Thirst in the global brandscape: Water,milk and Coke at the Shanghai World Expo

Abstract

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. It examines the socio-material life of three brands of refreshments featured at the 2010 World Expo: the local Chinese water purification company Litree, the Inner-Mongolian dairy manufacturer Yili and the soft-drink multinational Coca-Cola. Whereas international events nowadays play a key role in the intensification of the circulation of information, this article pays attention rather to the carnal dimension of the Expo and to the importance of the sensuous experience of the event in the promotion of these brands. It shows that close attention to the materiality of branding practices and the varieties of a brand’s existence can unveil a universe of constant tensions, uncertainties and immanent adjustments, even in the pacified and sanitized ecology of the World Expo.

Keywords

Globalization consumption food Shanghai brands world’s fairs

Thirst-quenching soft power

We were on our way to Shanghai for the World Expo, flying somewhere around over the northern edge of Eurasia. As we were preparing our senses to be overwhelmed by this new gigantic extravaganza on the eastern front of global capitalism, the issue of the in-flight magazine obliged with a feature report on the Expo. The main article focused unsurprisingly on the global significance of the first universal exhibition in China, how it would account as a sign of ‘China connecting with the rest of the world’, how it would foster new international business opportunities and how it would build new bridges across the cultures of the world. Cliché world’s fair wishful thinking, cynics might say. But next to this optimistic narrative of global communion was another story contained in the ‘Tips for visitors’ box that provided useful cues about the life-world of the Expo or, in others words, how the Expo was likely to be felt, sensed and experienced by visitors in flesh and blood, visitors who eventually need to eat and rest on the site:¹ ‘Start your visit in the morning. The busiest time at the Expo is mid-afternoon. Bring water, good walking shoes – and patience’ (Bird, 2010: 66). Before even setting foot in Shanghai, we were told that World Expo would be a thirsty experience.

It is my view that these recommendations have a significance that reaches beyond the domain of World Expo pedestrian anecdotes. They speak to the particularities of the carnal ecology of an ephemeral site designed for the intensive circulation of immaterial value. In times of ‘cognitive’, ‘soft’, ‘informational’ or ‘communicative’ capitalism, international events have come to play a central role in the global traffic of intangible assets. This is better expressed in the words of a management manual on international meetings:

During the Industrial Age, the emphasis was on raw materials, labor, manufacturing, product, and distribution. With the transition to the information age came dramatic changes in that traditional relationship. Raw materials became data, labor went from predominantly blue-collar to administrative and technical, and the computer assumed the responsibility for manufacturing the product, which is information. Distribution options took on many new forms: telex, copiers, fax, e-mail, cellular, and personal data assistants. A principal medium for the distribution of that new product – information – proliferated: meetings! (Krugman and Wright, 2007: xvii)

Information. Or, images and identities, symbols and signs, discourses and narratives, ideals and ideologies, predictions and projections, innovations and renovations, values and data. Obviously, the Shanghai Expo that attracted over 73 million visitors was in some respects, or according to some commentators, essentially an international parade of branding and soft power with China obviously leading the way in this glamorous operation of global seduction. This line of analysis obviously relates to actual tendencies both in contemporary global events in general and in the 21st-century Chinese event culture in particular (See the Expo map in Figure 1). In this article, however, I would like to start from my own bodily and unambiguously thirsty experience of the Shanghai World Expo in order to provide a more immanent account of this mega-event: an account that would attend to both the variety of issues crystallized in the promotional work of beverage companies and the bodily experience and daily vicissitudes of this global brandscape. In the case of the few refreshment companies that participated in the Shanghai World Expo, it was clear from my own experience and observations that the retailing, promotion and distribution of water, ice cream and soda were not just oriented towards the construction of brand-value and the worldwide dissemination of corporate communication. They were also, obviously and more prosaically, quenching the thirst of a massive public. It was more than evident that under the sweltering heat waves of the subtropical Shanghai August, refreshments would be a flourishing business as vending machines, ice cream stands, bars and coconut juice peddlers were occupying every section of the Expo site.

These two issues, the carnal experience of consumers and the brand promotion of corporations, were deeply entangled. The fuzzy intangible dimension of globalized informational capitalism instantiated in branding practices of multimedia storytelling was intermingled with the down-to-earth, corporeal and sensuous experience of drinking refreshments at the World Expo. As branding is now ‘much more immersive and immediate than advertising’ and its ‘informational qualities are therefore tactile and sensory rather than predominantly visual’ (Moor, 2007: 10), practices of commoditization are becoming more attentive to their material ecologies. In the latest round of capitalist innovation or Pine and Gilmore’s (1999) ‘experience economy’, new multidimensional commodities that extend into space and time are being increasingly differentiated by their singular entanglements into carefully engineered environments, ambiances and infrastructures (Thrift, 2012). Universal exhibitions, in comparison with other mega-events such as the World Cup or the Olympic Games, are first and foremost designed to be ‘experienced in person’ by visitors (Wang and Sun, 2012: 5). The Shanghai Expo was a typical instance of this permeation of brands in lived environments, forming what Klingmann (2007) calls brandscapes: ‘physical manifestations of synthetically conceived identities transposed onto synthetically conceived places, demarcating culturally independent sites where corporate value systems materialize into physical territories’ (p. 83).

