Sunday, December 17, 2000

Sweet somethings
Bubbly girls kept Coca-Cola sales peppy
By Bill Whitaker
Reporter-News Staff Writer

If Chris H. Beyer’s massive volume Coca-Cola Girls (Collectors Press, 288 pages, $60) seems more than just a lot of pretty girls clutching bottles of Coca-Cola through the ages, mark it off to clever advertising.

After all, advertising is key to the success of the world’s most famous soft drink, just as much as carbonated water, caramel coloring and caffeine.

That bubbling history is joyously celebrated in what is being touted as the first licensed Coca-Cola art book ever. And that means collectors of anything and everything to do with Coca-Cola are seeking out this wildly engaging volume, particularly the $125 limited edition wrapped in red foil.

Although Coca-Cola Girls boasts Beyer’s engrossing, carefully documented history of Coca-Cola’s brilliance in marketing and advertising since the late 19th century, the wit and soul of this book are its 500 full-color illustrations.

“They used some of the best artists of the day,” said Beyer, 53, a long acknowledged expert who has written extensively on Coca-Cola collectibles. “They also used innovative processes to brand their product at the turn of the century, methods contemporary with those being used today.

“It’s not just beautiful art we’re talking about but the way they used slogans and how they marketed the product,” he said. “For instance, starting in the mid-1890s, they put these free-drink tickets in newspapers as a way to get the product into everybody’s hands.”

Although some of the company’s best-known campaigns involve Santa Claus pausing for a drink during a Yuletide break — a seasonal success properly chronicled in Beyer’s book — the glory of Coca-Cola, at least for many years, was its use of pretty girls to tout the product.

Whether she was a girl at the soda fountain or on the beach, a 1930s movie-star icon such as Joan Crawford (who later married the chairman of the board of Coke’s chief rival, Pepsi!) or a World War II factory worker, the Coca-Cola Girl represented wholesomeness and, yes, voluptuousness.

And the company’s sweet, carbonated drink was always nearby.

While the physical charms of Coca-Cola girls were generally obvious, rarely did the ladies adorn themselves in anything scandalous, though Beyer’s book does trot out a 1928 calendar of some exotic vamp in little more than see-through gauze. But it was issued by a local bottler, not Coca-Cola.

“I would say their most successful period in terms of advertising was the 1930s and ‘40s,” Beyer said. “The company was terribly profitable in the 1930s, even though the Depression was going on. And in the 1940s, they successfully tied Coca-Cola into the war effort.”

Some of the most buxom Coca-Cola Girls are pictured in tight-fitting swimsuits. Men are also pictured, though it’s obvious they’re little more than mere props. And, yes, there’s even a big-busted girl in a swimsuit for a 1949 Coca-Cola ad aimed at ordinarily conservative Arabic audiences.

Granted, Coca-Cola has faced its challenges through the century, including an army of imitators (everything from sound-alikes such as Koca Kola and Coke-Ola to the enduring Pepsi-Cola) plus an early-day, wildly unproven suit alleging Coca-Cola contained harmful ingredients.

“Of course, there were always those rumors about cocaine being used in the recipe,” Beyer said, “but Coca-Cola quickly assembled a campaign to show the purity and healthiness of the drink.”

While Coca-Cola continued to show great marketing savvy through the 1950s and 60s, the later years saw less and less of “the pretty girl on the beach,” Beyer said, “and more and more of young people simply gathered together.”

And the new millennium?

Beyer, who was granted unlimited access to Coca-Cola’s Atlanta archives for his book (and claims he doesn’t particularly like soft drinks), suggests the company will face far stiffer challenges in the realm of marketing and advertising.

“They kind of ran the table in the last century, and there’s much more competition now from Pepsi and other bottlers,” he said. “Everybody else is much more savvy. But there’s no denying the foundation Coca-Cola has put down.

“They were men among boys for so long.”

With big help, of course, from the ladies.

Contact associate editor Bill Whitaker at 676-6732 or whitakerb@abinews.com.