This assignment will analyse Coca-Colas ideology and semiotics of its advertising. It will analyse the advertisements of the companys product and what they mean to customers in terms of denotations and connotations. It will also explain why the company and how the company is a paradigmatic example of how multi-national brands seek to promote a homogenous consumer culture. This assignment will endeavour to support all points and observations by appropriate scholarly research including work by various authors from the bibliography.
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Advertisements are global cultural interaction characteristics that people experience in a practically reflexive way on a daily basis. One of those reasons is because advertisements pursue attraction to people’s fantasy aspirations and people overemphasized themselves as customers. People get influenced by advertisements and become inspired by their way of life by looking at advertisements and turning it into a cultural thing of their own. This helps the promotional endorsements advancing into popular culture successfully and profitably. Advertisements do not easily diminish, protect and influence people to the products importance (Dyer, 1982: p.92). They produce denotation and connotation structures that sell commodities for people as public individuals in their unique shared affiliations and not as suitable objects. Products are given trade importances and advertisements explain assertions referencing to objects which are keen on assertions of people’s affiliations and customer kinds. Through advertising and influences, people have certain distinctive characteristics that represent movement in how they experience their life and it characterizes their existing cultural and civilized sphere in the modern era. Their way of life involved numerous characteristics from what they do. They decide what they eat and drink as their central utilization in their daily life. They had also ordered something serving up to them immediately without reducing its cost since time is money and that is one of those reasons why they have the best interesting beverage like a cold soft drink that does not include alcohol.
One example of popular soft drink beverages is Coca-Cola and its advertisements. Coca-Cola is a highly widespread soft drink since its creation in 1886 (Young and Young, 2002: p.112). Coca-Cola is a globalised product and it is a universal appeal as people can find it everywhere around the world. There are numerous ways to endorse this product around the world and one of them involves employing advertisement. The Coca-Cola advertisement is not the actual profitable advertisement done by the business but it was taken by successful commercial photographer, Sharad Haksar (Lury, 2011: p.163), (Ghosh, 2011: p.51). The advertisement is represented as a large red wall that has written white wording as ‘Drink Coca-Cola’. Then opposite the red wall, there is an idle blue hand pump that is followed by light-green pot, yellow pot, dark-worn green pot, orange pot, idle black car tire with a yellow container in its ring, a green and white cloth material. All these elements have connection involving the object and the colour. The idle water pump symbolizes water. These objects denote the advertisement’s state and uniqueness. The cloth material denotes specific uniqueness like country. The idle blue pump followed by pots and container denote a state which denotes there is a water supply pursuit but there is no water left because no water splash is left in the dirty pathway. The black idle car tire denotes earth and it may implicate that earth is vacant as there is no water left and there is nothing to be complete with the earth while numerous people expect a great deal from it. The container however generates theory that this is people’s desirable interpretation of expecting earth to supply water. The idle earth theory is also assisted by tree shadows, leaves and branches shadows on the red wall denote a season replete with daylights and possibly by dry season. As for the ‘DRINK Coca-Cola’ text, it represents if the product can restore water and it denotes that it is everywhere and it is better than water. The pots look like row to the idle water pump and it represents that people were positioning in a row with their pots to expect water but will get nothing. There are also various colours in the Coca-Cola advertisements but the central colour is red and it connotes that it has a main significance in classifying the product’s uniqueness. The red colour is a denotative meaning that will instinctively remind people of the product. The red colour is also strong as it also connotes hazard, maliciousness, desire, longing and influence. It represents the company’s dominance that denotes the middle-class culture influence by subtly controlling the world. The advertisements colours are the recognizable imagistic feature to draw customers. All of these connotations explain that Coca-Cola never concerns with the close state that require water supply and it is the company which is very considerably significant as the atmosphere problem is concerned by the company across its factory in India.
