Coke had already been in business for decades when the ad on the left above appeared in 1920. We don’t see the famously shaped bottle, which was designed in the shape of a woman’s curves in 1915. Was this omission deliberate? Or did they just not think the shape of the bottle was relevant in advertising?

In the ad from 1936 on the right, we see a reference to how long Coke has been around, probably in response to market pressure from Pepsi and other brands. By tying into the history of the brand, it was the first move towards its positioning as the “real thing,” though that tagline would come some 10 years later. We also see the beginning of the red circle, and the tagline “the pause that refreshes” used in the headline.

Until the late 1920’s, Coke was only thought of as a warm-weather beverage. The company set out to change that image through advertising.

The look of Santa Claus that we’ve grown so familiar with began as Coca Cola ads in the Saturday Evening Post back in 1930. In 1931, a series of illustrations were created for the D’Arcy ad agency by Haddon Sundblom, who was inspired by the famous poem The Night Before Christmas. Sundblom’s images were so successful his work was used for the next 33 years. The timing was right for Coke, as it tied in with the new explosion of commercialism. Perhaps it was the consistency of how Coke continued to portray Santa year after year that caused this style treatment of the Santa image to be so well established around the world. Today, we can’t imagine Santa looking any other way.

In 1941, advertising began to focus on product benefits, but it was still pretty unsophisticated. Notice how the ad on the left touches on multiple themes, from convenience to taste and quality, rather than staying on one message. While the ad is unfocused, it does a good job of communicating the portability of the six-pack.

Five years later, soft drink brands were putting their emphasis on group dynamics, showing people getting together in social settings with the product as the “life of the party,” so to speak.

In 1951, with American society buoyed by the post-war boom, two significant cultural changes seemed to impact the Cola Wars.

Automobile travel was huge. Coke took advantage of this trend by positioning itself as the refreshment for people who loved to drive.

The second change was the growth of full color in print publications. Cheaper printing meant everything was in color, and ads everywhere now exploded in the use of full-page, full-color, full-bleed images.

Meanwhile, 7-Up was floundering, with some seriously flawed soft drink advertising. These examples from 1955 and 1958 show how badly the company managed its advertising image at that time. It’s a wonder people drank 7-Up at all, given ad messages like these!

These ads for Pepsi and Coke from 1964 show the emergence of modern advertising. Everyone wanted to copy the look of the famous “Lemon” ad created by Doyle Dane Bernbach for the Volkswagen Beetle that year. It was the birth of art direction, with emphasis on eye flow and carefully managed font treatment. Notice how carefully these photographs were art directed, in order to move the eye towards the copy.

7-Up continued to struggle with pointless, silly advertising approaches. An example is the ad on the far right, from 1967, part of a lengthy “Wet and Wild” series showing inexplicable photos of glasses covered with carbonation foam. Look at the confusing body copy: “You’ve never seen anything like the taste of 7-Up. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” What?

Meanwhile, Coke’s simple ad emphasized practicality with a simple message. Note the use of the Helvetica font, which was now taking the world by storm.

In 1963, the Coca Cola company launched Tab, the new diet cola brand. Curiously, given the sophistication of the parent company, their advertising for Tab was a disaster, focusing on an image of upscale, snobbish users that ordinary people simply couldn’t relate to. A slogan in the 1970s touted the brand as “a beautiful drink for beautiful people.” Although there was a clear strategy around the idea of the wealthy being thin, I think the effort fell short of the mark. Who really cares if rich people drink Tab? How would that ever make it hip? Not surprisingly, while Tab enjoyed some success, especially in the 1960’s, it never fulfilled the potential for that market segment, and eventually Diet Coke would fill that niche with much greater impact.

Alfred Korzybski, who developed the concept of general semantics, explained it this way: Insane people try to make the world of reality fit what is inside their heads.

Someone who thinks he’s Napoleon makes the outside world fit that notion. He filters and interprets the events and signals around him to fit that belief. There’s no room at all for facts.

But the sane person is exactly the opposite. She constantly analyzes the world of reality and adjusts what is in her head to fit the facts. In other words, while the insane person has only opinions, the sane person never has opinions or feelings. She would be totally unaffected by colors, shapes, other people’s viewpoints and so on — using only cold, hard facts to make every decision. She would buy a mustard-colored sports car called the Slug on the same emotionless basis as a bright red Viper because issues of color or semantics have nothing to do with actual performance. What friends think wouldn’t even be an issue. Indeed, a completely sane person would be like a computer, and in many situations would be unable to make any decision at all! If you were truly making your decision on logic alone, you would often be unable to make a decision for lack of sufficient input.

