everywhere at Once

1211
YEARS OF
MARKETING

SUCCESS
BY J ERRY G R I L L O
IF YOU ARE ALIVE TODAY,
odds are that Coca-Cola has
always been part of your
personal backdrop. It is
the best-known brand in
the world, its iconography the
most instantly recognized popcultural set dressing from America
to Zimbabwe.

24

i December 2011 i GeorgiaTrend

ORN AND RAISED IN ATLANTA, Coke has been

"the real thing" for 125 years and remains Georgia's

most profitable company (netting $11.8 billion in
2010). Coke has added life. It has been "the great national
temperance beverage," "ice-cold sunshine," "the best friend
thirst ever had," and "America's Real Choice." It has been
subjected to some of the best marketing schemes (including
the slogans above) the corporate mythmakers could conjure,
and some of the worst (New Coke - 'nuff said).
But these slogans and schemes are only subtitles for a
logo that has stood the tests of time (and attention spans)
since Atlanta druggist John Pemberton created the soft drink
and his accountant Frank Robinson named it Coca-Cola and
hand wrote the Spencerian script logo that connects the 2011
version of the company to its roots in 1886.
"That script is one of the things that define this company
and the brand, and to think something as valuable as that
was created by a bookkeeper, not a marketing genius. So, for

125 years, that logo has remained the identifying mark for
the brand," says Phil Mooney, who charts the history of the
company's growth as director of Coca-Cola's archives
department.
"Our role here is to capture the ongoing history of the
organization, and that essentially is the advertising and mar
keting assets of the company, because that's how the con
sumer sees us.
"The way we package our products, the way we go to mar
ket, the way we advertise - that's how you see us."
The man is correct. I remember the commercials, the slo
gans I've loved and the ones I didn't care for, the toys and
calendars and other promotional merchandise emblazoned
with Coca-Cola, the paintings of Santa Claus - the real Santa
Claus - drinking a Coke. Mooney is all about that stuff, the
stuff that helped sell soft drinks and insert Coke into our
social DNA.
The company may be stretching it a tiny bit with their lat
est battle cry: "Life Begins Here" sug
gests images of Adam and/or Eve tak
Landmark:
ing the pause that refreshes, holding
The old
the famous 6.5-oz. contour bottles.
Coca-Cola sign
Mooney says, "A lot of people
a t M a rg a re t
think
the bottle mimics the female
M itc h e ll Square
shape,
and it's been called the Mae
w as a d o w n to w n
West bottle. It's also been called the
A tla n ta fix tu re
fo r years.
hobble-skirt bottle, because it looks
like a woman's skirt. It certainly re
sembles that shape." But the bottle
was designed that way (in 1915) so
that it would have a distinct look and
feel - so when you saw it somewhere,
or when you were poking around
blindly in a vat of ice, you knew exact
ly what it was.
The bottom line is, "Life Begins
Here" creates mental images of CocaCola and its classic shapely bottle to a
man who has already quoted the slo
gan twice in the span of a few para
graphs just to make a point. Score
another one for the soda pop compa
ny on North Avenue.

Capturing History
Mooney knows from Coke bottles.
So does the rest of the world, appar
ently.
"They introduced this contour bot
tle, patented it immediately, and it
changed the game, because now
you've got a package that is propri5 etary to your system, something no
I one else can use," he says.
"And the bottle itself becomes a
trademark, a shape so well-known

26 i December 2011 i GeorgiaTrend

Company historian Phil Mooney admits,

"A lot of people think the bottle mimics
the female shape, and it's been called the
Mae West bottle. It's also been called the
hobble-skirt bottle, because it looks like a
woman's skirt.''

around the world - it's estimated that somewhere in excess

of 95 percent of the world's population will identify the
shape as a Coke bottle, even if we don't label it."
The bottle also happens to be a very popular item among
the massive community of Coca-Cola collectors.
"I'm a bottle collector. I love bottles," says Steve
Brumbelow of Snellville. He served on the executive board of
The Coca-Cola Collectors Club, which has chapters all over
the U.S., Canada, Australia, Scandanavia and Spain.
They're widespread, Brumbelow says, because it's an
affordable hobby. It's affordable because there is a stagger
ing amount of stuff out there. Go to any flea market. Go to

