Power of advertising

What comes to your mind when anybody mentions Santa Claus- Father Christmas?

This image?

A jolly, portly old man with big white beard and wearing a red suit.

But Look closely at the image. What is he drinking?

"In 1931, Coca‑Cola commissioned Swedish-American artist Haddon Sundblom to paint Santa Claus for the company's Christmas adverts. Prior to this, Santa had been portrayed in a variety of ways throughout history: tall and gaunt; short and elfin; distinguished and intellectual; even downright frightening." - Source.



I always use this example to highlight the power of marketing (and advertising).

Santa was not created by Coca Cola, but the cultural icon we have come to associate with him was indeed created by Coca Cola. 

Also read: 5 Things You Never Knew About Santa Claus and Coca-Cola.

Academics and the dark side

Many of us grew up watching Star Wars and the various films has had an impact on a number of us. Anyway, one of my papers is titled  "Customer relationship management: advances, dark sides, exploitation and unfairness." My friend Bang Nguyen (my co-author) came up with the name. He is a big sci-fi fan and though I have not confirmed it with him, you can probably guess where the phrase "dark sides" come from. In fact, he has written a few other papers with the phrase "dark side" in the title.

Today while going through some academic papers, I came across one with "dark side" in the title. This made me wonder and a quick search on Google Scholar reveals that there are around  3,920,000 paper with the phrase "dark side" in the title. When I restrict the search results to publications which came out this year (2015),   there were an astounding 50,100 results including books, chapters and journal papers.

I further narrowed down the search to the keywords "dark side marketing" and restricted to publications this year, gave me 8,770 results.

The Force is definitely with us.