However, I want to show in this article how this entanglement of bodies and brands is often problematic in practice, even in a sanitized global environment such as a World Expo. I will focus on the socio-material life of three different brands promoted at the Shanghai World Expo: the global soft-drink corporation Coca-Cola, the national dairy retailer Yili and the local water purification company Litree. These three brands represented three different product lines, three corporations of different scales and their consumption bespoke three different underlying narratives at the Shanghai Expo: drinking Litree water meant drinking purity, eating Yili ice cream meant casting a vote of confidence for a company implicated in one of the greatest food scandals in recent years, drinking Coca-Cola connected the consumer with a happy globalized world. This article will examine how behind these smooth narratives of global communion and public trust, these liquids, because of their material, carnal, sensuous properties, were also at the centre of controversies and uncertainties in what is a globalization in the making and not yet ready-made.² If projective discourses of cultural exchange, technological progress, sustainability or China’s opening to the world circulated seemingly without effort across the World Expo site, the globalization in flesh and blood that was performed in the promotion and distribution of these products was much messier.

Litree: Drinking purity

Summers in Shanghai can get a bit hot, and water will be in great demand. Fortunately, there are 102 drinking water supply stations in the four zones of the Expo area, each supplying drinking water for 15 hours every day. While this may not seem remarkable, it happens to be the first time in Expo history that the host city has provided free drinking water for visitors. Each station has several fountains for drinking as well as taps for those that choose to bring their own drinking containers. (Expo Weekly, 2010: 24)

For some months, the sun was on everybody’s lips and skin at the Shanghai World Expo. The summer heat was making the newspaper headlines day after day with evocative pictures of wearied visitors resting under canopies and crowding at drinking fountains. In other words, the weather made things happen, expected and unexpected. It twisted the routine of visitors who were constantly seeking shelter in air-conditioned pavilions and refreshment bars. In some cases, they were demanding extra attention from the Expo staff and volunteers to look for any case of heatstroke or dehydration among the long queues for the most popular pavilions where some had to wait for 5–8 hours. The heat waves pushed the administration and the public authorities to constantly adapt to the punishing ecology of Shanghai in July and August by installing additional water dispensers and delegating new volunteers to keep an eye on the long waiting lines for any cases of health emergencies. Meanwhile, the Shanghai Health Bureau, feeling the heat of alarming weather conditions, was making public announcements, advising visitors to drink water instead of sodas and to avoid prolonged sun exposure in long waiting lines. The enthusiasm of the Expo crowd³ had to be cooled off, as the event was literally getting too hot.

The bid for the supply of free water on the site of Expo 2010 was won by the non-profit project of Litree (lisheng in Chinese), a young R&D company that concentrates its activities on the research, development and application of ultra-filtration membranes for water purification. At the Shanghai Expo, the Shenzhen-based company was operating hundreds of free water dispensing taps distributed throughout every sector of the site, as well as in some spots before the entrance gates (Figure 2). Over 150,000 ton of water was consumed at the Litree dispensers during the Expo, which amounts to an average of about 2 L per visitor.

These water dispensers quickly caught my eye on my first day at the Shanghai World Expo, if only because they were located in the initial waiting zones between the first security check and the turnstiles of the World Expo: the first thing visitors could drink once they penetrated the military guarded Expo perimeter and the only refreshment they would have while patiently zigzagging along the serpentine queues leading to the Expo gates. Their massive distribution on the site, their gleaming metallic surfaces and their unsurprising popularity under the summer heat made them an obvious starting point for a sensory exploration of the World Expo. It appeared that those very popular though unglamorous public counters seemed to exemplify the articulation between different scales of reference, from the micro-level of bodily experience to the macro-level of global connections advocated and performed by the World Expo itself.

