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D. Murali

IT began as a drink, as dark as night, and became an experience, flowing over time and place, linked by memory to the meal on the table and the company at hand," writes Constance L. Hays in The Real Thing, published by Random House (www.atrandom.com) . The book is about the "truth and power at the Coca-Cola Company"; about Coke that has "crossed the line between consumer product and object of desire"; and about a legend ranked recently as the fifth `most respected company' in the world by a 2004 survey by FT/PwC.

It was in 1888 that Asa Candler bought `the secret formula' from its inventor, John Pemberton. "Drugstores were perfect locations" for the promotion of the drink, because there were health claims, as "brain tonic that could cure headaches and exhaustion" and also "nerve tonic." Customers came in to the shop, placed their orders, watched the pharmacist mix "an ounce of syrup with five and half ounces of carbonated water", and drank it "inside the establishment." In 1889, the company sold 2,171 gallons of its syrup to fountains. Just five years later, sales topped 64,000 gallons.

To the original formula, Candler had added "a small string of other products," one of which was BBB, "officially registered as Botanic Blood Balm," and another was `Delectalave,' a liquid toothpaste. The formula has remained hush-hush and Candler took extra care: When he moved into a new building in 1898, "he designed and built a laboratory that was shielded by fireproof partitions and furnished with a sheet-iron safe door with a combination lock." However, when "technology caught up to rhetoric," Hays notes, the secret formula was "little more than a marketing gag," and "schoolchildren could approximate Coca-Cola in science class, using the right combination of known elements."

Almost a century ago, Whitehead and Thomas had bottlers from coast to coast in the US. "They caught the nation in peacetime," writes Hays. "Consumer culture was flourishing and the act of drinking or eating something that had been made outside the home was increasingly acceptable." The product was easy to ingest and so attracted the widest range of customers. Bottlers became "as indigenous to the American scene as the post office or the fire department."

Twelve years junior was Pepsi. Hays describes how in the 1930s when the "upstart" was "on the brink of bankruptcy," a suggestion came from "a used-bottle dealer" — "that it would be less costly to use old beer bottles than to buy new ones for Pepsi-Cola." Then came a more daring suggestion: "more generous serving." Stock "flew from the shelves" because price was half and the product "pretty much the same" — "both brown, both caffeinated, both sweet." The real beneficiaries of the `cola wars' have been the ad agencies.

One of the greatest debacles was New Coke, which was withdrawn "seventy-eight days after the unveiling," in 1985. The old secret formula had been tinkered in the face of the `Pepsi Challenge.' About it, Roger Enrico, Pepsi's president, had this to say: "God knows how they did it, but they had blown it. It just didn't taste good. It was not like the old Coke. It wasn't a good Pepsi, either. It was like painting by numbers, built from consumer research. It wasn't any good."

When consumers in more than 200 countries enjoy the company's beverages "at a rate exceeding 1 billion servings each day," there is a temptation to be smug. But there are newer problems too, such as what you find on www.karmabanque.com. Max Keiser, an "investment activist," is teaming up with the editor of the Ecologist magazine, Zak Goldsmith, and plans to get Coke's shares shed half their value in about a year. Their new hedge fund promises to donate profits from short-sales in Coke's stock "to the victims of Coke's business model in places like India and Colombia."

Too real for The Real Thing?

BookMark@thehindu.co.in

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