Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m going to make money, yes. So once things turbocharge with the bottlers and scaling across America, a lot of imitators and copycats start popping up, trying to make another cola drink, use the same model, go to other bottlers or maybe other aspiring entrepreneurs who didn’t get the Coca-Cola franchise, might want to open a competitive franchise in their local town, et cetera. By the mid-1900s, there are hundreds of Coca-Cola competitors out there. There’s Afri Cola, Char Cola, Carbo Cola, Coca and Cola, Fig Cola, [...] Cola, King Cola, Standard Cola, on and on and on and on and on. And by the way, a cola like what I’m holding up right now, David, this brown flavored fizzy drink, wasn’t a thing before Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola was insistent that we aren’t the coca variant of cola. Coca-Cola is one thing that means our formula, our secret formula with this mystery merchandise 7x, which is the real crux of the formula. And there are no other things that can be colas because we created the concept of Coca-Cola and we are N of one. So in 1905, Congress passes the Federal Trademark Act in the United States, and they federalize trademark protection in the country. Previously, it was just done state by state, which I think is probably how Coca-Cola trademarked the script logo earlier than that might have just been in Georgia.…

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