Coca-Cola, every mention

Coca-Cola: The Complete History & Strategy (Audio) · Acquired Nov 24, 2025 · 100 mentions

• ▶ 48:09 David Rosenthal So basically this creates a second wave of blitzscaling, if you will, for the Coca-Cola company across America, because they'd already nationally expanded to soda fountains, but soda fountains are only in towns large enough to have a soda…
• ▶ 48:36 David Rosenthal The net of this is that within a few years, basically every single man, woman, and child in the United States becomes intimately aware of and familiar with Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 48:49 David Rosenthal And the company doesn't have to lift a single finger to do it.
• ▶ 49:15 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola is sort of in the same thing here, where they can scale so fast because of the bottlers,
• ▶ 49:20 Ben Gilbert Where they're not actually having to do all this work themselves.
• ▶ 49:24 Ben Gilbert I don't think Coca-Cola is the ubiquitous international product that it is today where they just created and then won the market without this bottler scale thing.
• ▶ 49:37 David Rosenthal If they had taken the Amex approach and Candler had decided, ah, you know, we're gonna enter the bottling business ourselves and
• ▶ 49:51 David Rosenthal Absolutely no way would they have reached the critical scale that they did in the country.
• ▶ 49:57 David Rosenthal And then internationally too, they use the same model to go around the world.
• ▶ 50:02 Ben Gilbert And Coca-Cola would start referring to this as the Coca-Cola system.
• ▶ 50:06 Ben Gilbert I don't think we've ever studied a business before that has a system like this, where you can look at the Coca-Cola company, which is ostensibly what we're doing on this episode, but actually to understand the scale and impact and reach of…
• ▶ 50:28 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola still doesn't bottle.
• ▶ 50:30 Ben Gilbert We can talk about the exceptions to that, but in large part, and their desired end state is there's all these bottlers around the world that they just sell syrup to.
• ▶ 51:20 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola does the exact same thing with the bottlers and they say, Hey, you have a license to print money.
• ▶ 51:29 David Rosenthal More than some money, the local Coca-Cola bottlers usually become the wealthiest family in any given town across America.
• ▶ 51:38 Ben Gilbert But just to make sure we're super clear, Coca-Cola versus their bottlers.
• ▶ 51:43 Ben Gilbert The Coca-Cola company has higher gross margins, much better returns on invested capital, requires less invested capital.
• ▶ 51:49 Ben Gilbert They get to focus on just making syrup and marketing.
• ▶ 51:52 Ben Gilbert They don't have to do any of the undifferentiated stuff.
• ▶ 51:54 Ben Gilbert You'd much rather be Coca-Cola than the bottlers.
• ▶ 52:04 Ben Gilbert And if the Coca-Cola company is going to dictate terms to me and tell me exactly how red my truck needs to be and that it must say Coca-Cola in this particular way and the bottles must come off exactly like this, that is fine.
• ▶ 52:23 David Rosenthal Once things turbocharge with the bottlers and scaling across America, a lot of imitators and copycats start popping up, trying to make another cola drink, use the same model, go to other bottlers or maybe other aspiring entrepreneurs who…
• ▶ 52:46 David Rosenthal By the mid-nineteen-hundreds, there are hundreds of Coca-Cola competitors out there.
• ▶ 53:02 Ben Gilbert And by the way, a-Cola, like what I'm holding up right now, David, this brown-flavored fizzy drink, wasn't a thing before Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 53:09 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola was insistent that
• ▶ 53:14 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola is one thing that means our formula, our secret formula with this mystery merchandise, seven X, which is the real crux of the formula.
• ▶ 53:24 Ben Gilbert And there's no other things that can be Colas because we created the concept of Coca-Cola
• ▶ 53:42 David Rosenthal Previously, it was just done state by state, which I think is probably how Coca-Cola trademarked the script logo earlier than that might have just been in Georgia.
• ▶ 53:51 David Rosenthal Of course, the Coca-Cola company is one of the first registrants for their trademark,
• ▶ 54:09 Ben Gilbert We own Coca-Cola as a lockup.
• ▶ 54:13 David Rosenthal So over the next, like, 1520 years, by the mid-twenties, it's estimated that Coca-Cola sues and shuts down over 7000
• ▶ 54:29 David Rosenthal And this becomes the next critically important pillar of building Coke.
• ▶ 54:33 David Rosenthal Only Coke is the real thing.
• ▶ 54:36 David Rosenthal Coke is real.
• ▶ 54:49 Ben Gilbert There was a company called the Coke Company, K-O-K-E, that was insisting, actually, it's worth an aside here to say, at this point in time, Coca-Cola did not embrace the nickname Coke.
• ▶ 55:08 Ben Gilbert There's no more Coke in Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 55:25 David Rosenthal And this company, which still exists to today and is still the sole supplier of decocanized coca leaves to Coca-Cola today is granted a federal exemption by the U S government from the DEA.
• ▶ 55:50 David Rosenthal They sell the decocainized coca leaves to Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 56:11 Ben Gilbert And that's still how they produce Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 56:14 David Rosenthal Yeah, which is also another piece of protecting Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 56:34 Ben Gilbert You guys aren't saying you're Coke, so certainly we can be Coke.
• ▶ 56:38 Ben Gilbert And the other point they were making is Coca-Cola
• ▶ 56:57 Ben Gilbert And the Supreme Court says, uh, we are ruling in favor of Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 57:12 Ben Gilbert Coca-Cola means a single thing coming from a single source and well-known to the community.
• ▶ 57:19 Ben Gilbert And that is the new description of what the Coca-Cola brand is and why it is a trademarkable thing that has nothing to do with Coca or Cola.
• ▶ 57:28 David Rosenthal So this is the first biggest front of the war that Coca-Cola wages on the imitators through the courts.
• ▶ 57:50 David Rosenthal So Coca-Cola realizes, hey, we're not actually in the bottling business ourselves.
• ▶ 57:59 David Rosenthal If we really want to drive home to consumers that Coca-Cola is the real thing and have it be immediately identifiable what the real thing is, we actually can force our bottlers to develop and invest in a proprietary bottle.
• ▶ 58:27 David Rosenthal And this results in 1916 in the famous proprietary bottle that you all know today, the Ben you are drinking out of right now, the contour bottle as it is officially called, or as it is then known, uh, in the vernacular, the Mae West bottle.
• ▶ 58:55 Ben Gilbert So in 1912, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company sent a note to all of its members that Coca-Cola Company has this great distinctive logo.
• ▶ 58:55 Ben Gilbert So in 1912, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company sent a note to all of its members that Coca-Cola Company has this great distinctive logo.
• ▶ 59:29 David Rosenthal At the convention of the bottlers, where I think they approved this, the Coca-Cola company's head of legal, a guy named Howard Hirsch, who was doing all these lawsuits of the imitators across the country,
• ▶ 59:51 David Rosenthal We are not building Coca-Cola alone for today.
• ▶ 59:55 David Rosenthal We are building Coca-Cola forever.
• ▶ 59:57 David Rosenthal And it is our hope that Coca-Cola will remain the national drink to the end of time.
• ▶ 1:01:08 Ben Gilbert You all know what it looks like, the contour bottle.
• ▶ 1:02:17 Ben Gilbert Ultimately in 1915, the patent for the contour bottle gets granted actually not
• ▶ 1:02:23 Ben Gilbert Referencing Coca-Cola at all, because they wanted the whole thing to be a surprise when it hits the market.
• ▶ 1:02:28 Ben Gilbert They would then, this is some classic Coca-Cola lawyering, get additional patents for iterations on the design that effectively renewed the patent all the way from 1915 until the final one expired in 1951.
• ▶ 1:02:43 Ben Gilbert The company then went to the patent office and made the case that the bottle shape was so distinctive and so well known in 1951 that it should be granted trademark status
• ▶ 1:02:59 Ben Gilbert And their rationale was, look, in 1949, we conducted a study that showed that less than one percent of Americans could not identify the bottle of Coke by shape alone.
• ▶ 1:03:18 Ben Gilbert 99% of America could look at it and say, that's a Coke bottle.
• ▶ 1:03:24 David Rosenthal So, by the next year, one year after, everybody in the extended Coca-Cola family system is prospering, and nobody more so than the Coca-Cola company at the top.
• ▶ 1:03:40 Ben Gilbert Yes, and they had gotten a variety of monkeys off their back at this point.
• ▶ 1:03:59 David Rosenthal And by this point in time, the Coca-Cola brand and what it stands for and the beverage, delicious, refreshing, it's such an integral part of America that taking out the cocaine, cutting the caffeine by two-thirds or by three-quarters,
• ▶ 1:04:16 David Rosenthal The country is still hooked on Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 1:04:22 Ben Gilbert It makes it so you can consume a lot more Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 1:04:29 David Rosenthal Nobody's doing better than the Coca-Cola company.
