Christmas advert from Schweppes ‘ Schhh… You Know Who’

Schweppes is a beverage brand that is sold around the world. It includes a variety of carbonated water and ginger ales. Its marketing campaign made heavy use of an onomatopoeia in their commercials: “Schhhhh…. Schweppes,” after the sound of the gas escaping as one opens the bottle.

History

In the late eighteenth century, Johann Jacob Schweppe (1740–1821), a German-born naturalised Swiss watchmaker and amateur scientist developed a process to manufacture carbonated mineral water, based on a process discovered by Joseph Priestley in 1770, founding the Schweppes Company in Geneva in 1783.  In 1792 he moved to London to develop the business there. Mainstay products include ginger ale (1870), bitter lemon (1857), and tonic water (The oldest soft drink in the world – 1771).

An ad campaign in the 1950s and 1960s featured a real-life veteran British naval officer named Commander Whitehead, who described the product’s bubbly flavor (effervescence) as “Schweppervescence”.

Info gleaned from Wikipedia