Ben Gilbert

This is a whole different thing called the coca plant, not the cocoa plant.

C-O-C-A versus C-O-C-O-A.

But ultimately, it satisfied the design brief.

You definitely recognize it.

It's super distinct.

It's kind of beautiful with the sort of rounded, we'll put it in the email, all based on a misinterpretation of what the plant actually is.

But very distinctive.

Ultimately, in 1915, the patent for the contour bottle gets granted.

Actually, not referencing Coca-Cola at all, because they wanted the whole thing to be a surprise when it hits the market.

They would then—this is some classic Coca-Cola lawyering— get additional patents for iterations on the design that effectively renewed the patent all the way from 1915 until the final one expired in 1951.

The company then went to the patent office and made the case that the bottle shape was so distinctive and so well-known in 1951 that it should be granted trademark status, which they got.

It is highly unusual for packaging to be granted a trademark, and their rationale was, look, in 1949, we conducted a study that showed that less than 1% of Americans could not identify the bottle of Coke by shape alone.

It's an integral part of the product.

Yes.

There you go.

Talk about a successful accomplishment of that creative brief that all those years later, 99% of America could look at it and say, that's a Coke bottle.

Yes.

And they had gotten a variety of monkeys off their back at this point.

The cocaine is gone.

They've really started defending the trademark.