The Company that Taught the World to Sing: Coca-Cola, Globalization, and the Cultural Politics of Branding in the Twentieth Century.

Abstract

Straddling the conventionally separate spheres of business history and cultural history, policy making, advertising, and mass entertainment, my dissertation traces Coca-Cola’s trajectory from a local business in Atlanta, Georgia to one of the world’s most ubiquitous products. At the center of my story is the unexplored question of what it meant for Coca-Cola, a corporation whose early roots originated in the late nineteenth-century soda fountains of the Jim Crow South, to re-invent itself in explicitly "cosmopolitan" terms: as a "global" consumer product "shared" among the world’s diverse populations. It is also a story about the manifold challenges of macro-branding in an increasingly "segmented" collection of markets.

Chapters proceed chronologically from 1885 to 1971. Chapter one begins with the invention of Coca-Cola and follows the Company through the succession of three different leaders, an introduction necessary to understand the often competing corporate self-conceptions that could figure Coke as both quintessentially "American" and aggressively "global." The next pair of chapters examines Coca-Cola's extraordinary partnership with the U.S. military during WWII. Chapter two focuses on the Company's creation of a new category of employee, the so-called "technical observers," who traveled abroad to create bottling plants and serve the troops. In many respects, these "TOs" were the shock troops for Coca-Cola’s global expansion, and their detailed reports provide a unique historical window for examining the logistics, interpersonal relationships, and personal attitudes associated with this far-flung process.

Chapter three explores the wartime advertising campaign that intentionally mirrored the TO's observations. These "Global High-Sign" ads constructed an image of foreign markets that regularly welcomed American people and products. Chapter four brings the narrative back home to the U.S. and juxtaposes the multiple conflicts that surfaced when doing business with racially and culturally diverse countries against a backdrop of domestic racial tensions. Finally, chapter five puts Coca-Cola's landmark "Hilltop" television commercial from 1971 into the overlapping historical context of the ongoing civil rights movement and the Cold War.