Most people are somewhere in between. You make up your mind about something you like based on input from many sources, including visual appearance and emotion. A lot of it comes from your gut reaction, how you feel about it overall. You might like the color of the red car, causing you to prefer it over the brown one, even if other aspects of the car are less favorable. Once you start to form your opinion, you look for additional pieces of information proving that you are making the right decision, despite the fact that many aspects of your decision are not based on fact. You may even find the nearest expert (or non-expert) and accept his or her opinion. That way you don’t have to bother with too many facts. In the advertising business, that’s called “word of mouth.” So how did the ‘expert’ you went to get his or her opinion? The same ‘unsane’ way you did!

A good marketing or advertising strategy makes use of this psychological process. A good strategy must be simple, fitting easily into the mind of the prospect. It must be memorable. It must provide just enough facts to be believable. And it must strike an emotional chord to satisfy “unsane” people.

So how does this actually work in the real world?

Strategies and brand positioning are used to appeal to the emotional part of our decision-making process. Very rarely, if ever, are these designed to appeal to logic.

When Apple computer said, “Here’s to the crazy ones,” it was talking about all of us. That “think different” campaign was entirely pointed at our emotional response to being seen as leaders and innovators in a world of followers. This claim had nothing directly to do with whether the computer was better than the competition, because those arguments would have had no impact. People don’t want to hear that they made a bad choice. They want to be inspired by their association with one brand because it is cool, or thoughtful, or daring, or whatever.

Here are a few other historical examples of unsane marketing at work:

Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation

This campaign used emotion to trigger existing feelings of rebellion in young people, giving them an option to drink something different from what their parents were used to. Does this have anything to do with taste? No. But it worked wonders with an unsane audience.

Coke: The Real Thing

This campaign stood on Coca Cola’s position as the “original” soft drink. The factual side of this strategy combined with the implied perception that any product that has been a leader for so long must taste good. Personally, I think it’s a weak campaign (there’s no product definition), but it served the need Coke had to re-establish its position as the “original” cola.

BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine

Despite the fact that this car doesn’t look anything like a true sports car, this campaign effectively positioned the BMW as a driving enthusiast’s automobile. A certain amount of factual information had to be used to make the statement believable, but I wonder how many people make a sports-car buying decision without ever trying a Porsche.

United: Fly the Friendly Skies

This campaign ran for many years, and was very effective. Yet while it ran, I flew many different airlines and found staff at most of them equally friendly and courteous. This ad campaign worked because people want to believe that there’s a difference. Of course, success with this type of approach means you better be as good or better than others in the area you’re talking about, or you could crash and burn (it won’t be pretty).

Budweiser: King of Beers

Now, Bud may be a great beer, but exactly what makes one beer a “king” compared to another? Nothing, except the image of that bottle cap turned upside down. A brilliant campaign, directly targeted at the “unsane” nature of how and why we make buying decisions. It has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with emotion. Long live the king (of beers)!

Have you noticed how textures have become popular? We see this influence in the kind of papers used for brochures and packaging, to interior decorating trends, to the strong textures showing up in clothing styles. I believe this trend is directly related to the growth of Internet communications — a flat, untouchable medium that looks pretty but never offers any real tactile essence.

This isn’t the first time a communications trend has affected us culturally. The growth of television in the late 1950’s had a similar impact, though in those days it was checkered tablecloths, wrinkled chiffon dresses, silk shirts, and corduroy pants.

People have had enough experience with the internet and interactive presentations by now. The excitement that characterized the 90’s is fading. The internet is now an everyday tool. Meanwhile, people are getting tired of the pretty pictures behind glass. They are yearning to touch something real. They want to feel blind embossing and corrugated cardboard. They want to watch the shadows interplay from die-cut openings and edges. They want to run their fingers along unusual bindings and shapes of annual reports that look more like packaging than business documents.

Advertisers who wish to maximize the psychological impact of this trend should combine their internet strategy with extra effort on production of collateral materials. The most effective strategies will probably involve the use of highly tactile print communications combined with highly interactive and informative online communications. Especially if one requires or supports the other to complete the message.

Watch as social media continues the transition in our expectations. We now want our brands to interact with us, not to talk to us in a one-way message, but to demand a two-way dialog. Ignore these developments at your own peril.