Do you have a collection of something random in your home, even if you think and know it’s ridiculous? We collect soccer scarves and shot glasses at my house. What started out as a few here and there, has turned into a collection of hundreds. It is definitely more than I ever expected to collect. Our friends know that we have them in our house, so when they see them while on vacation, they buy them for us and our collection continues to grow. I’m definitely not complaining. It’s cool to see the places we’ve traveled and also where our friends have traveled. Collections can vary from household to household, so it only makes sense to meet Lillian, who is a wife and a mother of two. She lives in Ireland and she slowly started to collect Coca Cola memorabilia. This collection started with old Coca Cola cans about 30 years ago, and it has grown into basically a museum paying homage to Coca Cola. Check out Lillian’s house and also learn a little bit about the history of Coca Cola by reading below.
A pharmacist by the name of John Stith Pemberton, was a veteran who was wounded in the Civil War. He named Coca Cola after the two main ingredients: coca because it contained extracts of the coca leaf and kola because it contained extracts of the kola nut. That definitely makes sense, Coca Kola. After much discussion, he ended up patenting the product and sold it as a nerve tonic.
Once on the market, Coca Cola was sold as a medicinal drink. They said that it helped cure a long list of diseases to include addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headache, and impotence. In the 1800s, a lot of people suffered from neurasthenia AKA tired nerves. They said this was due to the high pace of the American life. Rumor has it that Coca Cola also helped with this ailment.
Back in the early days of Coca Cola, it did contain a trace amount of cocaine. However, by 1902 it contained as little as 1/400 of a grain of cocaine per ounce of syrup. By 1929, Coca Cola was completely cocaine free.
During World War I, there was a sugar ration which did hurt the Coca Cola brand a little bit. But lucky for them, when World War II came around, they started to market Coca Cola as a soldier’s drink. Coca Cola gave the soldiers the energy boost they needed when they were spending long hours and days out in the field. A military surgeon was quoted as saying, “I cannot conceive of a greater calamity worse than a loss of the base supply of Coca Cola.”
It was during the 1930s, that Santa Claus was introduced to the wonderful world of Coca Cola advertising. Even to this day, you’ll see Santa Claus teamed up with Coca Cola around the holidays. Coca Cola is now listed as #4 on Forbes list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands and now has a brand value estimated at $81.6 billion!!! I doubt Pemberton expected it to take off like that.
Coca Cola has a long list of trademarked and licensed drinks such as vitaminwater, Fresca, Fanta, Dasani, Barq’s, and many more! Out of the 55 billion servings of all different kinds of drinks that are consumed each and every day (other than water), 1.7 billion of those are owned by Coca Cola. That is quite the impact they have over consumers. In fact, Coca Cola has so many different drinks trademarked and licensed, that if you drank one of their drinks per day it would take you 9 years to try them all.
With a revenue of $35.1 billion, Coca Cola has the 84th largest economy in the world, which puts them just ahead of Costa Rica! Their worth is actually more than Budweiser, Pepsi, Starbucks, and Red Bull COMBINED. The worth of those four companies is right around $50 billion.
Coca Cola is being consumed by the masses. Don’t believe me? Well if you took every drop of Coca Cola that was ever consumed, put it in 8oz bottles, and laid them down on the ground end to end, you’d reach the moon and back over 2,000 times. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, if you take the 2.8 million Coca Cola vending machines in the world and stacked them on top of each other, it would take up 150.2 million cubic feet of space, which is the equivalent of 4 Empire State Buildings.
Ever wonder how Coca Cola became so popular? They spend more in advertising than Apple and Microsoft combined. In 2010, Apple had an advertising budget of $691 million, while Microsoft’s advertising budget was $1.6 billion. That seems like a ton of money until you realize that Coca Cola spent $2.9 billion on their advertising budget that same year.
It’s amazing how much Coca Cola memorabilia that Lillian has collected. It has overflowed into every square inch of her home. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been contacted about her home and all of the collectibles inside. A lot of them are in pristine condition, and could possibly be worth some serious money in the future.
I don’t drink soda too often, but some of pretty high The amount of money that has been spent over the years to push advertising and the amount of companies that Coca Cola owns is definitely the key to their success. In most cases, you have to spend money to make money, and this is definitely one of those times that it paid off. I doubt Coca Cola will be going anywhere, as it seems that they adapt to the consumer’s needs.