Coca Cola

“You know, LeBron did a bunch of things that most guys don't do, so he turned down McDonald's and Coca-Cola early on, and why, one of the reasons why was, they basically discovered this pizza chain called Blaze, and they were like, look, you could do this McDon…”

“We have seen many Olympic ads, Christmas ads, like Coca-Cola Christmas ad was generated on Hicksville.”

“Jimmy was trying to get a deal done with Coca-Cola. An executive at Coca-Cola, Steve Hyatt, turned it down twice.”

“Corporate America, a lot of chess moves they get nervous when you move very fast, and when you make stuff creative, and where you're not playing politics, well, not for to be fair, I was playing politics terribly. You feel more like a threat than a liability t…”

“Costco is so big that its house brand, Kirkland Signature, if that was a standalone company, it would be bigger than United Airlines, Procter & Gamble, or Coca-Cola.”

“What people found in 1929 Is the value stocks had a dangerous tendency to go bust in the Great Depression, and the Coca-Colas that were horrendously expensive did not go bust.”

“Coca-Cola spending one hundred forty million dollars to influence our nutrition guidelines like they have over the last, you know, 15 years.”

“I mean, that's the entire business is just syrup, sugar, and water combined, and it's a three hundred billion dollar company.”

“Dr. Pepper predates Coca-Cola.”

“In the original Coca-Cola, for the first, I don't know, couple decades, it actually had four times the amount of caffeine that Coke does today, so it's effectively an energy drink, even leaving the cocaine aside.”

“As best as I was able to read from a few different sources, I think roughly once Coca-Cola starts being produced in that first decade, call it four or five glasses of Coca-Cola would be about the equivalent of a line of cocaine today.”

“Frank Robinson, the business partner who also named the drink. He also introduces the script logo. Like he writes out the Coca-Cola script logo that we still use to this day.”

“And this is the very first manufacturer's coupon redeemable at a retailer.”

“Coke, when they were selling gallons of syrup to the soda fountains, they sold them for about a dollar and 30 cents per gallon. The soda fountains then sold drinks to customers at five cents a drink. They're 120 drinks per gallon. They're making six dollars an…”

“In that next year, 1891, when Asa Candler buys the last piece to fully own Coca-Cola, he got an incredible deal. Even with all that growth having already happened, he only paid 2300 dollars to buy it all.”

“And at this point in history in 1900, the Coca-Cola company is still just 20 employees.”

“If they had taken the Amex approach and Candler had decided, ah, you know, we're gonna enter the bottling business ourselves and We're going to go market by market and invest the capital in the production lines and the bottles. Absolutely no way would they hav…”

“More than some money, the local Coca-Cola bottlers usually become the wealthiest family in any given town across America.”

“The Coca-Cola company has higher gross margins, much better returns on invested capital, requires less invested capital. They get to focus on just making syrup and marketing. They don't have to do any of the undifferentiated stuff. You'd much rather be Coca-Co…”

“So over the next, like, 1520 years, by the mid-twenties, it's estimated that Coca-Cola sues and shuts down over 7000 Copycat cola brands in a very, very busy legal department.”

“In 19 oh three, They contract with a company called the Schaefer Alkaloid Works of Maywood, New Jersey, that has developed a process to decocanize coca leaves. And this company, which still exists to today and is still the sole supplier of decocanized coca lea…”

“And the Supreme Court says we are ruling in favor of Coca-Cola. It is a phrase that has transcended being a descriptive name, and it is now just a brand. And the official ruling, which is the stuff of legend, contains this phrase. Coca-Cola means a single thin…”

“Something got lost in translation, and the bottle was designed to look like the cocoa plant. The cocoa pod that you smash open to get out cocoa beans. This is a whole different thing called the coca plant, not the cocoa plant. C O C A versus C O C O A.”

“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.”

“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 Which they got. It is highly unusual for packaging to be granted a trademark.”

“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.”

“This is actually the first time the secret formula for Coca-Cola gets written down. It had been sort of this cool secret before, but as collateral for the loan that Woodruff took out to complete this transaction, they wrote down the formula and placed it in a …”

“Lee goes out and he contracts with all these famous American artists and illustrators of the day to create these like American lifestyle tableaus for the visual aspects of the Coke ads... They actually go get Norman Rockwell. Along with N.C. Wyatt and Haddon S…”

“And so he and the Darcy agency come up with a list of commandments for the Coca-Cola account. Some of them are never split the trademark Coca-Cola on two lines. Coca-Cola must always be together on one line. The circular sign should always carry the phrase del…”

“Because in 1931, Lee and Woodruff and the Coca-Cola crew create what I think is unquestionably the greatest lifestyle advertising success in human history, where they manage to associate Santa Claus with Coca-Cola.”

