In the late 40s and early 50s, its label featured the official Mountain Dew mascot "Willy the Hillbilly" and the slogan: "Ya-Hoo! Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew, for instance, originally based its entire brand around making fun of poor Appalachians, also known as hillbillies.
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For brevity's sake, we won't even get into later issues that surfaced, including exploitation of developing countries' resources and a massive racial discrimination case against Coke that led to a $156 million settlement in 2000, though you should fee free to click through if you're interested.Įlsewhere in the soft drink industry, though, the oversimplification of target consumers has had its questionable if not altogether offensive moments, too. So basically Coke and Pepsi used to be totally racist? As Hale, a history professor at the University of Virginia, goes on to explain, the companies abandoned their respective strategies and worked hard to shed "the image of Coke and Pepsi as 'white' and 'black' drinks." The race problems don't stop there but rather become more complicated and not entirely relevant to the companies' marketing practices. Some employees even circulated racist public statements by Robert W. The company hired Duke Ellington as a spokesman. Coke marketed mainly to the white middle class:īy the late 1940s, black sales representatives worked the Southern Black Belt and Northern black urban areas, black fashion models appeared in Pepsi ads in black publications, and special point-of-purchase displays appeared in stores patronized by African-Americans. The part about the interwar period in America is particularly interesting. The fascinating century-and-a-half-long history of soft drinks and race relations in the United States is spelled out in a just published New York Times column from Grace Elizabeth Hale. And now, in 2012 as Mayor Bloomberg plays tough against continued opposition to his ban on soft drinks, the complicated racial dynamics of the industry are exposed once again, as the NAACP works to reverse the ban, thanks, in part, to donations from Coca-Cola. Over the course of the decades and the seemingly limitless growth of the soft drink industry, the companies have expanded their marketing departments and launched myriad campaigns to discourage the idea that either appealed to a specific race. Put more bluntly, Coke was made for white people. Few realize that Coke marketed assiduously to whites, while Pepsi hired a "negro markets" department. Lots of people know about how Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine or how Pepsi was the hip drink in the 1960s.
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