How Coca-Cola “fixed” Santa and what it teaches us about engineering demand
Food and Nutrition
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The Power of Branding: Christmas Edition
Every year, we act like Christmas culture is ancient and immutable.
| Santa is Santa. Red coat. White trim. End of story.
That certainty is mostly a branding artifact. |
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Before the 1930s, Santa Claus was depicted in a variety of ways: Green coats, brown coats, blue coats, religiously austere versions, folk versions and yes, sometimes red.
There wasn’t one canonical Santa. |
| Then Coca-Cola hired illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint Santa for its winter advertising.
The brand didn’t “invent” Santa or even the red suit. But Coca-Cola’s scale, repetition, and seasonal ubiquity did something more powerful. It standardized Santa in the popular imagination. Not through a memo. Through behavioral engineering. |
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Similarly, in Consumomics™, demand is driven by a simple genome: Behavior = (P + E + C + A) × V
- P (Provisioning & Price): value and fairness
- E (Emotional & Identity Engagement): feelings, meaning, status, self-image
- C (Cognitive Load & Convenience): friction and mental effort
- A (Automaticity & Adoption): habit and ritual
- V (Validity & Trust): the regulatory genome “is this legitimate and safe?”
Santa is not a product, but the mechanism is the same. Coca-Cola didn’t win Santa by argument; it won Santa by shifting E, A, and V at mass scale.
1) E: They made Santa emotionally legible and lovable
Branding works when it makes something feel obvious. Sundblom’s Santa wasn’t abstract folklore, he was warm, human and kind. He looked like someone you’d want in your home.
That’s E-gene design:
- Comfort, generosity, family warmth, benevolence, delight.
Once you have that emotional clarity, the brain prefers it. People stop debating alternatives. They begin to feel the “right” version.
2) A: They repeated it until it became a ritual object
The hidden force here isn’t the image. It’s the repetition.
Coca-Cola’s winter advertising wasn’t a one-off. It showed up year after year. The brain responds to repetition by doing what it always does: it automates.
That’s the A-gene:
- What is repeated becomes default,
- What is default becomes tradition,
- What becomes tradition stops being questioned.
In other words: Coca-Cola did not just advertise Santa. It installed Santa as a recurring cultural ritual asset.
3) V: They gave the image legitimacy through institutional trust
There’s a reason it wasn’t a random postcard company that standardized Santa.
It was a giant, omnipresent brand with massive distribution and cultural reach.
That created V:
- People trust what they see everywhere,
- What’s everywhere feels legitimate,
- Legitimacy reduces uncertainty.
V doesn’t require conscious agreement. It works like gravity. The more consistently a system presents an image, the more “real” it feels.
4) The takeaway: perception is engineered, not discovered
This is the point most executives miss.
They treat consumer perception as if it’s found — “What do consumers think?” — rather than designed.
Coca-Cola’s Santa story is a clean example of what the best modern brands do:
- Engineer emotional meaning (E),
- Reduce uncertainty via repeated presence (A),
- Reinforce legitimacy through scale and consistency (V).
This is why the best brands often win even when the functional product is similar. They don’t just compete on features; they compete on installed mental defaults.
5) What this means for Big Food (and why it’s a Christmas lesson)
In food, we’re living through a trust and identity period that looks a lot like pre-canon Santa:
- “Clean” and “ultra-processed” narratives collide,
- GLP-1 and metabolic health reshape eating occasions,
- Consumers don’t know which claims to believe.
Most companies respond with short-lived campaigns and SKU noise.
The Coca-Cola Santa lesson says the opposite: the winners will be the ones who can standardize the new defaults, not with slogans, but with systems.
In Consumomics™ terms, that means:
- Build Science-based V (evidence, transparency, consistency),
- Design ritual A (breakfast systems, hybrid dinners, GLP-1-compatible snack rituals),
- Express E in a way that makes the “right” choice feel emotionally satisfying, not punitive.
If you can do those three, you don’t just sell a product. You shape what consumers believe is normal.
And that’s what Coca-Cola did with Santa – a reminder, every December, that the real power of branding isn’t persuasion. It’s installation.
This article reflects the independent views of Richard Kottmeyer, Global Practice Leader-Food, Agriculture and
Nutrition and Group Chief Strategy Officer, informed by professional experience and analysis.
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