And is there a more global substance than water? If world’s fairs epitomize to any extent the proclivities of current mainstream representations of the world, it would appear that water in its manifold guises has become a central preoccupation for nations and international institutions and a pressing issue for future global governance. The Lisbon 1998 Expo had ‘The Oceans, a Heritage for the Future’; the Zaragoza International Expo of 2008 was on ‘Water and Sustainable Development’ and the theme of the Yeosu 2012 Expo was ‘The Living Ocean and Coast’. Water shapes the world, water connects the world, water sustains the world and new solutions have to be imagined in order to confront the massive challenge of its management and protection. It plays a central role in the construction of imagined globalities in the 21st century, and its multidimensional currency indeed makes it, as Orlove and Caton (2010) argue, a ‘total social fact’. Water simultaneously connects institutions, issues, symbols, practices and conceptions of the world, and, as was the case with Litree in Shanghai 2010, its use articulates multiple social domains.

Interestingly, however, the globality of Litree purified water was not self-evident in comparison with jet-set commodities such as coffee (Tucker, 2010), papayas (Cook, 2004), bananas (Moberg, 2008) or bluefin tuna (Bestor, 2000) that anthropologists have examined in order to explore the social underworld of infrastructures upon which depends the efficiency of the transnational traffic of edible things.⁴ Whereas ‘[n]otions of “flow,” “fluidity,” and “liquidity” have become commonplace metaphors for distinguishing today’s mobile, globalized world-system from that of previous eras’ (Sutherland, 2013: 3), it appears that real material flows of actual liquids are far more problematic. Water is dense, heavy, cheap to store but expensive to transport and, more generally, ‘uncooperative’ (Bakker, 2004: 44). Consequently, at the Litree dispensers, not only was water local, but the universalizing virtues of the purification of local water were precisely the point.⁵ But the globalizing narratives embodied in water purification unfolded in two manners at the water dispensers.

On the one hand, technical globality was achieved through water purification as the situated production of facts was endowed with a purported universal value, one that pairs international standards in food safety. Litree’s participation at the Expo was then an opportunity to showcase, both materially on the expo site and virtually on their Website, the specifics of their trademark triple filtration technology that combines the work of activated charcoal, microscopic membranes of 0.01 µm in diameter and ultraviolet (UV) rays. Their purification devices had already received national and international coverage in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics, where Litree was the official water provider, and also during the relief operations in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake. But at the Shanghai World Expo, what the water filtration technologies stood for in the promotional work of Litree was low-carbon lifestyle. With the estimation that more than 70,000,000 visitors would visit the Expo, they calculated that they would save approximately 2.1 hundred million bottles and 3,500,000 ton of tap water, which would amount to 1760 ton of carbon dioxide. Litree thus integrated their promotional work into the narratives of sustainable development and green technologies that supported the political orientation of the event towards a globalization more attuned to new pressing environmental concerns.

On the other hand, a narrative of cultural globality was actualized through the active promotion, if not enforcement, of civil drinking behaviour. As visitors crowded around these dispensers on the hottest days of the Expo (one journalist even claiming to have waited over 6 minutes before reaching a faucet), the socio-material order of the public fountain became obviously problematic with a perpetual potential for water shortages due to the heavy demand for refreshments, the eventual unhygienic nature of the equipment and its mechanical wear due to the massive circulation of drinkers, not to mention disorder and impatience due to the clash of different queuing cultures among the visitors. Over a hundred ‘water guards’ employed by Litree were on the spot to ensure a constant supply of direct-drinkable water every day inside the 3.28-km² Expo Park (Figure 3). Among them, 39 were technicians in charge of equipment maintenance and 75 were cleaners maintaining the sanitation of the water supply facilities (Xinhua News Agency, 2010). The team dressed in recognizable white and orange t-shirts (thus distinguishing themselves from the Expo volunteers dressed in a light green and white uniform, but nevertheless also providing directions to querying visitors aside from their assigned duties), and the ‘water guards’ were indeed making sure that everything was in order and that the public was drinking the right way. The popularity of these dispensers, thanks to the incredibly hot weather in Shanghai, even led the company to install a dozen additional water dispensers on the site in July.

The Litree fountains also featured signs indicating proscribed activities at the fountain, thus addressing the risks of bodily pollution in this transnational gathering of sweat, saliva and bacteria. The ‘User manual of Litree drinking straight equipment’, displayed on the top of the faucets provided prescriptions such as ‘only use for drinking, not for washing’, ‘don’t touch the faucet with your mouth’ and ‘do not twist the faucet’ (Figure 4). They also printed a brochure on ‘clean drinking’, built an Expo Drinking Guide Website, and expanded their cleaning staff to over 200 employees by the first days of July. However, despite all these measures for the cleaning, maintenance and surveillance of the machines, it appears that, according to a China News reporter, many visitors were ignoring the drinking guidelines and displayed ‘uncivil drinking behaviour’: not waiting in line, touching the faucet with their lips, using the water to wash their hands and leaving tea leaves or paper scraps in the sink. In other words, the masses were not acting in accordance with the international norms of social behaviour implicit in a mass mediatized place where anybody could be at any moment under the world’s public gaze.

