David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I know you’ve been texting me all week, that you think that the whole secret formula thing is a red herring. I think there is today absolutely no value to the formula. There’s not just a thought exercise, there’s an actual conversation in the appendix of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola. Mark Pendergrast in his research found John Pemberton’s original formula from 1886 for Coca-Cola. He found it, took it to his contacts at the Coca-Cola company and said, I’ve got it. What do you guys think? And they said, well, okay. You publish it. Let’s say somebody gets a hold of this formula, what are they going to do with it? Make a drink? Okay, great. How are you going to distribute it? Okay, well, but let’s say you can figure out distribution. Well what are you going to call it? Are you going to call it Coca-Cola? Well, of course we’ll sue you for that. How are you going to brand it? How are you going to invest in marketing? Basically, how are you going to get the scale economies to do what we do? And the answer is, you’re not going to. And to your point about Pepsi… Pepsi’s got a better formula.…

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