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Rainwater and Hunter both believed that their contract with the company, the old document signed by Asa Candler twenty years earlier, was perpetual and unbreakable.
Ernest Woodruff.
Dobbs was no particular fan of the parent bottlers, but he believed the smart business move was to reach an accommodation with them.
Dobbs was one of the first witnesses called, and before he knew it he found himself answering embarrassing questions about how he had come to be president of the company.
The hearings lasted two weeks, and they put a fatal strain on the brittle relationship between Dobbs and Woodruff.
Dobbs’s closest ally on the board of directors continued to be Bill D’Arcy, and the two men shared the view that in spite of the financial pinch it was vital to keep advertising the product.
In signing the long contracts, he’d gambled that sugar prices would remain high indefinitely.
Actually, the preferred stock carried
no voting power, a harsh fact of life Dobbs ought to have remembered since he helped engineer the deal in the first place.
In a stroke of wicked irony, the board asked Howard Candler to return as president of the Coca-Cola Company,
J. C. Mayfield was Doc Pemberton’s last partner, a hard-luck fellow who thought he’d bought the rights to Coca-Cola in 1888 only to learn that Pemberton
had already sold them.
According to the Ninth Circuit judges, Coca-Cola had lost the right to protect its trademark because it had contained “the deadly drug cocaine” for many years,
On December 6, 1920, in an opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court rendered its decision. It was a triumph for the Coca-Cola Company.
Most ominous of all, the fortunes of the company were in the hands of Howard Candler and Ernest Woodruff, two men who didn’t understand or trust each other.
Woodruff was pressing Candler to subsidize selected retailers in every market and compel them to sell Coke for a nickel, thereby putting pressure on other retailers to cut their prices as well.
a deal was struck and the parent companies agreed to a syrup royalty of 12½ cents per gallon.
During the summer and fall of 1922, Woodruff quietly organized a holding company, the Coca-Cola International Corporation,
Woodruff had staged a coup. His son, three of his closest associates, and a new partner from New York would now be running the Coca-Cola Company.
Robert Woodruff maintained the myth. He could not bear to have anyone think his father gave him the job. And so he created an elaborate fable to explain how he rose to the presidency of Coca-Cola:
The star of the convention was the company’s new vice president for sales, Harrison Jones.
Jones had a special message for the bottlers. They were the wave of the future.
unveiled its new slogan, “Thirst Knows No Season,”
designed a carry-home carton, a rudimentary six-pack made of heavy, buff-colored paper board,
At the height of their tug of war, Ernest and Robert even fought over the allegiance of Robert’s younger brother, George.
Robert became the owner of a thousand shares of Coca-Cola and didn’t even know it.
make Robert the president of Coca-Cola.
The last thing Woodruff wanted was a flood of publicity suggesting that the Candlers were being purged from the Coca-Cola Company.
He saw people in the station drinking Coca-Cola, and he was struck by the thought that the soft drink had no natural boundaries of culture or climate.
Coca-Cola’s potential seemed limitless.
His first goal was to restore one of the company’s greatest assets, its secret formula, to the position he believed it deserved.
Woodruff decided to adopt a policy that there would never again be a change in the formula, no matter what.
“Being too lazy to think is the cause of religious prejudice—the cause of Republican administrations, threatened railroad strikes, prohibition, bad roads and divorces. People have plenty of ability to act intelligently if they would only think.”
“We wanted to promote Coca-Cola not just as a soft drink or even as ‘the leading’ soft drink,”
Haddon Sundblom, the gifted illustrator who later created Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus ads (and who was already famous for inventing Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats Man),
Coca-Cola’s primary color was red, of course, dating back to the bright paint Asa Candler chose for sprucing up the old beer kegs and barrels he used to ship his syrup.
“I learned,” Sundblom reported, “that the red, white and green combination was much more than a temporary device of harmonious color.
RED for energy, WHITE for pure wholesomeness, GREEN for refreshing coolness.”
In one recent year alone, the company had passed out a million calendars, 17 million paper napkins, 75,000 “Ice Cold” signs, 6,000 gross of pencils, 50,000 oval serving trays, 15,000 oilcloth signs, 100,000 streetcar signs, and three million blotters, all with the trademark prominently displayed.
Lee wanted Coca-Cola’s advertising to convey meaning.
Lee was masterminding one of advertising’s first
great “brand image” campaigns, investing Coca-Cola with an appeal that went far beyond its function as a product.
the English had a deep-seated, traditional dislike for chilled beverages.
he approved the use of beet sugar (rather than cane) as the sweetener in Coca-Cola sold overseas, allowing the company to save money by taking advantage of the cheap, plentiful harvests that flourished in the beet fields of Europe after the war.
Archie Lee had come up with a brilliant new catch-phrase for Coca-Cola: “The Pause That Refreshes.”
As he prepared to take command of the Coca-Cola Company, Goizueta conducted what came to be known as the “Spanish Inquisition,” a two-week interrogation of top managers in every area of the business.
Because of his quick smile and warm, ebullient nature, Keough was often underestimated and seen as a sort of corporate greeter, a gifted public speaker who had little to contribute when it came time for the harsh realities of the business.
He knew marketing inside out and had strong ideas about strategy for the company’s future.
Quoting an unnamed source, one account in the hometown Journal-Constitution described Keough as “rough, tough, not Mr. Smooth.”
“Don Keough is just plain tough. He’s just as mean as he has to be. If you get in his way, he’ll eat you alive.”