eBay, do a search for Coca-Cola collectibles and you get

41,000 listings (there are bids as low as a penny for labels and
bottle-caps and a suggested bid of $200,000 from someone
selling a rare misprinted bottle).
"For me, it started with one bottle, the special edition 1980
University of Georgia National Championship bottle," says
Brumbelow, a benefits manager for Lucent Technologies.
"That one bottle has turned into about 2,500 bottles. I've got
a ton of them, really old straight-sided ones, and bottles from
all over the world. For me, it's the thrill of the hunt."
Mooney understands perfectly. He is a trained historian
who has been in charge of the company's collections since
1977, the Indiana Jones of soda pop - obtainer of rare Coke
antiquities. When the Schmidt Museum of Coca-Cola
Memorabilia in Elizabethtown, Ky., auctioned off part of its
collection in September, Mooney was there. Among the
items that are coming to Atlanta, probably to the World of
Coca-Cola, is a 1949 delivery truck.
"We're always looking. We're always checking leads,"
says Mooney, who has hope that the three missing Norman
Rockwell paintings will turn up one of these days.
"The company commissioned six paintings from Rock
well in the 1920s and 30s - four of them were for calendars,
two were magazine ads," Mooney says. "We have three of
them."
Coke always had one of them. A former employee
returned another after keeping it in his home for decades,
and in 2001 a retired executive from the Kentucky printing
company that made Coke calendars called Mooney out of
the blue one day.
"He said, 'I have this Norman Rockwell painting, and
maybe you guys would love to have it,"' Mooney recalls. The
company bought the painting, which was probably worth
about $500,000 on the open market, for an undisclosed sum.
One of the Rockwells hangs in the office of Coca-Cola
CEO and Chairman Muhtar Kent. The other two are in the
World of Coca-Cola, which also displays Mooney's personal
favorite artifact.
"It's the prototype contour bottle, a fatter bottle," Mooney
says. "Only two of those bottles exist."
The bottle has captured the imagination of artists as well
as collectors. It was a favorite subject of folk artist Howard
Finster, and one of Andy Warhol's Coke bottle paintings
(black and white on canvas) fetched $35 million in auction at
Sotheby's last year.

w w w .g eo r g i at r en d .c o m i DECEMBER 2011 l 27

Bottle Sense

Through the 1950s, the company just made cola (or rather,
it made concentrated syrup and sold it to licensed bottlers,
The history of the Coke bottle, of Coca-Cola bottling in
who would add water and other ingredients, then put it in
general, is the story of American progress, of one corpora
bottles and sell it). Today there are roughly 500 brands in the
tion's exponential corporate growth. For the first 13 years of
Coke system worldwide (sodas, juices, coffees, water and so
its existence, Coke was strictly a soda fountain business.
on, all of it nonalcoholic).
Then Asa Candler, who bought the company from
Last year, The Coca-Cola Company bought the North
Pemberton, sold the rights to bottle the drink to a couple of
American operations of Coca-Cola Enterprises for $12.3 bil
Chattanooga businessmen (for $1), and that changed every
lion, bringing the largest single bottler into the corporate
thing.
fold in an effort to cut supply chain costs and create new rev
"Once you have it in bottles, you can move around, you're
enue opportunities.
not confined to an outlet, you have the capability of moving
Mooney says Coca-Cola is sold (legal
your product around," Mooney says.
ly) in every country except Myanmar,
At one time, before massive consoli
Former company president
North Korea and Cuba, where one of
dation, there were 1,100 bottling
first overseas bottling plants
plants just in the U.S.
Don Keough said in 1985 of the
opened more than a century ago.
"First they created a system of bot
"Yeah, but the people in Cuba get
tling plants that covered this country,"
the New Coke failure:"Some
Coca-Cola," Mooney adds. "I'm not
Mooney says. "Then, the world."
cynics say we planned the
saying I know how they get it, but they
Bottling plants started opening
definitely get it."
outside the U.S. in 1906 (in Canada,
whole thing. The truth is,
So Coca-Cola is recognizable in
Cuba and Panama). But it was Robert
every
corner of every place, and the
Woodruff, who became company
we're not that dumb, and
company
pays handsomely for its
president in 1923, who really extended
omnipresence
- almost $3 billion on
Coke's worldwide reach.
we're not that smart.''
advertising last year. That's a lot of
"He's the one who always pushed
scoreboards and stadiums and spon
to get Coca-Cola to expand outside
sorships (Coke sponsors the world's biggest sporting events,
the U.S., and it was tough to do - the board of directors was
the World Cup of Soccer and the Olympic Games). It's all
n 't so excited about that," Mooney says. "Woodruff begins
over your TV, your radio, your computer (the Coca-Cola
our association with the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in
Facebook page has 34 million fans). It is in movies, some
1928, and he forms the export corporation as early as 1930."
times as product placement, sometimes for free, like a gift
Woodruff also had 64 bottling plants built in Europe, the
from the gods (both a gift and a curse, actually, in The Gods
South Pacific, North Africa and parts of South America dur
Must Be Crazy).
ing World War II, serving about five billion bottles of Coke to
But besides being the everywhere-at-once Big Brother of
U.S. troops.
soft drinks, Coke will likely always be associated with social
The planet was wide open for a soda invasion. In the
awareness, too - a philanthropic habit that started with
1950s, guided by Woodruff's vision (he stepped down as
Candler, who became Atlanta's mayor after selling the compa
president but remained on the board as the de facto head
ny to the Woodruffs, who took corporate philanthropy to new
coach), the company opened about 15 to 20 plants a year
levels (Emory is a longtime major beneficiary), and took the
around the world.

