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What can you learn from a soft drink? Well, for starters, you can learn how to build a huge industrial empire from a nutritionally valueless collection of air, water, and chemicals. In the history of American industry, never has so much money been made from so unnecessary a product.
You can also learn about the value and meaning of advertising. Soft drinks would not have gone from curious afterthought to supermarket mainstay and cultural powerhouse without powerful and effective advertising.
Throughout the 120 years of soft drink manufacturing and marketing, three brands have traditionally led the pack: Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, and 7up. Although 7up got left behind in the so-called "cola wars" of the 1960s and 1970s, the lemon-lime alternative was a consistent third-place finisher for most of the 20th century.
With this website, I will discuss how two 7up advertising campaigns--the "You Like It... It Likes Y ou" campaign from 1943 to 1954 and the "Uncola" campaign from 1968 to 1974--reflected and perpetuated dominant trends in their respective societies. I will establish the historical context of the conformist late 1940s and 1950s and the rebellious late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, using 7up advertisements and other materials from the J. Walter Thompson archives at the Hartman Center at Duke University, I will show how the campaigns tried to attract consumers by playing to the conformist and rebellious mores of their respective eras.
An analysis of two 7up advertising campaigns as reflections of social history.
By Andrew Collins / History 291, Duke University / Prof. Simon Partner / May 1, 2004