Coke Corporate Bio Long on Fizzle, Not Sizzle
‘Real Thing’ examines company’s ambition in tedious detail

© 2009  • Stuart Wade • all rights reserved

The princely sum I’ll earn for writing this review will barely make a dent in my annual consumption outlay for Coca-Cola.

What exactly is it that has made me, and teeming millions of others from Moscow to Johannesburg, Coke fiends? Why do so many of us bypass morning coffee for the comforting click-shhhh of the ring-pull release of a cold 12-ounce can of sugar water, anyway?

In her bubbly corporate history, “The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company,” longtime New York Times beverage industry writer Constance Hays attempts to answer the question, “Just why is Coke ‘It’ anyway,” but the end result is more flat than fizzy.

The long-uneasy marriage between the parent company, which first got rich by selling the secret-formula concentrate, and its local bottlers, whose independence and influence spread beyond Coke’s corporate reach when it first outgrew the soda fountain, is “The Real Thing’s” real story. But this subplot is interesting in the business-school sense only.

Corporate historians and marketing strategists will enjoy this balanced and thorough book, which exhaustively chronicles Coke’s various battles, tracks its rise to international renown, thumps the company for its arrogance during the New Coke fiasco (the carbonated version of the Edsel), and culminates with the company’s meteoric 1990s ascent under the late Roberto Goizueta, who turned a $4 billion company into a $150 billion colossus.

It’s hard to pinpoint Coke’s specialness, but Hays works hard to do so. The history of Coke is a primer in 20th-century American capitalism. The brand’s fame, Coke’s pioneering marketing prowess, the curvaceous bottle, the familiar cream-and-crimson script logo and the century-old missionary zeal of Coke executives to colonize Earth with the ubiquitous brown concoction all blend into a secret formula that has earned nearly a 50 percent share of the world’s soft drink market.

The ad slogan “Always Coca-Cola ” pertains elsewhere, too. Hays writes that for those in Coke’s Atlanta headquarters, one billion global servings a day just isn’t enough.

The strategic sizzle, or fizzle, she recounts in the moments when “The Real Thing” isn’t tediously tracking the history of Coke’s original bottling families — franchisees with a license to print money, according to many Coke observers — is the company’s fanatic obsession with beating back not just hated rival Pepsi-Cola, but also coffee, tea, juice, milk, water — any beverage. Every beverage.

Even as it battles to rid the world of Diet Slice, Coke’s internal clashes have not been limited to executive-suite dust-ups, although “The Real Thing” cites numerous examples.

Hays’ book joins others, most notably Mark Pendergrast’s encyclopedic 1993 study titled, “For God, Country and Coca-Cola, ” in examining the ingredients that have made Coke an icon.

Unfortunately, “The Real Thing,” which commits to a redundant narrative theme of internal/external struggle (corporate executives labor day and night over a century to outmaneuver not only their own franchisees, but also ice water with lemon), is an acquired taste.

Stuart Wade is a frequent contributor to Books.

GRAPHIC: Constance Hays: Her ‘Real Thing’ looks at a company obsessed.

February 8, 2004, Sunday

SECTION: Lifestyle; Pg. K5

LENGTH: 533 words

BYLINE: Stuart Wade, SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN