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tustin2121 / James_Somerton_Transcripts

An archive of transcripts of James Somerton's videos. If you'd like to help, feel free to submit an issue with any found sources, or PR for code changes.
https://tustin2121.github.io/James_Somerton_Transcripts/
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[nCi19sYugIA] The Traumatic Camp of "Mommie Dearest" #60

Closed tustin2121 closed 7 months ago

tustin2121 commented 7 months ago
enoDRtiG commented 7 months ago

Somerton claims that "[Pepsi-Cola] was a nothing up-start to compete with the behemoth that was Coca-Cola. Joan was brought on as a brand ambassador and basically made the company into what it was." That might be a bit of a subjective statement but I don't think it's true. While Pepsi did take quite a while to get anywhere close to Coke, the catching up started long before Joan Crawford married Pepsi president Alfred Steele in 1955. In 1951, the year after Steele became president of Pepsi-Cola, Pepsi's gross profit before expenses was $30,216,383 (https://archive.org/details/pepsicofritolayannualreports/pepsicola1960/page/n27/mode/2up) while Coca-Cola's was $123,477,571.54 (https://archive.org/details/cocacolacoannualreports/cocacola1951/page/n7/mode/2up), so about a quarter of Coca-Cola's, which is a lot smaller but not 'nothing' I'd say. The truth in Somerton's claim is that Steele's tenure as president did see a massive growth in Pepsi-Cola's sales, as the report from 1960 linked above clearly demonstrates, but it was pretty continuous before and after marrying Joan Crawford, so I doubt she played that big of a role.