The Fourteenth Day Of Christmas Made Me Thirsty

Festive beverages are all around at this time of year. You know, Grandma's Swingin' Eggnog, Grandpa's Holiday Punch, or Uncle Bob Bitchin' Booze, whatever it is, beverages are all around. In the marketing world, Santa is all around as well. I think one of the most prominent places you see him this time of the year is on Coca-Cola products. Yep, Santa chuggin' or getting ready to chug a Coke, and ALWAYS from a glass bottle. Maybe he doesn't dig those aluminum cans, but they sure would be convenient to toss from the sleigh in the sky without the thought of killing someone, as with what would happen with a glass bottle. Nevertheless, Santa digs his Coke.

In fact, Santa digs his Coke so much that urban legends were started proclaiming that Coke invented Santa Claus:

The jolly old St. Nick that we know from countless images did not come from folklore, nor did he originate in the imaginations of Moore and Nast. He comes from the yearly advertisements of the Coca-Cola Company. He wears the corporate colors - the famous red and white - for a reason: he is working out of Atlanta, not out of the North Pole.

What's fascinating is that Coca-Cola did at least bring the standarized image of Santa to us:

At the beginning of the 1930s, the burgeoning Coca-Cola company was still looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator named Haddon Sundblom, who created a series of memorable drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with Coca-Cola. Coke's annual advertisements - featuring Sundblom-drawn Santas holding bottles of Coca-Cola, drinking Coca-Cola, receiving Coca-Cola as gifts, and especially enjoying Coca-Cola - became a perennial Christmastime feature which helped spur Coca-Cola sales throughout the winter (and produced the bonus effect of appealing quite strongly to children, an important segment of the soft drink market). The success of this advertising campaign has helped fuel the legend that Coca-Cola actually invented the image of the modern Santa Claus, decking him out in a red-and-white suit to promote the company colors - or that at the very least, Coca-Cola chose to promote the red-and-white version of Santa Claus over a variety of competing Santa figures in order to establish it as the accepted image of Santa Claus.

Maybe that's why Pepsi doesn't promote Santa quite as much as Coke does.

Wow, this entry is making me thirsty. Well, lookie here, I got me a Coke right on my desk. How did that ever happen? It's in a can, so it must not be Santa's. Cheers.