Branding

ATLANTA – It’s hard to go anywhere in this city without encountering something connected to its most famous product.

Coca-Cola is ubiquitous around the world, but it looms especially large in this city where local scientist John Pemberton brought a jug of syrup downtown to Jacob’s Pharmacy on May 8, 1886.

The syrup was mixed with carbonated water to create what was touted as a health drink, and what we now know as classic Coke (Trademark Coca-Cola within the company) was born.

At five cents a pop, Jacob’s Pharmacy sold all of nine glasses of Coca-Cola on the first day. As Coke’s current chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent described it here last Friday night, “that was the beginning of the greatest brand-building journey the world has ever known.”

Today The Coca-Cola Company sells 1.7 billion beverages a day or about 19,400 every second, operates in 206 countries and economies, employs 700,000 people, and owns over 500 brands and some 3,500 non-alcoholic beverage products around the world.

With some 26 million Coca-Cola fans on Facebook, a Coke executive believes the figure is 10 times larger than the fans of pop superstar Lady Gaga.

Across my hotel here in downtown Atlanta sits the World of Coca-Cola museum, one of the city’s top tourist attractions. It’s a short walk to Atlanta’s other global (although much younger) brand, CNN. A few blocks away Coke has its headquarters, where Kent welcomed about 120 journalists from 26 countries last Thursday in the run-up to the company’s 125th anniversary party.

“The fact that we are 125 years old is a testament to our youth and not our age,” he said in a promo video. To us he said, “In a way we’re just getting started. We’ve just scratched the surface of our potential.”

Coke got to where it is now not only because Pemberton developed a unique and great-tasting product but also because of innovative and aggressive marketing and branding.

As I toured the company’s facilities, I wondered if a Philippine brand would ever be as globally pervasive as Coca-Cola or those other hugely successful American brands such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, Apple and Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Disney and Yahoo!

The closest we have is San Miguel beer, but the original brew was developed by a German. There’s also Jollibee.

We’re not the only ones concerned about national branding. I met New York-based Finnish journalists here who fretted that Nokia could no longer catch up with Apple or even the brands using androids that have mushroomed all over the planet.

In success there’s no room for complacency. Even Apple must constantly stay at least one step ahead of the competition.

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In the race to create global brands, I hope we won’t also be left behind in our region. The Thais, for example, have created, packaged and marketed products that we also have in the Philippines but which they are succeeding in selling as distinctively Thai.

At the New Asian Market in Basel, Switzerland, I was pleased to see Philippine products: Jack n Jill Chippy and potato chips, Oishi prawn crackers and salt-and-vinegar chicharon, MY San Sky Flakes, Sunflower crackers, Fita biscuits. There were also Saba sardines adobo, Mega sardines in tomato sauce, Silver Swan soy sauce, Mang Tomas all-purpose sauce, UFC tamis-anghang, Maynila nata de coco and kaong, Zesto dalandan and calamansi juice, and Dagupan bagoong guisado.

Thai products, meanwhile, included their excellent fish paste and fish sauce. I was disappointed to see a wide range of canned food products made in Thailand rather than the Philippines even if the principal raw materials are also found in abundance in our country, among them coconut cream, mango fruit and pulp, rambutan, aloe vera syrup and flesh, mangosteen, jackfruit and bananas.

They’re great at global market penetration, but fortunately, the Thais still have to work on product branding. But it could be just a matter of time before the Thais produce a global brand.

If we don’t watch out, our products could even face stiff foreign competition from unexpected sources. Also being sold at the New Asian Market, for example, were barbecue-flavored “speckkrusten bacon chips” from Denmark, which looked exactly like our rind-only chicharon.

I don’t think it’s just coincidence that countries whose companies have created global brands are also among the world’s most prosperous economies. The corporate culture that created these strong brands becomes a model for other companies and even for other aspects of national life.

Singapore has a global brand in Singapore Airlines. Its companies, with little room to grow if confined to the city-state and its tiny population, are selling to the world.

When a country has a global brand, it’s also a good indication of national progress. Who would’ve thought rubber flip-flops could have global appeal? The Brazilians did. Today Pinoys, like many others around the world, are snapping up Havaianas, even if they are typically 20 times more expensive than the flip-flops that have been sold for the longest time in Philippine markets.

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Coca-Cola is constantly evolving, innovating and adapting. It has turned green with eco-friendly water utilization plus its shift to its trademark PlantBottle, a fully recyclable plastic container of which 30 percent is made of plant material. It is addressing obesity concerns by putting out low-calorie, sugar-free Coke versions and expanding its fruit juices. It promotes women empowerment and sustainable agriculture. The company uses pop music extensively to attract the teen market. It commissioned Ferrari makers to design the equivalent of the iPad of beverage vending machines, the Freestyle dispenser, from which you can choose and mix over 100 beverages.

The company has also succeeded in associating its flagship product with happiness, celebration and optimism.

Celebration is something Coke does very well. Natasha Bedingfield performed live at Coke headquarters during the anniversary kick-off event on Friday night, which featured a 3-D projection of Coca-Cola imagery onto scrim that covered the entire 26-story Coke tower – the largest single building illumination in the world. The 125th birthday bash on Saturday was capped by a concert streamed online and hosted by Ryan Seacrest at the Centennial Olympic Park. I watched Kelly Clarkson belting out “Since You’ve Been Gone” in the sizzling afternoon heat.

Coke executives are aware that success, as global public affairs head Clyde Tuggle put it, “is extraordinarily fragile; it could go any moment.”

The key, he said, is to have “the humility to know that we don’t own the brand. You own the brand.”

“A brand is a promise, and a good brand is a promise kept,” Muhtar Kent told us. “We have to live with that moral contract every single day.”