Name: How Coca-Cola Profited From Another Company’s Mistake
Uploaded: 2015-12-28
Duration: 2 min 26 s
Description: It happened 100 years ago

[ MUSIC ] That brilliant act of mistaken identity went to the Coke bottle. A wonderful mistake actually. 1913 was when they first came up the idea that they needed to have a very distinct bottle. The drink became so popular so quickly. What happened is people with imitate us People called it celery cola, lime cola. Coca noa, toka cola, my favorite my cococo. So Isa Candler at the time who was running the company, said let's try to make ourselves different, and he put a label on the side of the bottle. But when bottles were held in ice baths, the label would just fall off. So they put out a competition basically for $ 500. For a glass company that could come up with a design that nobody else had that we could trademark. And the description for the brief was it had to be recognizable in the dark or broken on the ground. And with that simple brief the course of the company was changed. [ MUSIC ] The root glass company in Tera Hote Indiana received this brief And they sent two of their researchers to the local library for design inspiration. They thought that a cocoa pod or cocoa was part of Coca Cola. But if you've ever seen a cocoa pod, it's bulbous in nature and has these ribs that go up and down. But the one problem was the bottle was so thick in the middle it couldn't fit through the bottling equipment that was already established. They said, alright, we'll thin it down and that's the contour bottle that we know today. [ MUSIC ] The very first painting that included a Coke bottle that I've ever been able to document was by Salvador Dali in 1944 and it was called poetry in America. Then Andy Warhol made the Coke bottle even more famous I am incorporating this art. His instantly identifiable.. put the picture of the counter bottle on the sides of..... People do not realize that. Before they realized that, It is has been doing this for a long time but it has been doing that since 1960. I think the coke bottle were Time goes I think the form itself won't change. What if we get a better material to work with in the future? What if we get something that will allow us to apply the beautiful concept of the contour bottle to a new material? I think our design group would be excited. To have that challenge. [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ]