600 million times a day people across the globe drink a Coke. Coca-Cola is the
most recognized trademark in the world and one of the most universally
recognized words on earth. Ever wonder what's behind all this? Well to find out,
let's go back 100 years.
Hi kids, and welcome to the World of Coca-Cola.
Today at the world of Coca-Cola in downtown Atlanta, you can sample the
world's best-known soft drink, as many times as you want. You can also trace the
history of Coca-Cola.
And this is Dr. John Stith Pemberton who is credited
with having created Coca-Cola.
The year was 1886 when Doc Pemberton ,as he was
known in Atlanta, began selling his invention at drugstore soda fountains.
People liked the taste that only cost a nickel and as word got around, sales
began to climb. But before the drink made much money,
Pemberton died and Asa G. Candler bought the rights. He was a marketing genius. He
understood the power of advertising.
Very early into the early 20th century he
allocated 5, 10, 20, 50 thousand dollars towards advertising which were
phenomenal sums at the turn of the century to do advertising. He was trying
to take a product which came out of Atlanta, which came out of the south, and
to make it a national product. That was a very difficult thing to do and he
understood that the only way to do that was to advertise.
Because of advertising,
people started trying Coke but they had to go to their local soda fountain to drink
one. That is until the bottle. Bottles let people drink coke no matter where they
were or what they were doing.
At the turn of the century bottling soft drinks was a very disreputable business.
The bottling machines tended to be in stables with dirty straw and horse
droppings, a right next to the horses, and so it took many years to clean up
the bottling industry and make it successful. Once that happened, then of
course bottled Coke quickly outsold soda fountain Coke and it made the bottlers
tremendously wealthy all across the country.
Once Coke became successful in bottles, literally hundreds of people tried to
copycat it and put out competing products and for years the Coca-Cola
company spent as much money on its lawyers as it did on its advertising,
putting these copycats out of business. Where everybody wanted to create and
produce something that sounded like Coke and I mean the list is hundreds of them
but among them Africola, Americola, Alacola, Blamacola, Cafe du Ola, Carbo Cola,
Candy Cola, Capicola, Cherra cola.
In 1960 and Coca Cola came up with an
ingenious way to stop imitators. They patented a bottle so uniquely shaped
that anyone could tell that was a Coca Cola even in the dark.
Protecting Coca Cola's name with a special bottle was one thing but keeping
the formula a secret was another.
Rumor has it that the recipe has been kept
under tight security in a bank vault for 100 years.
The original people who made
Coke from the 1880s on up into the first part of this century memorized the
formula and never wrote it down and it was only committed to paper when the
company changed hands in 1919. The new owners wanted a copy of the recipe
and that is the piece of paper that remains guarded in a bank vault to this day.
The syrup itself is manufactured in a number of factories, huge factories,
around the world. The secret ingredients merchandise seven acts, that is mostly
flavoring oils, that are a closely guarded secret, that part
the syrup is manufactured in Atlanta in a building that's part of Coke
headquarters. It's kind of a secret laboratory that nobody knows much about.
But the real secret of Coca-Cola success isn't the formula afterall, it's 99%
sugar and water. The real secret is advertising. Millions of dollars worth of
successful advertising that have made Coke more than just a soft drink. Coke
has become a way to feel good, look good, make friends, have fun, and celebrate life.
I understand the coke had one of the first bathing beauty ads and they they
used models in their ads and the drawings who were quite lovely and the
idea was to suggest that coke had a a place in romance.
Even Santa Claus owes
his good looks to Coca-Cola. He wasn't always the fat jolly beloved man we know
today. Before a Coca-Cola artist created these ads in the 1930s, Santa was a lot
more serious. But it wasn't until World War two that the company realized just
how effective their advertising had truly been over the years.
Yeah, GIs is eventually they wanted cigarettes, chewing gum, mail from their
sweethearts, and Coca-Cola. Those were the things they wanted from home. As a result,
once the war was over you had a whole generation of Americans who who had gone
to war with Coke and had a loyalty to it that transcended all other product
loyalty as you can imagine.
Since 1886 Coca-Cola has gone from Atlanta, Georgia
to every corner of the earth, even up in space,
becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Why? Because we
like it, we drink over eight thousand Cokes per second, but more importantly we
like the way Coca Cola's ads make us feel.
If all the Coca-Cola ever produced were in regular size bottles laid end to end,
they would reach the moon and back 1,045 times.