I mean Coca-Cola is junk food, it's unhealthy and we know it is. They advertise to maintain the illusion that it leads to success and happiness. They can't afford for scientific understanding to win over the brainwashing of 'brand advertising'as that would be the death knell for the company (or 99% of it).
Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
Coke advertises so that when you're in the store or a gas station and you think "maybe I'll get a soda" you think of Coke before Pepsi. They advertise so that someone starting a restaurant thinks to buy the Coke syrup before they think to buy the Pepsi syrup.
>Not a single human being alive in the world believes that drinking Coca-Cola "leads to success and happiness."
And yet somehow we still reflexively choose it, because something in our brain associates it with big smiles, success, happiness, being fit, etc., almost as if we've been fed imagery every day of our lives to try to convince us of that fact.
If you honestly believe that people drink Coca-Cola because they subconsciously associate it with "big smiles" and physical fitness I really don't know what to tell you, man. Everyone I know who drinks it has one because they want a soda every now and then.
Plenty of people are entirely capable of knowing that drinking a thing is not an objectively healthy act - soda and alcohol are the two big ones that come to mind - without pathologizing the act or pretending that the people making money off of it are Mr. Burns-level caricatures or mustache-twirling super-villain billionaires.