In their monumental study on urban infrastructures, Graham and Marvin tackle the particular issue of bundled urban environments made of global connections and local segmentations by taking, among a host of examples, the case of water. They highlight the fact that new special tourist zones in developing countries are now often provided with ‘water treatment and supply networks that are designed to meet international rather than local standards’, and while these infrastructures are not necessarily connected internationally, their main rationale is to design a background infrastructure that is ‘tailored to meet the exacting needs of foreign direct investment’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 172). Of course, in the particular context of a World Expo, infrastructure is not just practical; it is also demonstrative and spectacular, and this is particularly the case with water infrastructures (water towers, dams and plants), as Kaika and Swyngedouw (2000) note. What Litree and by extension the Shanghai World Expo and the Chinese authorities were showcasing was not only the technological advancement of their devices but also a demonstration of effectiveness, security, cleanliness and sustainability.

The numerous water purification devices distributed throughout the Expo site thus participated in the construction of a new sense of globality at both the symbolic and infrastructural levels. Water dispensers were accounting for Chinese leadership in technical innovation and were playing a key role in the constitution of a risk-free, comfortable environment for the international public. Litree displayed on its Website copies of the water quality inspection reports of the Shanghai Anti-epidemic Center, furthermore claiming that their aim was ‘to provide thoughtful and accurate service to the visitors’ and to ‘impress them with the preciseness of Chinese enterprises’. At various points across the World Expo, these stainless though somehow unremarkable water fountains were perhaps the most efficient displays that succeeded in blending multiple narratives of globalization into one flow: technological, environmental, cultural and economic. But it appears that even in the clean, securitized and pacified environment of the World Expo, messages and information do not circulate effortlessly, as some of the dispirited descriptions of the public’s behaviour at the fountains made evident.

Yili: Drinking trust

The tainted milk scandal broke out in 2008 during the Beijing Olympic Games as six infants and, reportedly, over 300,000 children were poisoned by melamine. The incident raised national and international concerns about food safety and consumer trust in China and pressed the development of tests and techniques for the identification of risk factors for edible products. In the aftermath of the scandal, two people were sentenced to death and many others were jailed. The government also created a new food safety agency to boost quality control and oversight of agriculture. Of course, the immediate consequences of the scandal on the Chinese milk industry were dismal to say the least.⁶ Even a few years later, a survey conducted by the China Youth Daily in September 2011 reported that 67.8% of the 1290 respondents expressed serious doubts over the quality of dairy products, with illegal additives being cited as their major concern (Xinhua News Agency, 2011). At the same time, apparently, a number of other brands not incriminated in the affair had, nonetheless, to ‘weather the storm’ after the bankruptcy of the Sanlu Group (Moody and Chang, 2010). As Tracy (2010) puts it, ‘The events surrounding the melamine scandal were interpreted retrospectively by some observers as a litmus test of the purported greater transparency and accountability in corporate and national governance – a test that China failed’ (p. 4). But as companies are now being commanded to never let a crisis go to waste, the melamine scandal has had the effect of even further promoting brand trust as a success factor for doing business in China.

In the end, 22 Chinese dairy companies acknowledged the presence of melamine in their products, and among them were the two most important dairy companies in China, Yili and Mengniu that are both based in Inner Mongolia. It was announced in May 2009 that Yili, appointed by the Shanghai World Expo Business Coordination Bureau, would be the only dairy sponsor and the exclusive provider of dairy products for the Shanghai World Expo. Yili, by then the second largest dairy producer in China, won the battle over its principal competitor, Mengniu, and ‘scored a coup’ (Ding, 2009) as both companies were trying to recover from the tainted milk scandal in which they were involved. Yili, the quickest to recover from the scandal, was appointed the official and only dairy sponsor for the 2010 Expo. The company claimed that ‘The sponsorship does not only mean potential profits’, but more importantly ‘the sign of national recognition that could further enhance awareness of the Yili brand’ (Ding, 2009), and furthermore that ‘Yili’s brand building is based on product quality, health concept and social responsibility’, thus extending the ontological space of the brand over critical territories. Yili’s facelift operation was apparently successful enough, as Zhong Yanqun, fulltime deputy director of the World Expo 2010 Shanghai Executive Committee, stated that the Expo organizers chose Yili ‘not only because of its reliability but because of its stable operation and good public image’. Reports were indeed made that since May 2009, in line with the standards of the Shanghai World Expo, the Yili Group implemented a company-wide ‘Expo standards’ project, a comprehensive upgrade in the accuracy of their management system and an improvement in product quality and service.

