"co*ke" wasn't always a welcome nickname. In fact, early Coca-Cola ads attempted to dissuade the public from using the term.
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Under the Influence27:28S9E21 - Fix It Again, Tony: Brand Nicknames
"co*ke" is a nickname.
The soft drink is officially called Coca-Cola. It is one of the most valuable companies in the world. Coca-Cola was also a mass marketing pioneer.
Founder John Pemberton placed the first newspaper ads for Coca-Cola back in 1886. By 1912, the advertising budget was $1M or nearly $30M in today's dollars - a huge ad budget for the times.
Even with a budget that big, the soft drink company discovered people weren't asking for a Coca-Cola in stores, they were asking for a co*ke. It was a nickname that evolved very early in Coca-Cola's history. And the Coca-Cola company wasn't very happy about that.
In 1913, the company actually created an advertising campaign to dissuade people from using the nickname co*ke. The campaign theme was:
"Coca-Cola: Ask for it by its full name - then you will get the genuine."
Clearly, Coca-Cola feared the short nickname would erode its unique brand identity and could quite possibly lead to a generic trademark. In other words, the company worried that "co*ke" could become the catch-all word for any soft drink.
Coca-Cola kept encouraging the public to ask for a Coca-Cola instead of a co*ke for the next 30 years. But the public still insisted on asking for a co*ke. The nickname was unstoppable.
So the soft drink company had to make a decision. To either keep fighting that trend and risk another company grabbing the word "co*ke" as a trademark - or embrace it. They chose the latter.
To fold co*ke into their trademark and brand identity, Coca-Cola created an advertising character called the "Sprite Boy" in 1942.
The mascot was illustrated by Haddon Sundblom, the same artist who created the iconic Coca-Cola Santa Claus image. This Sprite mascot was designed to look like an elf or a little pixie - with just a face and hands - and it wore a Coca-Cola bottlecap as a hat.
By the way, Sprite Boy was not connected to the lemon-lime soft drink of the same name. As a matter of fact, Sprite Boy was created and retired long before Sprite the drink was introduced.
The purpose of Sprite Boy was to remind people that co*ke and Coca-Cola were the same thing. Print ads would show the Sprite Boy peeking around a bottle of Coca-Cola. You can feel how much the company was struggling with their nickname - as even the headlines were awkward. For example, one Sprite Boy ad said: "Hello, I'm Coca-Cola, known too, as co*ke."
There was even a P.S. at the bottom of the ads that said: "Everybody likes to shorten words. Abbreviation is a natural law of language. 'co*ke' is the friendly abbreviation for the trademark Coca-Cola."
In 1945, Coca-Cola gave in to the force of its customers and trademarked the nickname. The first advertising slogan to use the word "co*ke" appeared in 1948. It said: "Where there's co*ke, there's hospitality."
Maybe the biggest sign the company had fully embraced the nickname came in 1971 when it launched this campaign:
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