Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation Main Menu An Introduction to the Digital Book Counter-Cola: Introduction The Coca-Cola Bottling System and the Logics of the Franchise Mediating Coca-Colonization: Negotiating National Development and Difference in Coca-Cola’s Postwar Internationalization “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”: The “Real Thing” and the Revolutions of the 1960s "Indianize" or "Quit India": Nationalist Challenges in Post-Colonial India A Man in Every Bottle: Labor and Neoliberal Violence in Colombian Bottling Water for Life, Not for Coca-Cola: Commodification, Consumption, and Environmental Challenges CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility and Continued Social Resistance A Nonconclusion

Advertising a New Generation

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In the 1960s, the generation coming of age in an era of unprecedented prosperity in the US was asserting an independent popular and consumer culture and soon-to-be insurgent youth politics.  And the existing advertising, print ads featuring “aspirational” images of all-white, upper middle class picture-perfect families and wholesome young people, the cloying jingles – like Coca-Cola’s “Be really refreshed” – this one from the McGuire Sisters in 1959 and the hokey & contrived dialogues of mothers offering teenaged son’s refreshing Cokes after baseball practice or two young women chatting over what food to serve alongside their “family-sized” Coca-Colas at their next party, failed to capitalize on the emerging youth culture.  In the early-1960s competitor Pepsi was doing a better job of capturing their attention than the older, more established Coke brand, with ads that directly addressed them as fellow up-and-comers:  Pepsi was the drink “For Those Who Think Young” -- they were “the Pepsi Generation.” In the Pepsi TV ads, a quiet setting would be broken by the sound of excitement like that of a motorcycle or a roller coaster, and California teenager types would embark on a frenetic, somewhat anarchic adventure, shot with handheld cameras for a New Wave style or from dramatic angles (like helicopter shots) over which played lively music and a singer calling on youth consumers to “Come Alive!  Come Alive!  You’re in the Pepsi Generation.”[i] Pepsi would meet youth culture where it was, as the ad says, and even encourage generational identity formation and countercultural style along the way.[ii]
 
[i] Pendergrast, 274
[ii] Frank, 174-176

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