Coca Cola at 130: New packaging to enhance identity

The Coca Cola Company, which turned 130 years last week, is one of the world's leading beverage makers. It is present in almost every country (except Cuba and North Korea) including Sri Lanka where it was first launched in 1955.

However, Coca Cola (also called Coke) brands really took off in the island soon after the liberalisation of the economy in 1977. Today, Coca Cola has nearly 130,000 employees worldwide.

Dr .John Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta, USA was the originator of Coca-Cola in 1886. Together with his partner Frank M. Robinson, Pemberton created the famous Coca-Cola syrup which was primarily intended for patients. Robinson wrote the name joining the two 'Cs' in Spencerian script, because he thought it would work well in advertising.

One hundred and thirty years later, Coca-Cola still uses the very same script, the same logo and its headquarters is still in Atlanta.

The Coca-Cola formula and brand was bought in 1889 by Asa Griggs Candler (December 30, 1851 - March 12, 1929), who incorporated The Coca-Cola Company in 1892.

The company operates a franchised distribution system dating from 1889 where The Coca-Cola Company only produces syrup concentrate which is then sold to various bottlers throughout the world.

Recipe

The first year Coca-Cola was sold, in 1886, sales averaged a modest nine drinks per day. Today, 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola Company products are sold each day, according to the company. The Coca Cola recipe remains a secret to this day, although a purported list of ingredients was published some time back. In 1906, the first three countries to bottle Coca-Cola outside the United States were Canada, Cuba and Panama. In 1977, the contour bottle was granted registration as a trademark by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Until 1955, The Coca-Cola Company had only one product - Coca-Cola. In 1955, Fanta was introduced in Italy. Fanta was originally an orange flavoured soft which has since become available in many flavours now such as grape, peach, grapefruit, apple, pineapple and strawberry. Sprite is the other core carbonated beverage in the Coca Cola portfolio.

Expansion

In 1960, the company acquired Minute Maid with its Minute Maid, Snow Crop and Hi-C brands, and acquired Tenco, the maker of instant coffees and teas, expanding the company's beverages beyond soft drinks. Coca Cola also has a bottled water brand called Dasani in many countries.

History was made in 1982 with the introduction of Diet Coke, the first extension of the Coca-Cola and Coke trademarks. Today, there is also a Zero version. Coca Cola tried to introduce a new formula and rebrand the old formula as Classic in the late 1980s, but there was massive consumer opposition to the move and the old version was restored to its former status, though some say it was a marketing exercise.

Valuable brand

Coca-Cola, the third most valuable brand in the world according to Interbrand, is launching a new soft drink packaging from this month. In this new branding scheme, unveiled at an event in Mexico City on April 19, a Diet Coke can appears predominantly red, as do cans of Coke Zero and Coke Life-with just a sliver of their original colours peeking through one side.

Coke claims that this will make their products easier to distinguish. "We are taking the next step towards full adoption of the 'One Brand' strategy, uniting the Coca-Cola family under one visual identity and making it even easier for consumers to choose their Coca-Cola with or without calories, with or without caffeine," said chief marketing officer Marcos de Quinto in a press release.

Red Disc

Coke's in-house design team spent 18 months tweaking and testing their package designs in 14 market tests to come up with the new look. Their design solutions echo Coke's new One Brand marketing strategy, where the 130-year-old company plans to stamp all their design assets with the colours, design motifs and nostalgic themes of the bestselling classic Coke.

The new packaging, like their new ads, herald the rise of the 'Red Disc' - essentially a flat, red circle paired with the white Coca-Cola Spencerian Script logo - as the brand's singular unifying graphic element.

A Coca-Cola official told the Quartz website that the disc is meant to unify the Coke brand: "By extending the Red Disc across the variants, we are further uniting the trademark products as one Coca-Cola family."

Coke's VP of global design, James Sommerville said in a press release that the Red Disc - which appears like a rising sun in bottle labels - will be applied across "packaging, retail, equipment and experiential marketing."

Coke's One Brand packaging deployed in Mexico this month will trickle to markets worldwide by 2017. Coke, which has a reputation for memorable and even iconic advertising campaigns, will initiate a major marketing campaign for this roll out.

Warren Buffet's (third richest man in the world) Berkshire Hathaway Group is the biggest shareholder of Coca Cola.

Incidentally, Buffett, 85, credits fudge, peanut brittle and Coke for his health and happiness - and claims he gets a fourth of his daily calories from the sugary soda. He is said to drink at least five cans of Coke a day. However, both Coca Cola and its main competitor Pepsico are focusing more on bottled water and fruit drinks as consumers increasingly move away from fizzy drinks.

Coca-Cola reported US$ 44.23 billion in revenue in 2015 with a net income of US$ 7.3 billion. Coca Cola revenue fell by 4% in 1Q 2016. Foreign currency headwinds and softness in soda volumes have been the primary factors impacting the company's top line in the recent quarters, Yahoo Finance said.