{"id":998,"date":"2022-09-06T23:56:06","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T23:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/?p=998"},"modified":"2022-09-08T22:09:07","modified_gmt":"2022-09-08T22:09:07","slug":"coca-colas_first_polar_bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/coca-colas_first_polar_bear\/","title":{"rendered":"Cold and Fuzzy: Coca-Cola\u2019s First Polar Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Ivana Dizdar<\/em><\/p>\n

This year marks the centennial of the polar bear\u2019s first appearance in a Coca-Cola advertisement. In a French print ad from 1922, a polar bear shares a bottle of Coca-Cola with the sun. Sitting upright on an iceberg, the polar bear smiles as he extends the bottle\u2019s mouth toward the mouth of his companion. Sweating in its own scorching heat, the sun eagerly quenches its thirst, its expression one of pure pleasure. Beneath the product\u2019s logo, the ad reads \u201cD\u00e9licieuse. Rafra\u00eechissante.<\/em>\u201d Delicious and refreshing it certainly is\u2014so much so that the sun has ventured outside its proper place in the solar system to approach the earth for a taste of soda, irresistibly sweet and cool.<\/p>\n

Polar bears have been a subject of visual representation for at least two millennia. In prehistoric artifacts by Dorset makers across Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, the polar bear is the most common non-human motif. Dorset carvings\u2014miniatures made of materials like bone, ivory, and soapstone\u2014depict polar bears frozen mid-hunt as though stalking, swimming toward, and pouncing on their prey. From Renaissance maps to engravings, paintings, and panoramas in the modern period, polar bears appear as symbols of majesty and mystique, of strength and survival, of danger and death. They were a point of fascination for European artists, some of whom traveled to the Arctic alongside explorers and scientists or observed them in captivity at zoological gardens, while others drew from existing textual and visual documents and their own polar fantasies.<\/p>\n

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The French Coca-Cola print ad came as polar bear imagery was thriving in fine art, popular culture, and entertainment. French artist Fran\u00e7ois Pompon was producing a series of polar bear sculptures, the first of which\u2014a life-sized plaster rendition\u2014was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1922 (1). Meanwhile, neighboring Germany was swept by a polar bear craze. On the streets, on the beach, and in the snow, children, families, and soldiers were posing for photographs with actors in polar bear costumes. The furry and friendly bears hug and hold hands with their human counterparts in these surreal snapshots. Bizarre and amusing, the pictures are also haunting\u2014entangled with the social and cultural life of interwar Germany.<\/p>\n

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The polar bear\u2019s popularity made it an excellent candidate for a Coca-Cola ad. Appealing to consumers\u2019 emotions, the company represented the anthropomorphic bear as a friendly, generous, and compassionate figure: after all, he is sweet\u2014just like the drink he is sharing. But what made the polar bear an especially effective marketing tool was its status as an animal that lives and thrives in the cold. Not coincidentally, the ad was released as electric fridges went into mass production, enabling individual consumers to store and enjoy cold commodities at home (2). Notably, Ivan Pavlov\u2019s theory of conditioning, introduced at the turn of the century, was gaining traction. Embracing this scientific breakthrough, Coca-Cola formed a powerful constellation of stimuli: the coldness of the polar north, the cuteness of the polar bear, and the sweetness of Coke itself. Coca-Cola wasn\u2019t the only company to play on this kind of relationship: in an ad that came a few years later, a polar bear lies feet-up on a glossy sheet of ice, grasping a Campari bottle with all four paws as he pours its bittersweet contents into his mouth (3). Nothing, the ad conveys, is better than Campari on ice.<\/p>\n

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Italian Campari ad, 1928<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Coca-Cola\u2019s first polar bear was a precursor for what would become the company\u2019s visual icon and among the most recognizable brand mascots of our time (4). In 1993, Coca-Cola would revive and animate the polar bear, making it a longstanding protagonist in the company\u2019s commercials and digital ads. Concurrently, as debates about global warming began to surge, the polar bear became the foremost symbol of climate change and a poster child for a number of environmental campaigns. The polar bear imagery that thrived\u2014and continues to thrive\u2014in Coca-Cola advertising became an unwitting nod to the deep entanglements of capitalism, consumerism, and climate change (5). Looking back, the original polar bear ad seems to foreshadow\u2014inadvertently\u2014a future of extreme ecological change. Coca-Cola has drawn the sun closer to the earth, warming the Arctic and melting a glacier in the distance. We can imagine the ice the polar bear is sitting on will melt too, leaving him with nowhere to sit, hunt, or live.<\/p>\n

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Still from Coca-Cola Super Bowl commercial, 2013<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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(1) Another life-sized iteration, produced between 1923 and 1933, is on view at the mus\u00e9e d’Orsay in Paris. The sculpture is so striking and so popular, the Museum has made it into a secondary logo: it appears as a graphic outline on exhibition labels and reincarnated in gift-shop items from keychains to snow globes.<\/p>\n

(2) Thanks to Quora user John Turner for bringing this to my attention.<\/p>\n

(3) In order to emphasize its product, Campari made the bottle disproportionately big, unwittingly making the polar bear look like a cub.<\/p>\n

(4) The polar bear appeared in Coca-Cola ads only sporadically between its first appearance and its revival in 1993, with a three-decade hiatus beginning in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

(5) As climate change becomes increasingly drastic, and its effects increasingly palpable, the polar bear\u2019s use by a corporation with a major carbon footprint becomes more ironic, more awkward. In 2011, Coca-Cola announced a pledge of two-million dollars to the World Wildlife Fund<\/a> over the course of five years. Meanwhile, from 2011 to 2013, the company spent almost ten billion on advertising and earned an astonishing profit of almost nine billion. See Mya Frazier\u2019s \u201cShould the Polar Bear Still Sell Coca-Cola?<\/a>\u201d in The New Yorker<\/em>, November 6, 2014.<\/p>\n

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Ivana Dizdar<\/a> is a historian of art and design, a doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and a Visiting Student Research Collaborator in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on representations of the Arctic in nineteenth-century visual culture. As she was writing this post, she tried Coca-Cola for the first time.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Ivana Dizdar This year marks the centennial of the polar bear\u2019s first appearance in a Coca-Cola advertisement. In a French print ad from 1922, a polar bear shares a […]","protected":false},"author":1639,"featured_media":1005,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[258,55,257,83],"class_list":["post-998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-library","tag-advertisement","tag-climate-change","tag-coca-cola","tag-polar-bears"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paHdq5-g6","meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/568\/2022\/09\/1_CC-ad.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1639"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=998"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1014,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions\/1014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}