But how was Yili’s presence felt on the Expo site? Anthropologists know that milk is no ordinary product, it is ‘one of those rare commodities that have a virtually universal currency’ (Atkins, 2007: 970) because of its symbolic associations with maternity, kin, family and life itself. Milk was, interestingly, one of the few liquids that could receive special treatment at the Expo gates. Right before the airport-style security check with X-ray belts and metal detectors at one of the entrances of the Shanghai Expo, a large sign with Haibao, the blue mascot, greeting visitors presented a list of items prohibited on the site. It was a compendium of materials and substances endowed with risky agencies of different kinds: lighters, matches, posters, promotional brochures and leaflets, bicycles, motorcycles, animals, hang gliders, parachutes, kites, balloons and radio transceivers. But at the top of the list were liquids for drinking or to be more specific ‘beverages in hard or soft packages, alcoholic drinks or any other liquids, with the exception of liquid milk products for babies and liquid medicines needed by patients, both of which can be carried in an appropriate quantity’.

But as dairy products are now being differentiated in an ‘economy of singularities’ (see Karpik, 2010), images of nature, pastoral authenticity and traditional purity are currently often used and reused in order to make the commodities stand out in a standardized market (Jönsson, 2006). These symbolic associations of milk with both nature and culture were well reappropriated indeed by Yili’s public operation on the Expo site, most notably by providing services such as the Life and Sunshine Pavilion, designed specifically for the disabled; the Happy Bay, an entertainment garden for children and most importantly, the 40 childcare centres around the Expo. As interfaces of connectivity, brands not only extend and multiply the semiotic associations of commodities, but are also fully integrated into the design of the built environment and the coordination of a variety of non-commercial practices and services. At the Expo, according to their press release, Yili linked their activity to higher concerns such as ‘spreading the concept of nutrition and health appropriate for the Chinese’ and ‘serving for the consumers’ health and happy life according to the global highest production standards’. Their packaging campaign during Expo 2010 for their fruit yogurt products, designed by the global firm Ogilvy & Mather Beijing, was also developed with the aim of creating ‘a stronger emotional connection with consumers’. By connecting bodies to the world, their design symbolized both world peace and family-like proximity with six cartoon girls from different regions around the world in cups of different colours. China’s opening to the world symbolized emphatically by the World Expo has contributed to turning internationality into a signifier of commercial success and a metonymy of consumer trust.

But materially, Yili’s presence at the Expo for the sale of milk, milk powder and ice cream mainly took the form of dozens of white and blue cubic stands in the site’s alleys and open spaces (Figure 5). Although these Yili fibreglass booths were set down on the cement fairgrounds in a very unspectacular fashion by World Expo design standards, they were predictably, nevertheless, very much appreciated in the critical market niche of icy refreshments. In the end, Yili’s participation had apparently overwhelmingly positive results, with the company even claiming in press releases that because of the 2010 Expo, Yili had broken numerous national records in terms of the sales volume of their ‘Expo-targeted milk products’. This globally publicized trial in brand trust was seemingly a success for the recently indicted milk producer.

However, the imposition of food distribution monopolies by the administration on the economic enclave of Expo was a particularity of the Shanghai event, in comparison with previous international exhibitions, and for quite a few restaurant managers having to deal with Yili for their milk and ice cream or the German food wholesale retailer Metro for the rest of their foodstuffs, it was a commercial, logistical and organizational burden. The rationale behind this restrictive commercial framework on the part of the Chinese administration was simply an economic and biological pacification of risky goods (see Çaliskan and Callon, 2009), engineered by the limitation of channels of distribution, thus facilitating the centralization of the food monitoring activities into one single hangar located on the edge of the Expo site and representing the legal and material embodiment of what some might call ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’. Yet, here again the question is how these general principles and public calls for food safety connected with the branding operations of Yili were translated into daily life on the World Expo site, in the ‘mundane governance’ (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013) of bodies and fluids, as it appears that in practice, the framing itself was not as strict as in theory. In the words of a disgruntled European bar manager operating a small venue in his national pavilion, ‘Yili company is one big mafia!’ Not only did they manage to obtain a clause of exclusivity after the scandal, but apparently their representatives were monitoring the use of dairy products on the site, as was dramatically recounted by our informant: ‘Before, we had our own ice cream, then Yili came to us and they said: if you’re not going to take that ice cream away, if you don’t stop selling that ice cream, there will be lawsuits’. His frustrated resignation, punctuated with sarcastic and cynical remarks on the Expo administration, was compounded by the presence of a Turkish ice cream stand a few metres away, an extremely popular attraction in the European sector, which was benefitting from derogation for the use of its own ice cream, as they managed to turn the vendor booth into a cultural exhibit.