Throughout the years, Coca-Cola became one of the most favourable continuing product brands in history. Customers have loved the product for years. It also became one of the longest remaining product brands which is why it is believed to be one of the highly profitable establishments ever due to their intense marketing and advertising (Eldred, 2008: p.34). Coca-Cola has continually depended on advertising to market and endorse their brand which makes it successful and exceedingly influenced popular culture all around the world. When it first began, Coca-Cola owner John Pemberton sold his product at a soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia and published his first advertisement in the Atlanta Journal (Eldred, 2008: p.4, p.28). The inaugural newspaper advertisement displayed the business’s first and last tagline: ‘Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating!’ No inventiveness was in this advertisement as only some ordinary text was used with no stylish fonts or images. Pemberton then administered an influential newspaper advertisement of the same tagline and it still endorsed the drink (Upchurch, 2009: p.43). Pemberton also made unlikely assertions that Coca-Cola would increase intelligence and heal people from health issues. Those claims were proven fictitious as newspaper advertisements at that time were fraudulent and made by scam artists. However in the 1900s, Coca-Cola’s advertising depended on young women as their representatives to sell its products. At that time, men and women were sent overseas to serve the war but the government told the women to go back home to be housewives. The advertisements may have contributed a key in encouraging this. Women were employed as a way of selling products and represented in distinct social-classes to give their brands a further worldwide attraction mainly to other proletariat people. Advertisements also pursue working-class women because they never had sexual appearances. The denotation linked with the advertisements is to sell Coca-Cola to proletariat people so that they will be motivated to do their jobs. This ideology explains that Coca-Cola will revitalize anyone from exhaustion and appeal working-class women to influence them that it is enjoyable and revitalizing. As it progressed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Coca-Cola was frequently credited for inventing the cheerful Santa Claus. It’s associations with Santa’s images has continued ever since (Ferrell and Pride, 2011: p.54). The myth of it is that the red and white robes were Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign concept. The company are widely believed to be responsible for Santa which denotes the approaches that this semiotic convergence has become ideologically realism in popular culture and that this was hegemonically assured by the folkish characteristic to the myth. When it got to the end of the 1960s, another advertisement slogan was published as ‘It’s the real thing’ (Crothers, 2009: p.126), (Bell, 2003: p.24). These advertisements affiliated with the slogan represent Coca-Cola as distinctive and refreshing. The ices, condensation and fruits represent Coca-Cola’s freshness. The advertisements support the company to make their products distinctive and remove competitive products from the view. They were made at a time when there was vast competition and reproduction in the United States. The campaign has since based itself on the product’s bottle. From this era up to the 1980s, Coca-Cola went universal and has enlarged into numerous distinct flavours like ‘Sprite’ and ‘Fanta’ (Hennessey, Jeannet and Gillespie, 2010, p.488). The company went with a substantial advertising campaign and immediate growth as Coca-Cola has continually trusted in advertising. As it got towards the 1980s, this decade also denoted the presentations of ‘Diet Coke’ and ‘New Coke’ (Stoddart and Batchelor, 2007: p.48). It was a critical attempt after Coca-Cola saw a severe failure in turnover and the enlarged rivalry from ‘Pepsi’. The story underlines the approaches in which the product’s significance collapsed and there were enraged reactions to ‘New Coke’ symbolizing Coca-Cola’s morals being vital to people on an emotional stage. That is why people reacted when they replaced the branding because they saw the product as their hypothetical security being endangered. This history explains how influential and thriving Coca-Cola has fixed itself into popular culture awareness. ‘Diet Coke’ was believed to be one of the company’s predominant failures in history as people disliked it (Stoddart and Batchelor, 2007: p.48). In 1993, one of Coca-Cola’s best unforgettable company representations is the animated polar bears. It originated from the ‘Northern Lights’ advertisement movement and the initial advertisement showcased polar bears watching a movie with aurora borealis while drinking from the product (Riggs, 2000: p.322), (Sivulka, 2012: p.328). This is an understanding advertisement for the approaches it represents Coca-Cola being unconsciously interesting because the polar bears cannot communicate but they acknowledge Coca-Cola’s popularity. This advertisement also delivers understated family morals significance through harmless simulated ways. It is an imaginative thought of how polar bears would watch movies and the ‘Northern Lights’ represents a captivating location where they watch movies while drinking from their Coca-Cola bottles. This advertisement is portrayed as fantasy for family audience and it gives an impression to the audience that Coca-Cola gives a fantasy feeling. Polar Bears in the advertisements also denotes freshness and highlights the product can be drank at a low temperature. People see the polar bears holding Coca-Cola bottles and are reminded of the cool and refreshing drink taste. From the year 2000, there was an advertisement which had a new slogan, ‘The Coke Side of Life’. Its advertisement campaign was presented in 2006 and its central topic focuses on people drinking the product as well as being optimistic and joyful (Johnson, 2009: p.169). This ideology explains that if people drink the product, they will feel better. The promotion has been helpful and has enthusiastic attraction. It attains the actual life principle.
I believe this assignment has endeavoured to explain the practicality semiotic method in analyzing the favourably iconic advertising metaphor implications and morals like Coca-Cola utilization. It has consecutively presented restricted details of these morals becoming conceptually replicated and recognized by customers as emphasized by the invented red and white Santa Claus’s folkish belief, the sensitive reactions of the ‘New Coke’ rebranding and the widespread cultural popularity of invariable Christmas advertisements that show much about the approaches the brand has permeated a universal awareness.
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