, but it also distracts us from recognizing the degree to which we are exploited by the ruling classes.

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