• ▶ 1:04:32 David Rosenthal Asa Candler is a big man about town in Atlanta, probably the most important person in town, so much so that a group of other Atlanta citizens convince him to run for mayor, which he does, and he wins and becomes the mayor of Atlanta in…
• ▶ 1:04:58 David Rosenthal And then a couple of years later in 1919, a local banker named Ernest Woodruff puts together an investor syndicate and basically stages a takeover of the company and buys out the family members for twenty five million dollars.
• ▶ 1:05:16 David Rosenthal This also effectively serves as the IPO of the company because it's a syndicate of investors and shares start trading hands and the company becomes publicly traded.
• ▶ 1:05:32 Ben Gilbert And it was a complicated little period, because some of the kids did want to have this happen, other ones didn't want to have it happen, they're sort of family infighting, but ultimately, after a few years, Ernest Woodruff and his…
• ▶ 1:05:52 Ben Gilbert To buy this company, like, twenty five million dollars in 1919 is a huge amount of money, and so as a result, this is actually the first time the secret formula for Coca-Cola gets written down.
• ▶ 1:07:36 Ben Gilbert But Coca-Cola has kept this secret all these years.
• ▶ 1:07:39 David Rosenthal And it's still part of the lore of the company to this day that, oh, there's two people that know the formula and they can't travel together.
• ▶ 1:07:51 Ben Gilbert The Coca-Cola company would maintain that is absolutely not true.
• ▶ 1:08:36 David Rosenthal So the company plods along for a couple years with the existing management team.
• ▶ 1:09:25 Ben Gilbert I mean, for all the John Pemberton lore and all the Asa Candler lore, Coca-Cola, as we know it today, is Robert Woodruff's Coca-Cola.
• ▶ 1:10:42 David Rosenthal So yeah, there's an alternative future where instead of CEO of Coke,
• ▶ 1:10:50 David Rosenthal And Robert, through his own devices, again, almost against his father's will, had been an original investor in the syndicate that bought out Coke from the Candlers.
• ▶ 1:11:01 David Rosenthal So the board of Coke makes Ernest consider his son.
• ▶ 1:11:10 David Rosenthal His first offer to Robert to come be the new president of Coca-Cola is a salary less than half of what he's making at white motor company.
• ▶ 1:11:33 David Rosenthal Everything gets handed over to me and I am going to have full control and run this company.
• ▶ 1:11:41 David Rosenthal So in 1923, Robert takes over as president of the Coca-Cola company, becoming the youngest president of any major corporation in America at that time.
• ▶ 1:11:53 David Rosenthal He would run the company for the next 32 years as president and then control the company as chairman of the board for another 30 years after that until his death in 1985.
• ▶ 1:12:07 David Rosenthal One of the first moves that Robert makes when he comes in is to become close with the head ad man at Coke's ad agency at the time, a firm in St.
• ▶ 1:12:20 David Rosenthal And Coca-Cola's main creative account man there is a guy named Archie Lee.
• ▶ 1:12:27 David Rosenthal Lee had already created a hit slogan for Coca-Cola in Christmas of 1922 with his thirst knows no season campaign, which is, you know, a great phrase with a great ring to it, but was particularly good because Coke had a legacy of primarily…
• ▶ 1:12:55 David Rosenthal And together, Archie Lee and Robert Woodruff make a pretty massive leap forward for Coca-Cola advertising, and it's really the last critical piece of the brand.
• ▶ 1:13:26 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is inventing this idea that through advertising, we can associate our products with feelings.
• ▶ 1:13:52 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola isn't a
• ▶ 1:13:53 David Rosenthal Carbonated sweetened soft drink with unique flavor manufactured by the Coca-Cola company.
• ▶ 1:13:59 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is happiness.
• ▶ 1:14:01 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is friendship.
• ▶ 1:14:08 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is summertime.
• ▶ 1:14:10 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is holidays.
• ▶ 1:14:12 David Rosenthal Coca-Cola is Christmas.
• ▶ 1:14:14 Ben Gilbert And whether you are in America or not in America, Coca-Cola is America.
• ▶ 1:14:24 David Rosenthal So Archie eliminates basically all verbiage from Coca-Cola advertising, except for one simple slogan.
• ▶ 1:14:46 David Rosenthal In 19, 23, when Robert takes the helm of the company, they come out with Coca-Cola.