Lucozade is a long-established flavoured glucose drink in Britain and is traditionally associated with convalescence, helping people get over an illness, or recover from surgery. The name dates back to 1929, but the history is longer. Over the years, the narrative has changed with the most recent transformation being from sickroom drink to become a performance-enhancing sports energy drink. Thereafter, the marketing focus has been on the replacement of lost energy following activity. There was a continuing narrative of health utility but the emphasis was different: the product had been recast for consumer concerns in a new era.
However, there had been earlier, and arguably more dramatic changes to the narrative. There were two phases to this but both led to broader claims for effectiveness. Lucozade’s origins had not been as the sickroom standby, it was developed as an unbranded drink in the early 1900s and used clinically as a precaution before chloroform anaesthesia. In this, it was a pre-emptive life-saver, not something to generally aid recovery from illness. This later purpose appears to have been an accidental attribution, first gaining popular traction around Newcastle. The drink was subsequently branded, first as Glucozade in 1927 and as Lucozade in 1929, by a manufacturing by a chemist. Acquisition by Beechams in 1938 and their substantial 1939 newspaper advertising campaign gave Lucozade much wider recognition and consolidated this claim of generic utility by invoking well-established advertising ideas about tonic preparations. In the course of that year, it was portrayed as the answer to many everyday problems. General help with convalescence was still assured but now Lucozade’s effectiveness was framed as a bulwark against several ill-defined afflictions – poor appetite, nervousness, listlessness, depression and all manner of personal debility. These were terms designed to resonate with readers, the advertisements referenced problems in their lives and alluded to Lucozade’s approval by doctors and nurses. This presentation examines the scope and scale of newspaper advertising during this 1939 Lucozade campaign.