Introduction
Diet Coke, introduced in 1982, quickly rose to prominence as a symbol of power, modernity, and accessible luxury. Its trajectory mirrors significant shifts in American culture, from the rise of image-driven marketing to the era of blurred work-life boundaries and the emergence of a new entrepreneurial class. This article explores the historical context, marketing strategies, and cultural impact of Diet Coke, examining its association with influential figures and its eventual decline in the face of changing consumer preferences.
The Birth of a Power Soda
Before Diet Coke, The Coca-Cola Company seemed previously to have thought that people didn’t want their drink to announce that they were on a diet. However, the success of Diet Pepsi and the increasing emphasis on fitness prompted Coca-Cola to launch Diet Coke. The soda hit the stores for the first time in 1982. The company realized that it could market more powerfully under the Coke name than it could market its existing diet cola, Tab, which had suffered from the saccharine scares of the preceding decade.
Marketing and the Image of Success
Marketing and power became the lodestars of Diet Coke’s ambitious brand. The first commercial for the new drink showed celebrities in black tie and jewels filing up the red carpet to watch, with manic grins, Diet Coke-themed dancers kick to a racing soundtrack. (Coke culture and coke culture arrived together, hand in sequinned glove.) By then, the Coca-Cola Company had bought Columbia Pictures, a business move that, some have suggested, was most successful as a product-placement scheme. When the company sold the studio to Sony, in 1989, celebrity culture, commercial branding, and creativity were convergent, and Diet Coke had become a part of that powerful braid. The soda's early marketing campaigns were characterized by glamour and exclusivity. These campaigns featured celebrities and emphasized the drink's association with a sophisticated, aspirational lifestyle.
Diet Coke and the Power Generation
During the late eighties and nineties, Diet Coke seemed less fussy, less patrician, less “Frasier” than second-wave coffee. It helped define a novel archetype of masculinity-the bootstraps kid who’d made it big, who was cool and modern, in a suit-that would later be perverted to support crimes of the sort now finally being recognized. As an office drink and a leisure drink, a daylight beverage and an acceptable cocktail order, Diet Coke was suited to porous work-life boundaries and the leaders who learned to thrive in, and in some cases insidiously exploit, the gray areas of that new world.
The soda became the beverage of choice for a power generation that emerged during the Clinton years, who cheered tie-less, outside-the-box, rule-bending thought in business and in life. Diet Coke fit with everything new, and seemingly cost-free, about the nineties.
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Prominent Figures and the Diet Coke Obsession
Several high-profile individuals have been associated with Diet Coke, further cementing its image as a drink of power and influence.
- Donald Trump: The Times reports his daily intake to be twelve cans, which, at his reported weight, is two cans shy of the the daily recommended adult human limit for caffeine. Trump, we’re told, guzzles Diet Coke instead of coffee. In the past, Trump has tweeted, “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”; one can only assume that he was not looking far beyond the mirror during these years.
- Karl Lagerfeld: A well-known Diet Coke addict has been Karl Lagerfeld, whose ascent (and slimming) dovetailed with the beverage’s rise. (“I don’t like hot drinks, very strange,” he has explained. “I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed.”)
- Harvey Weinstein: Besides Trump, one of the most notorious Diet Coke mainliners of recent decades was Harvey Weinstein.
- Bill Clinton: Bill Clinton was a known fan (a Diet Coke can is buried in a time capsule at his Presidential library), as were members of his Cabinet (such as Larry Summers).
Diet Coke as a Fashion Accessory
“Diet Coke became the ultimate accessible fashion accessory,” the journalist Christa D’Souza has written. “Cheaper than an It-bag, more obvious than a perfume, and available in every corner shop.”
The Era of Image and Influence
To an astonishing extent, the age of Diet Coke-its rise, its reign, its fall-maps onto a historical bracket that began with the launch of MTV and ended with the emergence of social media: the era of the power of the image in a mainstream burnished form. Enter the boomer opportunists. This swirl of power, sex, and corporatized glamour attracted an emerging entrepreneurial class, which realized that great work could be done if you just left behind the niceties and red tape of the past and played-well, not dirty, certainly not, but, you know, not quite by the rules, seizing loopholes as you saw them and leveraging the way that celebrity, business, culture, creativity, and power were flowing together. The results of this world view carried to extremes have recently grown all too horrifyingly plain.
The Decline of Diet Coke
If our reckoning with the abuses of that era has been gradual, long, and increasingly painful, so has the declining profile of Diet Coke. In 2013, domestic Diet Coke sales hit their lowest figures since 1995, before the Shirtless Diet Coke Man was iconic. The drink lost 4.2 per cent in sales volume in 2016 alone. In recent years, consumers have grown more scrutinous of supposedly healthy fare, and beautiful people are more likely to seek stimulation in nut-milk lattes, matcha, fresh juice, or a number of extremely fancy waters.
Attempts at Reinvention
So Diet Coke is struggling back-with a carbonated kick. During its years of decline, new products kept appearing, like lost siblings in pursuit of an inheritance. What were we to make of Coke Zero, the twin with the creepy, vacant gaze? Who conceived Diet Coke Plus, the grifter soda that purported to be rich with vitamins and minerals? Earlier this year, the Coca-Cola Company introduced a suite of four supposedly hip new flavors (Ginger Lime, Feisty Cherry, Zesty Blood Orange, Twisted Mango). Let’s speak frankly: these are crazed and desperate drinks. Who buys blood oranges for the zest? Recently, in the daze of the summer heat, I bought a case of Diet Coke Ginger Lime, and it tasted like Diet Coke drunk from a glass unrinsed of citrus Dawn. New Diet Coke arrives in slender cans that look like plus-size Red Bull servings-Red Bull being one of a few beverages that is even more of a red flag for decency than Diet Coke.
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Preliminary reports suggest that this novelty packaging has raised sales numbers. But the final picture is more complicated-with a tart, ironic fizz. Beverage-biz mythology holds that Coke does better under Democratic Administrations than under Republican ones. Recent news gives unexpected credence to that claim. Last week, James Quincey, Coke’s president and C.E.O., told investors that the company will have to raise its soda prices, in an effort to rebalance the books. The reason? Largely Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports, apparently, which have driven up costs for aluminum and steel. This is, it seems, the rare instance in which the Commander-in-Chief has not managed to privilege his personal interests.
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