COLUMN: You drink what you are (Dr. Pepper made me do it)
I hate to admit it, but my Dr. Pepper made me do it.
Some people blame their problems on the devil. Not me. I pass all responsibility for my actions on to the Dr. Peppers I drink.
Most people who know me – so the six people out there who actually read this column because I promised them cookies if they would – know I love Dr. Pepper. It’s my drink of choice, and I’ll take it over Coke or Sprite any day of the week. But what these people don’t realize is I didn’t choose the drink, the drink chose me. Let me explain.
Everybody’s heard the common saying: “You are what you eat.” That only applies to strict food items. Drinks are a whole different story. The saying for drinks is: “You drink what you are.”
It didn’t used to be this way. Back in the days of the caveman – and I don’t mean the Geico caveman – there were only a handful of drinks available: water, mastodon blood, milk and coconut juice, but that was only for the cavemen living in Hawaii. The most common drinks were water or milk. They did the trick and sustained life.
But over time, water got old and new drinks were created, mostly juice from fruits. Then the effects of fermenting and alcohol were discovered, and this gave rise to a whole new family of drinks. Eventually drinks evolved to include my favorite genre – the soft drink.
The soft drink was tastier than water but not intoxicating like alcohol. It was the perfect go between. But as a latecomer to the drink game, the soft drink had to find its place, and that required some tricky advertising.
Instead of trying to convince consumers that drinking a soft drink is all about taste, ingenious marketing professionals came up with the concept that a person should drink a soft drink because that is who they are.
Soft drinks couldn’t use the food phrase because I’m not milk if I drink milk. That makes no sense. But I do drink milk if I am a certain type of person. It’s a lifestyle. That’s the message of nearly every soft drink ad, and it has been so successful that other beverages have caught on and started using the targeted lifestyle approach.
This is where my Dr. Pepper obsession comes in. Dr. Pepper prides itself in being the oldest soft drink and for having 23 flavors, likely the result of some bored soda shop boy squirting every flavor into a drink off a dare.
The Dr. Pepper lifestyle is one of variety and eclecticism. I drink Dr. Pepper because I’m pretty sure I’m schizo. The voices in my head tell me to drink Dr. Pepper because it fits their varied needs – there’s a flavor for every personality up there, plus one extra. I only have 22 personalities. I got short-changed.
I (and by I, I mean myself and all my personalities) used to think there weren’t very many crazy people like me out there until I met my friend’s dad, who is now my hero. This man is something of a visionary. He has an entire refrigerator dedicated to Dr. Pepper. For his last birthday, he received 250 cans of Dr. Pepper from his children. That’s commitment to the voices. He understands the lifestyle.
But Dr. Pepper isn’t the only lifestyle portrayed by beverages. There is a drink for just about every lifestyle and person out there.
Take Coke for example. It’s probably the most popular soft drink on the market, and it has worked hard to establish “The Coke” lifestyle. Watch any Coke commercial and you’ll catch the message: Drinking Coke makes me cool, part of the in-crowd, and will dissolve my internal organs faster than water washes away sidewalk chalk.
That’s the lifestyle portrayed. The actual lifestyle is something more along the lines of, “I drink Coke because I want to look hardcore but I don’t want to deal with a hangover the day after.”
Diet Coke, while part of the Coke family, portrays an entirely different lifestyle. It says, “I can get a watered-down version of Coke that has a horrible aftertaste and somehow be seen as slim and health-conscious.”
As such, Diet Coke has become the unofficial Mormon woman soft drink of Utah. Don’t think that’s true? In high school I worked at a local grocery store, and every day I would see women come through the checkout line with at least two 12-packs of Diet Coke. I never once saw a man walk through the checkout line with a Diet Coke.
This addiction – yes, it is an addiction – among Utah women is so bad that my wife was weaned with Diet Coke in her bottle. Come to think of it, that explains a lot now.
The Sprite lifestyle is like a cowboy’s trusty sidearm. It’s old, works well and doesn’t have much of a kick. Sprite is the standard go-to drink when nothing else sounds good. It’s the vanilla of soft drinks – extremely popular but kind of drab. All I know is until I actually see LeBron James drink a Sprite on the basketball court after a slam dunk, I’m not going to fall for any of that sublymonal advertising.
Alcoholic beverages lack vision. There is only one message common among all the alcoholic drinks, albeit a very successful one: “Drinking alcohol makes you super attractive and will improve your sex life.” Strangely enough, I have yet to see an alcohol commercial that portrays the real lifestyle of alcohol the morning after.
Milk is the grandmother of beverages. It’s difficult to say much bad about milk, although I still don’t understand how it’s OK to walk around with a white mustache and say, “Got Milk?” but socially unacceptable to walk around with a Kool-Aid mustache. Last time I did that, I was told I was a slob. Sounds like drink discrimination to me.
The list of drinks and the lifestyles that accompany them go on and on. I wish I had time to devote to the subclass of root beer or the battle between Sunkist and Fanta, but the voices in my head are reminding me it’s time to take another swig of that heavenly Dr. Pepper goodness.
Seth Hawkins is a junior majoring in public relations. He’s looking for a St. Bernard with a small barrel of Dr. Pepper around its neck to rescue him when winter hits in Logan. Comments and questions can be sent to him at seth.h@aggiemail.usu.edu