Eventually, the visit from Yili’s staff led our bar manager to comply and buy the ice cream mix from the Inner-Mongolian firm and also rent their ice cream machines in order to continue offering what was in fact his best selling item in the Expo summer days. But this anecdote also implies that if commercial surveillance was indeed tight, and in some ways privatized, in the special economic zone, it was nonetheless loose enough to allow the bar manager to operate his ice cream stand with its own products for many weeks, without being warned or even notified that the activity was contravening the exclusivity clauses. It actually appeared, from our interviews with many restaurant managers, that the flipside of the massive calls for control, safety and accountability for the Expo administration was bureaucratic opacity manifested in rules and regulations which changed sometimes on a daily basis: an experiment in globalization, Chinese-style, with processes of trial and error (Tran, 2014). Yili’s branding operation at the Expo relied on pacifying narratives in tune with recent shifts in China’s commodity culture with growing concerns for issues of trust, safety, transparency and accountability. But a look at the brand’s actual presence on the site and the ways by which this presence was enforced provide another picture of globalization in the making in the transnational enclave, one where the simple problem of providing refreshments for a massive public becomes entangled with commercial, ethical or political issues, and ultimately different conflicting versions of the common good.

Coca-Cola: Drinking happiness

During these six months, we have created the largest operational venue in the company’s history by serving drinks to millions of visitors as well as Expo staff. Our pavilion is deeply loved by visitors and we have received more than 5,500 people each day on average. Our pavilion has been so popular that there was, unfortunately, an average waiting time of four hours to enter. (Li Yichuan, Director of the Coca-Cola pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo)

Times have changed. Our recipe hasn’t. And never will. Coca-Cola is 100 percent authentic. Since 1886 inspiring moments of uplift and happiness everyday has [sic] been a part of Coca-Cola’s DNA – and the cornerstone of the company’s success. It is this refreshingly optimistic view of the world that unites Coca-Cola and Expo 2010. Both of us share a common vision of creating a brighter, more sustainable future. (Glenn Jordan, President of the Pacific Group, Coca-Cola Company)

At the end of 2007, it was announced that Coca-Cola would be the first international company to sponsor both the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo and the first US company to independently become a Global Partner of the Shanghai World Expo.⁷ This branding leadership displayed by the ubiquitous red and white soft-drink manufacturer’s logo provides a sign of both the ever-growing economic and cultural presence of the beverage corporation in China and its habitual omnipresence in the sponsorship of mega-events. The Atlanta-based multinational employed by 2010 more than 30,000 locals and has so far installed more than 40 bottling plants in China. Likewise, Coca-Cola consistently maintains a relentless advertising presence at the most mediatized sporting events from the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup™ to the Olympics. The company has a rich history of participations in world’s fairs throughout the 20th century, from the reconstitution of an operating bottling plant at the 1958 Brussels Expo to a very popular pavilion called ‘World of Refreshment’ at the 1964–1965 New York World’s fair, which featured an exhibit tellingly named ‘Global Holiday’.

This phrase aptly summarizes the happy mix of enjoyment and globality that seems to lie at the heart of Coca-Cola’s advertising discourse embodied in its iconic slogan ‘Enjoy’. Glenn Jordan’s statement quoted above, which was pronounced on the occasion of ‘Coca-Cola Day’ at the World Expo, echoes wonderfully this optimistic outlook of liberal globalization: connecting people around the globe and enrolling commodities in the mission of making the world a happier place. In Jordan’s own words,

Both Expo 2010 and the FIFA World Cup™ in South Africa are about bringing people together, celebrating the optimism of the human spirit. As a global corporate sponsor of both of these milestone events, the live performance of the Coca-Cola music anthem for the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ today allows us to celebrate ‘Coca-Cola Day’ while also sharing the passion and excitement around Expo 2010 and the FIFA World Cup™ with China and the world.

