The power of positioning: Would Santa be a successful brand without the Grinch?

What is Santa’s secret? How did Santa become one of the world’s most powerful brands? Not the cookies. Not the sleigh. Nor the flying reindeer with suspiciously high fuel efficiency.

It’s not even the free toys delivered with a logistical precision that would make Amazon sweat. Santa’s real superpower is positioning.But this wasn’t always the case. For centuries, Santa was a walking, jingling, wildly inconsistent brand failure.

Every country had its own prototype. Every illustrator had a different artistic conception. You had Dutch bishops, British fatherly figures, American elves, Norse legends and the occasional bearded fellow who looked like he escaped from a forest cult.

Sometimes stern, sometimes cuddly, sometimes the old man in charge of children’s behaviour. Tall in one story, pint-sized in another. Skinny enough to slip under a door or plump enough to get stuck in one.

Wardrobe? From green robes to brown furs, even blue suits—everything except ‘corporate consistency red.’ Santa was not a brand, but a shared myth with more identity issues than a Bollywood hero with amnesia.Most people credit Coca-Cola for fixing Santa’s brand problem, but that’s only half the story. Coca-Cola gave Santa his visual form as we now know it, but it was Dr. Seuss who gave him his strategic enemy.

Let’s start with Coca-Cola. In 1931, it commissioned illustrator Haddon Sundblom to create a Santa for a holiday campaign. Sundblom came up with brand magic.

He gave the world the Santa we recognize today: red suit, white trim, round belly, rosy cheeks and twinkling eyes. A loveable and huggable uncle from the North Pole. And here’s the kicker: Coca-Cola never tried to update him.