Fizz (18 page)

The following year Pepsi showed them how to do it with a campaign that not only sold its drink but altered the way radio advertising was done. The campaign started when two songwriters, Alan Kent and Austen Croom-Johnson, wrote a song for the company called “Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot,” based on the tune of “Do Ye Ken John Peel.” The ditty reinforced Pepsi's value-for-money selling point with the refrain: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, 12 full ounces, that's a lot, twice as much for a nickel, too, Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.” Mack decided the song should run on the radio by itself. His advertising agency was horrified. At the time radio advertisements were long, rambling affairs that, like a second-rate politician's speech, tended to drone on and on. Even the shortest lasted at least five minutes. So when Pepsi asked radio stations for a thirty-second slot to play their record, the big stations refused to run such a short ad.

Eventually the company got the song aired on a number of small cash-strapped stations, and it became an instant hit with listeners. Soon big stations were clamoring for the chance to play it too. A vinyl recording of the tune sold more than one hundred thousand copies and in 1941 alone it was played on the radio more than three hundred thousand times, often without Pepsi paying a cent. Ten years after its 1939 debut, “Pepsi-Cola Hits the Spot” was still being played on air, and other radio advertisers had followed Pepsi's lead and started running shorter, snappier ads. “When I listen to some of the jingles that come pouring forth, I'm not so sure that I started such a good thing,” Mack reflected years later in his 1982 biography.

Off the air, Pepsi's promotional work was scrappier, reflecting its status as an upstart with everything to gain and little to lose. While Coca-Cola ads tended to be chaste, Pepsi was risqué. One of its ads showed a man leering into the cleavage of a young woman holding a Pepsi bottle alongside the words “Mmmmmm—it looks good.” It attempted to buy the rights to Popeye so that the sailor man would now get his powers from Pepsi-Cola rather than spinach. After that ploy failed, Pepsi invented the Pepsi-Cola Cops, a Popeye-inspired newspaper comic strip about two policemen— Pepsi and Pete—who always save the day after guzzling down Pepsi. The
pair's cartoons ran in more than two hundred newspapers across America, and they became two of the country's best-known advertising characters. By the time the crime-fighting duo made their debut in 1939, Pepsi-Cola had divorced itself from Loft and increased its earnings by 39 percent on the previous year.

Coca-Cola's response to its emerging rival was to drag it into the courts. In 1938 Coca-Cola sued Pepsi for trademark infringement. But in light of a similar case it brought against Roxa-Cola that backfired when the judge supported its rival, Coke's legal team felt it was too risky to challenge Pepsi in the United States, so it sued in Canada.

Coca-Cola won its Canadian case but Guth—who was still Pepsi's general manager at the time—responded with not only an appeal but lawsuits in the United States claiming that since coca and cola were generic terms the Coca-Cola trademark was invalid. When Pepsi won its appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, Coca-Cola appealed by taking the case to the Privy Council in London, the highest court of appeal in the British Empire. The legal stakes were getting precariously high. If Pepsi lost in London it would have to change its name, and all the breakthroughs it had made in the late 1930s would have been for nothing. If Coca-Cola lost against Pepsi in America, it could be forced to ditch its fifty-year-old brand. The cola kings were preparing for a final showdown, a legal fight that could only end in destruction for one or other. But on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an altogether bigger fight was brewing. The world and soda were about to go to war.

While Coca-Cola spent much of the days of Prohibition and Depression cementing its place in American life, it had not been idle elsewhere. The Atlanta soda giant had long harbored global ambitions and had started its slow expansion beyond the United States in 1906 with operations in Cuba and Puerto Rico. But, Canada aside, progress had been patchy, and nowhere was its international expansion more troublesome than in Europe.

The continent might have been the place where the secret of carbonation was cracked, but Europeans hadn't fallen for fizzy pop with the same enthusiasm as their American cousins. Soda fountains were a rare sight in Europe, and carbonated drinks almost exclusively came in bottles. What's more, little had changed in the way soda was made and promoted in Europe since the nineteenth century. Most of the fizz on sale in Europe was produced in small factories that still relied on horse-drawn carts for distribution, an approach that restricted their sales to local areas or regions. Instead of replicating Coca-Cola's use of franchising to expand, European soda makers tended to build their businesses by opening new factories, an expensive approach that resulted in slower expansion.

The British soda maker Ben Shaws was typical. Founded in the Yorkshire textile town of Huddersfield in 1871, the company started out bottling mineral water from the Pennine hills before adding flavored sodas such as lemonade and cream soda to its range shortly after. Fifty years later, it was still working out of the same factory and only just starting to think about
replacing its trusty horses with motorized trucks. It would take until 1959 before the company started to reach beyond its Yorkshire base after building Europe's first soda canning plant.

There were a few exceptions. Schweppes, the grandfather of the soda industry, was doing brisk business in Britain and beyond with its tonic and mineral waters, which it continued to market as the refined fizz of choice for the upper classes. At the other end of the social scale was Tizer, a distinctive fruity British pop with a hint of carrot. Invented in 1924 by the Manchester-based mineral water businessman Fred Pickup, Tizer became a hit with children, and by 1936 Pickup's company had opened a network of factories across England and Wales to keep the bright red soda flowing.

Another success story was the German citrus soda Sinalco. The drink emerged out of the Nature Cure movement that took Germany by storm in the 1870s with its claim that people were born with the ability to cure all ailments but needed to live wholesome lives to bring out this innate power. One of the leading lights of this Germanic branch of quack medicine was Friedrich Eduard Bilz, a self-proclaimed healer who in 1882 published
Das neue Naturheilverfahren
(The new natural healing), the first encyclopedia of Nature Cure treatments. The book became a runaway success, selling more than two million copies of its various editions by 1917 and turning Bilz into a celebrity.