Perhaps more than any other item on the global supermarket, the dark carbonated soft drink embodies, for both its proponents and its opponents, Western values, Americanization and capitalism. As an omnipresent global object that is often taken to embody the evils of American neoliberalism and every wrong in Western culture from hypercaloric consumption to anti-union policies, Coca-Cola remains unavoidably a continuous source of controversies, as polemical essays regularly populate bookstore stacks around the world in an attempt to unveil the company’s unethical practices, the health dangers of its flagship product and the dark pages of the corporation’s history. Ethnographers interested in the life and fortunes of the global brand in local contexts have, however, highlighted precisely how the avatars of globality objectified in the American soft drink can be reappropriated, localized and endowed with new local meanings and practices in Trinidad (Miller, 1998), Chiapas (Nash, 2007) or Argentina (Classen, 1996). Tian and Dong (2011) show precisely how Western brands are now being reappropriated in new articulations of national identities in China. As Foster (2008) puts it in his ethnography of the transnational operations of Coca-Cola, ‘Coca-Cola officials, in particular, understand that the appeal of the brand lies in its capacity to impress consumers as being both globally extensive and intensely personal, there and here, at the same time’ (p. 85).⁸ After all, Scott Lash (2007) describes the new economic order as a ‘chronic production of economic, social and political relations’ (p. 56) rather than the hegemonic reproduction of hierarchies. In this context, a brand works as a locus of interactivity between producers and consumers and attempts to ‘guide the investments of affect on the part of the consumers’ (Arvidsson, 2006: 93). This interactivity is particularly important in the current Chinese context, as new local brands are quickly gaining popularity and Chinese companies are now beginning to compete head to head with foreign brands. More than ever, with China’s growing soft-drink industry, this means that foreign brands ‘need to understand the needs of evolving Chinese consumers more and react faster to their desires’ (Zhang, 2011). The purpose of the Coca-Cola pavilion was then not only to advertise and entertain but also more crucially to survey consumers and test new products and campaigns.

The Coca-Cola pavilion was one of the most popular buildings on the Pu Xi side of the Expo, in a sector mainly occupied by private exhibits and pavilions of State enterprises.⁹ It attracted over 1 million visitors, and it was one of the few pavilions where my staff badge did not grant me immediate entry, as we had to wait for about 15 minutes (as compared with a few hours in the regular lane) in a special but nonetheless tightly packed lane for employees, seniors and disabled people. Outside, the unavoidable hit of summer 2010, the multilingual ‘Wavin’ Flag’ by K-Naan, by then the already overplayed theme song of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, was hitting the subwoofers around the bottle-shaped animated screen showing a multicolour slide show. The globality of Coke was further exemplified by the exterior wall design of the building itself, which featured a red facade decorated with renditions of the iconic Coca-Cola logo in different languages. In addition, Coca-Cola drink stands could be found pretty much everywhere across the Expo site, from small mobile booths dotted on the fairgrounds to larger counters selling a wider variety of soft drinks (See Figure 6).

The design of the exhibit, entitled ‘A World Refreshed with Happiness’, followed a classical rhythmic organization in three time blocks for the control of crowd fluidity: artefacts/movie/souvenirs(See Figure 7). This formula was replicated by a great proportion of the Expo pavilions (Thailand, the United States, Australia, the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion and a significant number of others). First, the waiting room for the movie theatre, decorated as a factory setting with greyish walls, cogwheels and corrugated iron, was an exhibition of Coke memorabilia, from vintage bottles to old postcards and advertisements, along with pictures of the Happiness Factory characters posing as employees of the month. The main feature was a short movie on ‘A Happiness Factory’ with the recognizable insect-like virtual characters dancing around in a pastoral landscape. After the film screening, the visit ended with the distribution of a 200-mL sample of self-freezing Coke Superchill to the public: a typical gift-commodity hybrid, as described by Bird-David and Darr (2009), that fosters a feeling of relationality and interactivity between the giant corporation and its individualized public in the form of a common ritual of refreshment, as every audience member saw, felt and tasted their carbonated drink. According to a marketing professional on a visit at the Coca-Cola Pavilion, the exhibit was a great example of ‘experiential marketing’, ‘branded entertainment’ and ‘transmedia storytelling’, as well as ‘a 360 degree brand encounter’, thereby paradoxically acknowledging both the singularity of the experience itself and the standardization of new branding practices.

Thus transpired the icy ending of the visit to the Happiness factory. The exuberant material culture on display at a spectacular interactive exhibit obviously reproduced the exhibitionary logic of the World of Coca-Cola building in Atlanta. It produced an interesting mix of narratives, as the Coca-Cola pavilion managed to promote Coke’s initiatives in sustainable development and community initiatives alongside the representations of joy and happiness associated with its product. Moreover, besides the utopian narrative of global communion expressed by the sundry creatures of the Happiness Factory film, Coca-Cola globalization at the World Expo was also fleshed out in actual operations of connectivity, from the launching of a promotional campaign for green innovations among Chinese universities, to the international promotion of the Expo which entailed sending the mascot Haibao on a global journey along with three ‘Coca-Cola ambassadors’ to a visit of 206 countries in 2010 (Zhu, 2011).

