The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [10]
Coca-Cola wasn’t born in the bottle. It was concocted in 1886 by one John S. Pemberton at Jacobs’ Pharmacy, an Atlanta drugstore. For years its origin dictated the way Coca-Cola was sold—in a glass, only over drugstore soda fountains. The Coca-Cola syrup, the sweet caramel-colored base of the drink, was mixed with cold carbonated water and consumed on the spot. Today Coke is still sold the same way as a fountain drink in paper or plastic cups at sporting events, in theaters, through quick service food outlets such as McDonald’s and many thousands of outlets all over the world, but far more gallons of Coke are now sold in supermarkets and other retail outlets in bottles and cans.
Pemberton died in 1888 and the young Coca-Cola Company passed into the hands of Asa Candler, who continued to expand the business across the southern United States, but only through pharmacies. In the late nineteenth century, the soft-drink bottling process was rather primitive and sometimes dangerous with frequent explosions. Understandably, the early founders of the business in Atlanta didn’t see much future in branching out beyond soda fountain sales. (Why take the risk? See Commandment One.)
But in 1899, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, a couple of adventurous young lawyers from Chattanooga, came to Candler proposing to bottle the drink, offering to assume any of the risks. Because they saw no future in bottles, Candler agreed and literally gave away the bottling rights. Thomas and Whitehead bought the franchise to bottle Coca-Cola in perpetuity for the princely sum of just one dollar. Candler would, of course, retain the formula for the syrup and if anything came of the harebrained scheme, he’d still make money selling the syrup to the bottler or bottlers.
The bottle caught on. By 1905 there were more than two hundred bottling plants in the United States and Coca-Cola was being sold in bottles in all kinds of places, especially in the hot summer months when the small grocery stores and general stores of the time would set out large galvanized washtubs filled with ice and cold water and stocked with many different soft drinks, of which Coca-Cola was just one. There were root beers and ginger ales and orange drinks and cream sodas all together, all bottled in the same generic, eight-ounce bottle. If you reached into the tub you couldn’t tell what drink you were getting, and if the label had come off in the water, the mystery was further compounded.
Prodded by bottlers, The Coca-Cola Company, which was beginning to recognize the potential of selling Coke in bottles, commissioned the Root Glass Company to design a distinctive bottle that would incorporate the Coca-Cola trademark. They wanted a bottle that you could “feel”—something you could immediately identify by touch in those tubs of cold water.
Root came up with a unique bottle made of green glass in a unique shape, a reverse hourglass figure with a fat middle and indented sides. It was a big success with the bottlers and the customers. And it became indistinguishable, in the minds of many, from the product itself.
And, as I said, that was the trouble.
As Robert Woodruff carried out his aggressive global expansion of The Coca-Cola Company, the six-and-a-half-ounce green bottle was so entrenched that he and many others did not see any other packaging possibilities. In their view, the bottle and the Coca-Cola in it were like an egg. The shell and the contents were one, inseparable, a single thing bearing the singular trademark, Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile, in 1939, at Pepsi-Cola a marketing genius