Seven-Up
by Samuel R. Lewis Future marketing textbooks probably will devote an entire chapter describing the brilliance of automotive product managers and their advertising colleagues who convinced tens of millions of American drivers over the last score of years to purchase slow, heavy, boxy, gas-guzzling vehicles (aka "SUVs") originally inspired by a bouncy, style-less general purpose vehicle ("jeep") in World War II. As impressive a marketing feat as that was, it's a snowflake in Alaska compared to the marketing challenge posed by the advent of ethical monotheism more than three millennia ago. At the time, most people in the world worshiped topographic gods — rivers, mountains, trees — or saw their deities embodied in animals such as cats, dogs and rats, or simply in figurines they made themselves. It would take an extraordinary narrative to persuade a largely illiterate, nomadic people to adopt a theology based on a God who was universal, physically invisible, and cr...