Much could be said about the slogan ‘Enjoy Coca-Cola’, which has been interpreted by Lacanian theorists, as well as Lacan himself, as the archetypical instance of ‘objet petit a’, an unattainable object of desire that transcends its own material properties. According to Slavòj Zizek (2008), Coca-Cola is therefore the embodiment of the ‘pure surplus of enjoyment over standard satisfactions’: insofar as drinking Coke does not respond to any particular need, the soft drink stands for nothing but enjoyment itself (p. 19). However, besides these otherwise interesting ruminations on the nature of consumption in advanced capitalist societies, the carnal feelings, affects and the catharsis of pleasure displayed at the Coca-Cola pavilion and at the World Expo in general also account, more modestly, for this very recent development of a quest for happiness in China (Kleinman, 2011): the unfolding of new narratives for success, joy and self-fulfilment that incidentally are getting branded by corporations and the government alike. The World Expo official slogan ‘Better city, better life’ was perhaps itself a great articulation of this progressive and optimistic thinking that characterizes the rebranding of 21st-century China.

But as was the case with milk, even in the monopolistic framework of the World Expo, the market was never fully pacified, as backstage tensions, competitions and controversies eventually surfaced in this highly competitive environment that somehow contrasted with the front-stage official discourses and representations. In the soft-drink domain, as Pepsi could not leave the whole field to Coca-Cola, they ‘contributed five million U.S. dollars to become a highest tier of U.S. Pavilion sponsor together with other leading American firms’ (Xinhua News Agency, 2011). But the hot weather also triggered a public controversy on another scale around the presence of suspiciously ‘out of order’ Coca-Cola vending machines around restaurants. According to the Shanghai Daily (Chi, 2010), ‘Some visitors, feeling the heat as temperatures soared to 37.4 degree Celsius and irritated by the “broken” machines, had to purchase expensive beverages at restaurants as no drinks can be taken into the Expo site’. It was in fact the nearby restaurants that deliberately unplugged the machines, claiming they were paying the power bills to keep them running, as the machines’ owner, Coca-Cola’s local bottler, Shanghai Shen-Mei Beverage & Food, did not contribute enough for the electricity fee.

Conclusion

It would be no exaggeration to claim that in today’s context of intensive capitalism (Lash, 2010), international events play a crucial role in the management of brand equity, not merely in the trivial sense of offering an exceptional advertising platform of international scale, but also in the more pragmatic sense of establishing connections and developing tests and trials of public trust. The Expo is itself a globalization project that does the world by performing international connections (see Tsing, 2000), along which perceptions and information are circulated, exchanged and monetized in this intensive global node. It appears nevertheless that historically, since the 19th century, world’s fairs have always been instrumental for corporations in the construction of glorifying narratives around their brands. These stabilizing narratives obviously take on great importance in the current context of unstable markets in China,¹⁰ as French brands of spring or mineral water such as Perrier or Evian are apparently losing ground in favour of new cheaper Chinese domestic brands of spring water from Tibet or Qingdao Laoshan, as dairy products are still associated with unfortunate events for a great number of Chinese and international consumers and as Coca-Cola is still wrestling with Chinese brands over issues of copyright infringement. Consequently, each of these brands, in one way or another, performed many scales (body, nation, world) in the fabric of globalization at the World Expo. Brands and the narratives associated with them still hold to their traditional function of indicators of origin and guarantors of quality because in a market thoroughly affected by growing safety concerns, brands and certifications are, as Busch (2011) sums up, ‘convenient means for summarizing a plethora of qualities of a product and allowing rapid decision making’ (p. 177).¹¹

However, in the case of drinking liquids, the carnal contact of the consumer with the brand materialized in refreshments also has the potential to disrupt the pacifying narratives involved in branding practices and thereby offer another picture of globalizing processes, full of adjustments, tensions and uncertainties. Theodore Bestor (2004) shows in his ethnography of Tsukiji that the dry economic notions of supply and demand are in reality embodied in a multiplicity of individual actors, institutions, infrastructures, habits, cultural histories and narratives. The same point could be made with the post-industrial or ‘new economy’ notions of immaterial value, brand equity and the aforementioned marketing buzzwords such as ‘transmedia storytelling’, ‘experiential marketing’ and ‘branded entertainment’, especially insofar as it is claimed, across the spectrum of new theories on cognitive capitalism, that they outweigh in certain sectors the laws of supply and demand in the determination of prices and value. If the brand has become a salient market cultural form in the 21st century, an immaterial object that ‘mediates the supply and demand of products through the organization, coordination and integration of the use of information’ (Lury, 2004: 3) and ‘an alternative device for the calibration of the market’, the varieties of its existence in the sensuous ecology of markets, where consumers sweat, spit and rest, can also unveil a universe of constant tensions, uncertainties and immanent adjustments.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the editor and the two anonymous referees for their careful reading and very useful comments. I also wish to thank Mac Wigfield and Dexter Fergie for their great work proofreading this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Van Troi Tran is lecturer and research assistant in Ethnology at Université Laval in Quebec City. He is currently serving as president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada.

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