7 strategies Coca-Cola used to become one of the world's most

recognizable brands

Coca-Cola held a massive Olympics celebration in Beijing in 2012Feng Li/Getty Images

Coca-Cola went from a cocaine-infused elixir in 1886 to a ubiquitous sugary drink by
1929.
Now people in more than 200 countries drink 1.9 billion servings every day, according
to The Coca-Cola Company.
Having a product people enjoy is far from the only thing needed to become one of the
world's most valuable companies. Coca-Cola used seven key design and marketing
strategies, which made it as recognizable in the streets of Shanghai as in its hometown
of Atlanta by the 1920s, says Coca-Cola VP of innovation and entrepreneurship David
Butler.

1. It started with a unique, market-tested formula.

Coca-Cola started as a less intoxicating version of the

coca wines that were popular in the nineteenth
century.Coca-Cola
After serving as a Confederate colonel in the Civil War,
John Pemberton wanted to develop a version of the
coca wines (basically cola with alcohol and cocaine)
that were in vogue at the time. In 1886, Atlanta passed
prohibition laws that forced beverage manufacturers to
produce non-alcoholic versions of their drinks.
Pemberton sent his nephew Lewis Newman with
samples of his formulas to a local pharmacy where
people congregated to drink these early versions of
sodas. Newman relayed feedback to his uncle about the
various concoctions, and by the end of the year
Pemberton had a recipe that was unique and tailored to
customers' tastes. The original recipe is still locked in a vault in Atlanta.
Cocaine was removed from Coke in 1903. Other minor adjustments have been made in
the past century or so, but beyond the "New Coke" disaster of 1985, the recipe has
largely remained unchanged. This decision helped the company scale, Butler writes,
since it did not spend time trying to tailor the taste to regional markets throughout the
world.

2. Its logo uses a timeless font.

The Coca-Cola Company

Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Mason Robinson, decided that Coca-Cola's logo should
be written in the Spencerian script, which accountants used, because it would
differentiate it from its competitors. The company standardized the logo in 1923 and,
like the recipe, decided that while packaging could adjust to the times, the core logo was
to be untouched.
It's resulted in a logo that has had more than 100 years to become imprinted in the
minds of people around the world.

3. It was distributed in a
proprietary bottle.

The iconic Coke bottle is

inspired by the shape of a cocoa
pod.Medicaster/Wikimedia
Commons; The Coca-Cola
Company
After the Georgia businessman
Asa Griggs Candler became the
majority shareholder of Coca-
Cola in 1888, he set his sights on
making Coke the nation's most
popular cola through marketing
and partnerships with regional
bottlers.
By 1915, Candler was losing
market share to hundreds of competitors. He launched a national contest for a new
bottle design that would signal to consumers that Coke was a premium product that
couldn't be confused with some other brown cola in an identical clear glass bottle.
The new bottle had to be able to be mass produced using existing equipment yet also be
distinct.
The Root Glass Company in Indiana decided to enter the contest and base its design off
the product's name. While combing through the dictionary for the word "coca" and
words like it, Butler writes, mold shop supervisor Earl R. Dean came across an
illustration for the cocoa plant that caught his attention. Coca-Cola had nothing to do
with cocoa, but the cocoa pod had a strange but appealing shape. He and his team got to
work and were declared the contest winners the next year.
Coca-Cola commissioned the bottle design as a piece of defensive marketing, but began
promoting the shape as much as the logo and product. Even after plastic replaced glass
as the standard means of drinking Coke in countries like the US, the company continued
to promote the image of the Coke bottle as an icon.

4. It held retailers responsible for maintaining its

high standard.

This 1890s advertisement fit into Coca-Cola's

strategy of being a premium soda distinguished
from its competitors.Coca-Cola
Ernest Woodruff's Trust Company of Georgia
bought Coca-Cola from Candler in 1919. Woodruff
was focused on maintaining a standard of
excellence as the company scaled.
The Coke team decided that its drink should be
served at 36 degrees Fahrenheit, and would send
salesmen to new retailers to tell them the product
should never be served above 40 degrees.
The tactic may seem a bit silly today, but the 36-
degree standard was just another example of
establishing Coca-Cola as a premium product that
was worthy of more attention than any of its
competitors.

5. It kept its consumer price

fixed for 70 years.

A neon Coca-Cola sign in

New York's Times Square in
the 1930s.AP Photo
It's common today for tech
startups to begin by offering a
service for free and then
charging a higher price to
consumers and/or advertisers
once they've become hooked.
Before utilizing networking
effects became a standard
practice, Coca-Cola used a
similar approach to scale
across the US and then
throughout the world.
From 1886 to 1959, a bottle of
Coke cost just five cents.
 6. It guided word-of-mouth
advertising and developed a voice.

Coca-Cola developed a voice that

was uniquely its own but adapted to
the times.The Coca-Cola Company
It became apparent after Candler
took over early in the company's life
that Coke was as much a drink as it
was a consumable brand, an idea
consumers could feel good about
identifying with.
Candler started a mass coupon
initiative that resulted in 10% of all
products from 1887 to 1920 to be given away in order to build brand awareness. He also
provided retailers with Coca-Cola swag like posters and festoons for decorations and
calendars and clocks for customers. According to Butler, Coke was a pioneer in affixing a
brand to items unrelated to the product.
And finally, all national, and then global, advertising contained variations of "Drink
Coca-Cola/Delicious and refreshing" and fit into a standardized design style.

7. It adopted a franchise
model.

Coca-Cola is bottled in a
plant in Clamart,
France.Jacky
Naegelen/Reuters
"Amid the soda wars that
broke out in the 1880s,
Candler's most significant
business decision had
nothing to do with
branding," Butler writes.
In 1899, two Tennessee
lawyers, Benjamin F.
Thomas and Joseph B. Whitehead, approached Candler and asked if he would let them
bottle Coke. The drink was sold as a syrup that retailers would mix with soda water, but
it wasn't typical to drink cola on the go or bring it into the home. Candler decided to
hand over the bottling rights for just a dollar, which he never collected, because he was
content with maintaining the rights to the syrup.
This marked the beginning of what the company internally calls The Coca-Cola System,
a franchise partnership with bottlers that allowed the brand to truly take off.
Today, there are about 275 independent bottlers around the world.
"The Coca-Cola Company isn't one giant company; it's a system of small companies,"
Butler writes. "And this pattern helps it scale new products, new communications, new
equipment, etc. Designing for this pattern is critical; when it wants to scale fast, it can."