Last Monday I took a look at the two versions of the creation of Coca-Cola: the version the Coke company has on their web page, and the much longer version presented in the book A History of the World in Six Glasses.  Today I’m exploring why there’s a difference between the two versions.

The Coca-Cola company is obviously a company that’s concerned with with how they’re perceived by the public.  One way to manage public perception is through the use of history; in this case, with how they present the creation story of Coca-Cola.

As I outlined on Monday, the longer creation story has these elements:

• John Pemberton tried to copy an existing product.
• That product was a kind of patent medicine made with wine, which wasn’t unusual because patent medicines contained things like alcohol, opium, and cocaine.
• Pemberton spent time retooling the product to not contain alcohol.
• Early on, Coke was advertised as both a medicinal cure-all and a non-alcoholic drink.

The version of the story on the Coca-Cola website has these elements:

• Pemberton created Coca-Cola
• it was ‘excellent’ from the beginning, and sold quickly.

The Coca-Cola Company’s version is much shorter and simpler.  It drops elements of the story that could be controversial.  It loses the idea that the inventor of Coke was originally trying to make a type of product that was notoriously dangerous and addictive (patent medicines were so bad that, in a time when the government generally let businesses do whatever they wanted, the government began to take steps to control just what medicines could contain).  It also loses the idea that the product that eventually became Coke was originally supposed to contain wine.  Furthermore, the whole concept of copying an existing product disappears from the story—Coca-Cola is, after all, a well-established company that does not shy from taking legal steps against products that are too similar to its own products.  As an example, Coke spent time in the early 20th century in court with Pepsi, arguing that aspects of Pepsi’s business were too close to Coke’s for comfort.

It’s fairly obvious why a company wouldn’t want anything controversial on their website.  There are two other changes to the story, though, that don’t just ignore parts of the story but actively try to spin it.

First, there’s no mention that John Pemberton did any experimenting with the Coke recipe.  Gone is the time he spent making a copy of the French wine patent medicine, and then the time involved with making a non-alcoholic version.  Instead, he simply creates the formula in a day—May 8, 1886, as the website says.  The second change to the story is the addition of a bunch of people proclaiming the new drink “excellent.”  Not only did Pemberton not experiment with a formula, but he succeeded in making a wonderful drink on the first try.

The intention of the Coke company’s version of the story, then, is to simplify the overall story but also to present the drink as something that was perfect from day one.  Far more than other foods, the makeup of Coke is part of its myth, a formula that’s supposedly so secret that only a few people in the world know it (which seems ridiculous—what if those few people happened to die within a very short span of time?).  Presumably, since Pemberton’s creation was pronounced excellent on delivery, it has been excellent ever since.

The Coca-Cola company is in a strange position.  On the one hand, they have an extremely well-known brand with strong sales, but on the other hand, Coke is nothing more than water with some extra things added that competes with lots of other versions of essentially the same thing sold by other companies.  In order to keep Coke selling strongly they sell a set of ideas rather than a taste (and how do you even describe the taste of Coke?) and one of those ideas focuses on the purity and essence of Coca-Cola.  This idea says that Coke tastes good and always has, even since the day of its creation.  The company manages these ideas mostly through advertising, but also through spinning its creation story on its website.  By leaving out parts of the story and changing what’s there, the company is able to continue selling more and more Coca-Cola.