Coca-Cola Bottle

Coca-Cola Bottle

Description

JJust over a century ago, The Coca-Cola Company faced a major challenge. Copycat colas with similar names and bottle designs—Noka-Cola, Coke-Ola, and the like—openly free-rode on the popularity of the fizzy drink. In 1915 it devised a potent tool to deter knockoffs: the distinctive delivery system that we know today as the Coca-Cola bottle. A unique bottle, the company hoped, would serve as a versatile and powerful anti-fraud device. If the company’s bottlers used only this bottle, and only Coca-Cola was sold in the bottle, consumers could know exactly what they were getting. The company could sue any competitor that dared to use a similar (much less identical) bottle. Better yet, the cost and risk of development might be too great for a knockoff to even attempt. Today the famous curvy bottle is ubiquitous and synonymous with the product itself. Yet, the whole notion of bottling was actually an afterthought for the company. Early ads showed only fountain Coca-Cola. Company founder Asa Candler thought bottles were low-class and left the bottling task to others, even going so far as to enter into a perpetual contract for syrup at a set price because he was so dubious of the enterprise. Syrup was sold to bottling franchisees all over the country. Candler miscalculated, as bottle sales soon outpaced fountain sales. Even Americans who would serve themselves seated at the soda fountain could buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for a nickel. While Candler’s decision left huge profits on the table, it had the happy side effect of encouraging entrepreneurs to spread the Coca-Cola gospel. Bottling turned out be a force for consumer diversification and mass consumption. The company needed the bottlers’ cooperation and investment to make any switch to a new uniform bottle. Yet bottlers were an unlikely partner in the quest to stamp out free-riders. Early bottles could be any shape or color, required by contract merely to have diamond-shaped paper labels bearing the company’s name in capital letters. As agents of the company, some bottlers were faithless in the early days, furtively adulterating the syrup with saccharine. Soda fountains played games too, sometimes quietly swapping a different drink when customers asked for Coca-Cola—thus, Coke’s famous advertising campaign to ask for “the real thing.”) A new bottle was urgent, in part, because of infirmities in a second legal tool that the company had used against knock-offs, namely trademark law. The company began filing trademark lawsuits against similar-sounding competitors almost as soon as the first soda fountain glass of Coca-Cola was pulled in 1886. But the company’s trademark suits had a weakness. The name Coca-Cola originally referred descriptively to two key ingredients. Coca leaf gave the product its original cocaine kick; the kola nut was known as a source of caffeine. Initially, the company played up the connection with illustrations of coca leaves and kola nuts on bottle labels and advertisements. However, the description was inaccurate. Well before 1915, cocaine had been removed from the “soft” drink, and the kola nut was only used in trace amounts. The inaccuracy created problems for the company. When it sued a copycat called Koke for using a similar name, it was in turn accused of “unclean hands” for using a misleading mark. The potency of such an accusation, which could prevent enforcement of the trademark, was brought home by a non-IP case. The Food and Drug Administration complained that, because Coca-Cola contained “no coca and little if any cola,” it was misbranded, in violation of federal pure food law. The suit, quaintly named United States v. Forty Barrels & Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, ultimately settled. In the meantime, Coca-Cola quietly dropped the coca and kola illustrations. But the case showed the company’s vulnerability to a misbranding claim. The company was in a no-win legal situation. If Coca-Cola had contained cocaine, the company would have been in trouble for the cocaine, which became illegal to distribute without a doctor’s prescription in 1914. Absent cocaine and kola, its mark was misleading and arguably its product misbranded. A new bottle thus opened a new, less vulnerable front against knockoffs. Strikingly, Coca Cola’s legal department, rather than marketing, led the charge. At the time, legal was staffed by far fewer than the 100 attorneys that today constitute the internal legal office of Coca-Cola. Harold Hirsch, the company’s general counsel, exhorted the bottlers to accept a “bottle that we can adopt and call our own child.” In appealing to the bottlers’ ambition, he also revealed his own: “We are not building Coca Cola alone for today. We are building Coca-Cola forever, and it is our hope that Coca-Cola will remain the National drink to the end of time.”

Source Publication

A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects

Source Editors/Authors

Claudy Op den Kamp, Dan Hunter

Publication Date

2019

Coca-Cola Bottle

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