Ben Gilbert

The good life, family, your sports heroes, beautiful people.

Christmas.

I mean, happiness generally.

You are going to want to have a Pavlovian association between your drink and happiness.

And you're going to want to spend huge amounts of money blanketing the entire world with this messaging.

Now, to build something this valuable, you also can't have a big, expensive bottling and distribution operation.

So you're going to need to figure out some clever way to get someone else's capital and employees for that while still maintaining the control that your brand requires.

I mean, ideally, it would be great if you could serve the entire world with just a few of your own production facilities.

That would be pretty great.

Yes.

And the last thing.

You must never, under any circumstances, change the formula or flavor.

Ooh.

We were doing great there.

We were doing great.

Well, we'll debate that at the end of the episode.

Listeners, of course, this playbook is almost exactly what the Coca-Cola company has done.

And they've done it over the course of 140 years.

It has its roots all the way back in the Civil War.

It grew up through the rise of the automobile, through the Great Depression, through two world wars.