The holidays are a great time for marketing around the world thanks to one of the most important business icons in history: Santa Claus. It doesn’t matter what they call it in other places, like Santa Claus, Sinterklaas or Saint Nicholasis about a legendary character who talks about Christmas, gifts, family reunions and in a lesser known way, the most important soft drink on the planet.
Although the origin of the character is in the Christian bishop Nicholas of Bariborn in the 3rd century, the brand Coca Cola he made it his own when he first used it in one of his ads to appeal to children as potential consumers. According to advertising and marketing specialists, the reason for these campaigns was to change the idea that soda was a drink for hot weather, so they decided to launch a strategy with the slogan “Thirst knows no season”.
There is a record that the North American company began to use the character in the 1920s in the advertising of magazines such as National Geographic or The New Yorkeramong others, and used a much more severe image of Saint Nicholas. The artist fred mizen painted a Santa Claus drinking a bottle of Coca Colaan image that was reproduced in print ads for the 1930 Christmas season. Such was its success that the official advertising agency D’Arcy and especially the executive Archie Leethey decided to use this symbol the following year and thereafter.
Santa Claus in his uniform, as we know him today, had his improved version in 1931 by the Swedish cartoonist Haddon Sundblom after being commissioned by D’Arcy’s publicists. This happened when Coca-Cola launched a Christmas advertising campaign that focused on a santa claus with the corporate colors red and white.
According to some sources, the Nordic illustrator was inspired by the poem “The Night Before Christmas” from Clark Moore to create her scenes and continued to retouch her model for the next 33 years, later incorporating her children and grandchildren into the character images. When age allowed, she took advantage of her personal resemblance to her recreated persona to become his own model for her. The artist passed away in 1976.
The paintings that the artist produced between 1931 and 1966 were used in each and every one of Coca-Cola’s Christmas campaigns around the world, even today they continue to be an obligatory reference for the industry and the advertising studio. Such was the advertising success that to date the Santa Claus by Haddon Sundblom it is an icon of global culture.
A curiosity about the artistic significance of the work is that Coca-Cola produced dolls, toys, oil paintings, merchandising and different advertisements with Sundblom’s images that to date are collector’s items, and are part of the stock of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, the Louvre in Paris, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the Coca-Cola Corporate Archive.
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