C O K E In Georgia
COCA-COLA was first served at
Jacobs Pharmacy in downtown
Atlanta in May 1886.

Coca-Cola President

ASA CANDLER

1899-1902

1900-1916

1915

28 1December 2011 i G eorgiaTrend

provided the land

and a cash grant
th a t allowed
Emory University to
move to Metro
Atlanta and build Emory
Hospital.

Coca-Cola Chairman

ROBERT
WOODRUFF
donated the
land for the
Centers for
Disease
Control and
Prevention
near the Emory
campus. He was
also the chief bene
factor of the Woodruff
Arts Center.

COCA-COLA DONATED
the land for the National
Center for Civil and
Human Rights in 2006,
and the company is
making aS7-million
grant to the Atlanta
University Center insti
tutions to enhance the
Robert W. Woodruff
Librarys ability to house
the papers of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.

THE COCA-COLA COMPANY

company public, at $40 a share,

in 1919, assuming dividends
were reinvested. (That single
share would be worth in excess
of $6 million today.)
If Coca-Cola had a holy trin
ity, Mooney believes Woodruff
would be the Godfather, with
Candler and Roberto Goizueta,
Woodruff's protege, and the
namesake for Emory's business
school on either side.
"Goizueta was a gamechanger; the stuff he did was
groundbreaking," Mooney says.
He introduced Diet Coke (the
No. 2 soft drink in the U.S., after
regular Coke and ahead of
Pepsi). He introduced the caf
feine-free sodas and the first fla
vor extensions (Cherry Coke). Of
course, he also was the driving
force behind New Coke in 1985.
"But he was smart enough to
quickly realize we'd made a mistake," Mooney says.
Within a few months, after consumers basically rioted in
the streets, the so-called secret formula was reintroduced in
Coca-Cola Classic, and New Coke gradually disappeared
over the next several years ("Classic" was dropped from the
red labels of regular Coke a couple of years ago).
Goizueta would be forgiven and lionized by the time of
his death in 1997, after 16 years in charge. But for years, con
spiracy theorists believed he had engineered the whole New
Coke fiasco as a brilliant marketing scheme designed to revi
talize interest in the original formula.
"Nope. It was a case of a couple of wrong conclusions
based on faulty research," Mooney says. "We just went down
a wrong path."
Or, as former company president Don Keough said in

1985, "Some cynics say we planned the whole thing. The

truth is, we're not that dumb, and we're not that smart."
They just didn't take into account the emotional attach
ment people had with their soda, an attachment bordering
on deep and abiding faith, or fervor, which is something
Goizueta came to appreciate.
He is remembered as a passionate leader devoted to the
company soda, and as the guy who famously said, "A billion
hours ago, human life appeared on Earth. A billion minutes
ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, The Beatles
performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. A billion Coca-Colas ago
was yesterday morning."
Goizueta would probably be pleased to know that in 2011,
yesterday morning was 1.7 billion Coca-Colas ago. As for this
morning, well, it's early yet.
(g jj

MORE THAN 200 MILLION

Coca-Cola C hairm an

ROBERTO GOIZUETAs
g ift to E m ory U n iv e rs ity
g re a tly enha nce d its b u s i
ness scho ol, w h ic h is
na m ed a fte r him .

Coca-Cola shares are ow n e d

by in d iv id u a l G eorgians or
G eorgia in s titu tio n s ; the se
shares re p re s e n t a b o u t
10 p e rc e n t o f som e tw o b illio n
c o m p a n y shares o u ts ta n d in g .

APPROXIMATELY 80 PERCENT o f CocaMORE THAN 9,000

in d iv id u a ls are e m p lo y e d
d ire c tly by Coca-Cola in
G eorgia.

C olas sales o c c u r o u ts id e o f th e U n ite d

S tates; Coca-Cola is a v a ila b le in 206 c o u n trie s.
Three o f eve ry 10 e m p lo ye e s a t th e Coke
h e a d q u a rte rs in A tla n ta s u p p o rt th e in te rn a
1957

tio n a l business.
Source & Images: The Coca-Cola Com pany

w w w . g e o r g ia tr e n d .c o m i D E C E M B E R 2011 I 29

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