You were having such a good year. Earlier in 2015, I listened to This American Life’s fascinating exploration of Coke’s original secret recipe. It’s a brilliant exploration of what makes Coke Coke, or what makes anything anything. Says the programme’s inimitable presenter;
“...the ingredients to Coke's supposedly super-secret formula can be figured out without much trouble by anyone who wants to, that seems incontrovertibly true.”
Without spoiling the programme for anyone who listens, it is Coke’s original recipe, easily discovered in the archive, but its taste isn’t quite like today’s Coke. The history of Coca Cola is a road map of 20th century consumerism, brand strategy and mass marketeering. It’s linked inextricably to sporting events, music, advertising, product placement, fat children, McDonalds, and my own stupefying nostalgia for hanging out on dilapidated bowling greens on a BMX. The finale of the intricately slow-burning series Mad Men actually culminated in the ‘birth’ of modern advertising... / / SPOILER ALERT HERE / /...not only giving Coke’s masterpiece “I’d like to teach the world to sing” some renewed airtime (and showing how the so-called innocence of the early 1970s could, even then, be manipulated to shift product), but connecting the dark genius of the series’ protagonist, Don Draper, to the modern era. What sticks out the most for me is the small, nearly-imperceptible ‘bing’ moment that Draper demonstrates through his meditative smile. He’s got it all figured out.
Coke’s recent blunder came with their association with EHI. Well, I say association; it’s more a case of them owning it. Coca Cola funded a study at the ‘European Health Institute’ that found, strangely enough, a strong link between the consumption of soft drinks and increased sporting performance. Led by a Professor Ron Maughan, of Loughborough University (and one of the UK’s premier sporting universities..), the EHI published its results at the beginning of October. And of course, Coke has previous form for this kind of thing; they own ‘The Beverage Institute’ which is, at least, proud to show its patron’s logo atop its homepage. Professor Maughan is alleged to have received £1m for his work as a consultant for Coca Cola. Until recently, his name carried a great deal of weight in an advisory capacity for other sports organisations.
So, do Coke, and similar soft drinks, actually aid re-hydration during sports activities? Coke actually launched a campaign only months after the ‘results’ were found, despite a questionable methodology in their scientific basis.
"There is already much confusion over the role of sports drinks, and for the majority of people participating in exercise and sporting activities water is all that is needed for effective hydration," say the Natural Hydration Council in relation to the banning of this Lucozade ad from 2014.
From a design point of view, the hierarchy of this ad is a wonderful distortion of the information, or lack thereof. That the headline uses a clear disinction between two colours should set some alarm bells ringing... initially, we read that “Lucozade Sport hydrates and fuels you” which, of course, it does. Water = hydration. Sugar = fuel. But then, as your eyes adjust to the dominant, but somehow recessive blue that fills the page, you see the extra, killer line “.. better than water”. It almost stands alone. The use of the hastag “I believe”, a confrontational Gareth Bale (not, I don’t think, a scientist) and the wonderful "scientifically proven” cheekily dropped in the bottom right corner all contributes to this composition. Even more than that, the styling of the ad borrows heavily from pseudo-scientific graphic language. Blueprint colourway, strong white diagrammatic linear and isotypes, mathematical symbols. It looks like science so it must be science, right?
Wrong. Of Coke’s EHI study, an independent hydration specialist explained that you had five times more chance of linking Coke’s hydrational benefits in one of EHI’s studies than you did if you were to read an independent study.
Science, like sex, sells. It doesn’t have to be real, it doesn’t need to be well-proven, even; if you throw enough money at the research, the research comes out in your favour. Especially if you are already biased so so heavily toward the answers you want. We call this deductive reasoning. Well, we could call it that; I call it bollocks.