Bilz used his fame to open Schloss Lößnitz, a luxury sanatorium in the town of Radebeul, near Dresden, that offered Nature Cure remedies to wealthy believers. The treatments revolved around the idea that people needed to be toughened up if their bodies were to drive out disease. Patients walked barefoot through the snow, stood knee-high in baths of cold water, and in the most serious cases, deprived themselves of water and other liquids on the grounds that it would flush out their illness. Eating and drinking healthily was another tenet of Bilz's medical approach, and in 1902 this belief led him to create Bilz-Brause, a soda made from tropical and local fruits and natural mineral water.

Although Bilz created his beverage with the patients at his sanatorium in mind, he decided to sell it more widely, so he teamed up with industrialist Franz Hartmann to bottle the drink for mass consumption. By the end of
1903 the pair had sold ten million liters of Bilz-Brause across Germany, and in 1904 sales reached twenty-five million liters. The success of Bilz-Brause prompted a spate of copycats, so in 1905 Bilz and Hartmann decided the drink needed a more distinctive name and came up with Sinalco, based on the Latin
sine alcohole
(without alcohol). By the start of 1914, Sinalco was being exported all over Europe and could even be found in China, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States. But the outbreak of World War I stopped Sinalco's growth in its tracks by forcing its production to stop. Sinalco returned after the war and, despite the setback of Bilz's death in 1922, could be found in places as far afield as Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Chicago, London, and Warsaw by 1932.

But for all their success Sinalco, Schweppes, and Tizer were working in a continent that was much less partial to soda than Americans. While there are no figures allowing a direct comparison, the pre-World War II sales volumes reported by the bigger European soda makers suggest that carbonated drinks, while not unusual, were consumed far less in Europe than in America. The French continued to quaff their wine, the Germans kept drinking their beer, and the British retained their fondness for tea. What's more, almost no one in Europe had any idea what a cola was. So when Coca-Cola started its push to win over European taste buds it faced not only the challenge of converting a continent to the taste of cola but also a market that had yet to fall in love with soda. It was an expansion fraught with difficulties, and Coca-Cola's first European venture set the tone.

In 1919 the company granted the right to bottle its drink in Paris to an expat American and his French business partner. The pair knew little about bottling and even less about hygiene. They mixed Coca-Cola syrup with unsterilized tap water that they put into bottles and capped with bottle caps they failed to disinfect. The result were fizzy cocktails of bacteria that caused every Parisian who tried the new drink to become violently ill. The incident ruined the name of Coca-Cola in Paris. For years after restaurants and cafés refused to talk to the company's salesmen. One restaurateur was so angered by the poisoning of his customers that he chased the next Coca-Cola salesman who came to his establishment through the streets of Paris while brandishing a butcher's knife.

Despite such failures Robert Woodruff had stepped up Coca-Cola's efforts to conquer the world. In 1926 he created the Coca-Cola Export Corporation, which was charged with giving the world a Coke. On the surface the new business got off to a flying start. Within three years of its creation, Coca-Cola was on sale in seventy-six countries and 15 percent of the company's income came from outside the United States. But the truth was Coca-Cola was struggling to penetrate markets outside Canada, Mexico, and the American colony of Hawaii. Once again Europe was a source of pain. In 1940 all of Coca-Cola's small European operations were racking up significant losses, even though more and more Europeans took to drinking soda during the 1920s and 1930s. All, that is, except one: Germany.

The idea of bringing Coke to the beer-loving nation came from an American named Ray Powers. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Atlanta, Powers first came to Europe in World War I as part of a machine gun battalion. But instead of returning home when the war was over, he decided to stay, convinced big bucks were to be made in postwar Europe. One such business opportunity, he imagined, would be bringing Coca-Cola to the Old World. He knew how big Coke was back home and believed it could be just as big in Europe. So the relentlessly optimistic expat badgered Coca-Cola to give him the bottling rights for Germany. In April 1929 he got the go-ahead and opened Germany's first Coke bottling plant in the industrial city of Essen.

The Essen plant was a primitive operation with basic, hand-powered bottling machines and horse-and-cart deliveries, but it had no trouble meeting demand because there wasn't any. By the end of his first year in the Coke business, Powers had burned through all his money and sold just 5,840 cases of the drink. Undeterred, Powers persuaded Woodruff to sink another $10,000 into the business. Sales doubled but business remained dismal. Yet Powers, full of puppy dog enthusiasm, remained as hopeful as when he started. It was just going to take a bit more time, that's all, he told Woodruff in a 1930 letter. Oh, and don't worry about that Adolf Hitler guy either: “If Hitler comes to power he may bring German signers of the Treaty of Versailles before a court martial and actually some heads may fall … but I do not believe that he stands for disorder, lawless violence or arbitrary repudiation of the documents German statesmen have signed.”

Powers was more worried about the German love affair with beer than the Nazis. He knew it was vital for people to have a cold rather than warm Coca-Cola when they tried it for the first time. But the only outlets with refrigeration were the taverns owned by the German breweries, which also owned the nation's ice plants, and they didn't want this nonalcoholic beverage taking up valuable space in their iceboxes. Soft drinks, as far as Germans were concerned, were to be consumed warm and stored under the bar or in the cellar.

To convince bar owners to take the drink and keep it cold, Powers invented a special briefcase for his salesmen. The case contained a tin box filled with ice and Coca-Cola bottles so that when bar owners were introduced to the beverage it would be at the ideal temperature. The unlucky salesmen who had to lug this heavy case around with them called it the
Seufzertasche
—“the case of many sighs.”