“Coca-Cola was a sponsor of the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, which makes them the longest running Olympic sponsor.”

“There's so much margin to go around being the retailer. Of soft drinks, especially at this time, that they were making more money on coke than gas.”

“And so he changes course for the Coca-Cola company and says, I'm now willing to buy and own and operate bottlers. Oh, not because I want to, but as a way to like force standardization and clean up underperforming bottlers, I'll buy them out, fix them up, and t…”

“Coke can be profitable at way lower end consumer prices than the other subscale companies.”

“Pepsi tried to sell itself to Coca-Cola, like sell its operations to Coca-Cola three separate times over the years.”

“This is textbook counter positioning. Coca-Cola cannot respond because they and their bottlers have just invested all of this capital and all of this IP into the six and a half ounce contour bottle. They can't react.”

“1941 to 19 45, 64 portable bottling plants were sent to Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and the best estimates are that more than five billion bottles were distributed to troops during the war.”

“They would change the formula and they would launch it in the U S later in 1960, but Fanta has its origins as we can't get real Coca-Cola in Germany during World War II.”

“In fact, Robert Woodruff was openly supporting segregationist politicians during this time.”

“Consumers, when presented with the two drinks, Coke and Pepsi, in a blind taste test, a statistically significant number of people prefer Pepsi. The taste of Pepsi.”

“Tab quickly becomes the best-selling diet soda in America, I think in the world, and stays that way all the way up until they release Diet Coke, which we'll talk about in a little bit.”

“The thing that is definitely true is Coca-Cola ships the formula to McDonald's in stainless steel tanks instead of being delivered in bags.”

“Coke sales teams are prohibited from selling syrup to restaurants for less than McDonald's pays, even if it means they're going to lose the business to Pepsi.”

“Made a giant mistake not buying it.”

“They got the budget greenlit from the head of advertising at Coca-Cola to do the most expensive ad of all time, a 100,000 dollar budget.”

“So then the band goes and re-records it as a real song to release on an album that has different lyrics than I'd like to buy the world of Coke. And it turns out to become a best-selling song also.”

“I was looking up studies recently, and the Coca-Cola company is the number one polluter globally of Crap in the ocean. Pepsi's very close behind all the big drink companies.”

“In 1977, Pepsi outspends Coke in advertising for the first time in history. And Pepsi actually passes Coke in market share in the bottled market.”

“So starting in 1980, he got 50%, and then by 1984, they were replaced at a hundred percent.”

“Keo converts him to Coke by telling him about this new product that they're going to launch, Cherry Coke, because Buffett loved cherry syrup in his Pepsi, and so he converts Warren to a Coke guy before Warren ever invests a dollar in the Coca-Cola company.”

“Later on at Sun Valley, Bill Gates lets it slip on a panel with Warren and Roberto and Don Keogh that Warren has always told Bill that Coca-Cola could be run by a ham sandwich.”

“By the end of 1983, the first full year on the market, Diet Coke is the number one diet drink in America. And unlike Tab, which clearly from That commercial that you talked about earlier was exclusively marketed to women. 30% of Diet Coke drinkers, even in the…”

“And Diet Coke costs significantly less for Coke to produce because it doesn't have sugar.”

“Coca-Cola is a singular N of one product. Coca-Cola does not exist in a universe with other competitors. And here's Bill Cosby directly talking about Pepsi and the challenge. It's the worst thing that Coca-Cola could possibly do.”

“So it turns out that in all the research that they conducted for New Coke, all 200,000 people that they did the taste test with They never asked them how they would feel if this new beverage replaced the old Coca-Cola.”

“There was 79 days between when they released new Coke and when Coca-Cola classic made its return.”

“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”

“So he pitches Coke that CAA can make 40 ads a year for them. For the same cost that McCann Erickson is making seven and they can all stay unified under the new Coke slogan of always Coca-Cola.”

“CAA wins the business. Dethrones McCann Erickson. And among the many ads that they create for Coke is a new Christmas Coca-Cola motif, not featuring Santa Claus, but instead the polar bears.”

“In 2000, the CEO of Coke announces publicly a sixteen billion dollar deal to acquire Quaker Oats and Gatorade... So he announced it without board approval. The board rejected it after the public announcement. The deal falls through and the next year Pepsi ends…”