Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
54 published records
01 / belief
“The founder then goes on to leave Coca-Cola and starts BodyArmor, a sports drink that (I think) is coconut water–based, a little bit more sugary.”
02 / belief
“Pepsi, as we’ve discussed, up until Alfred Steele came in, had always been a seat of the pants school of hard knocks management–type company. This person who joins (I think) might have been the first MBA to join the company, and he was one of the very few, even college graduates.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don’t know who the Coke II fans were, but it was available for you at some point.”
04 / commitment
“We will get there. But it’s this notion of everything should be standardized. It should be the formula, it should be the marketing, it should be the packaging.”
05 / belief
“The company’s headquarters, I think the original Lay company, is an Atlanta company.”
06 / commitment
“Now, there is still that one term of the deal that was we will always sell a gallon for a dollar.”
07 / uncertainty
“The truth is, we are not that dumb and we are not that smart.” I don’t know. It all seems pretty dumb to me.”
08 / belief
“I think that’s why we focused the bulk of the episode on the pre-1998 Coca-Cola.”
09 / observation
“The constraint is it must be a non-alcoholic beverage business. And another constraint, it must throw off many billions of dollars in dividends along the way to your shareholders.”
10 / belief
“Tab quickly becomes the best-selling diet soda in America, I think in the world, and stays that way all the way up until they released Diet Coke, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.”
11 / observation
“If you weren’t selling alcohol, which had natural preservatives, the only way that you could buy and consume a drink that really wasn’t water or milk or something was fresh.”
12 / belief
“I can truthfully say that I haven’t seen smiles spread over a bunch of boys’ faces as they did when they saw Coca-Cola in this godforsaken place.” And then, “If anyone were to ask us what we are fighting for, we think half of us would answer the right to buy Coca-Cola again.”
13 / belief
“As best as I was able to read from a few different sources, I think roughly, once Coca-Cola starts being produced in that first decade, (call it) four or five glasses of Coca-Cola would be about the equivalent of a line of cocaine today.”
14 / belief
“I asked family members, I asked people who were like, yeah, I think that was a two- or three-year period.”
15 / belief
“My opinion has always been that Coca-Cola is the type of business that can be run.”
16 / commitment
“Cocaine was really, really in America in the 1880s, perhaps foreshadowing a little bit the 1980s in America, as we will get to later in the episode.”
17 / belief
“I think Pepsi really becomes the more interesting company than Coke for at least the next, (call it) 30–40 years here after World War II.”
18 / belief
“Pepsi has 10%. I think there are a lot of things in soft drinks. If you just look at carbonated, Coca-Cola does have 47% market share and Pepsi has 19%.”
19 / commitment
“What Roberto does when he becomes CEO is he says, Don, you are my partner in crime. We are going to run this company as a team.”
20 / belief
“Atlanta, I think might have been the first major city in America that institutes prohibition and becomes a dry town, no alcohol.”
21 / commitment
“Then third, and maybe most importantly, we are going to wholeheartedly embrace a revolutionary new advertising medium in technology: television.”
22 / belief
“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.”
23 / belief
“I think the story of the last 25 years is they sit there in a privileged position, look around, and wait and see.”
24 / belief
“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.”
25 / disagreement
“All right, I disagree. I think there were definitely periods in history, yes, but in 1985, no.”
26 / belief
“I think neither Pepsi nor Coke would be what they are today or be as great a product and company as they are today if it weren’t for the other one.”
27 / belief
“I believe the way it ends up coming down is technically yes what you said, Ben, but it applies to any bottler that serves retailers that are located near a military base, regardless of whether that bottler also serves civilian customers.”
28 / belief
“Back in 1967, a young Wharton MBA graduate joins Pepsi after a few years of working at IPG, the big ad agency which owned and I believe still owns McCann Erickson, parent Company of McCann.”
29 / belief
“I think there was an element of the context of the time that came out in 1929, same year as the stock market crash.”
30 / disagreement
“I would say, not that I disagree with anything you’re saying, this just reinforces for me, this business is all about scale economies.”
31 / belief
“I’m pretty sure what actually happens is Pemberton lets his formula settle, and it’s this thick syrupy thing, brings it down the street to the first drugstore, and that druggist, that proprietor is the one who actually combines that syrup with the carbonated water and makes the choice, which I think could have gone either way.”
32 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if anyone’s told you this yet, but I think AI is the future, and it was quite helpful for me.”
33 / commitment
“Man, I had not focused on this issue at all until doing the research. I am going to only buy can and glass bottles going forward.”
34 / belief
“I think the more interesting playbook this time is a brief review of why Coca-Cola worked.”
35 / observation
“Blue, yellow. The point is, there was no standardization. All of a sudden now, Coke’s got this huge, industrial imagery machine of not only advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, but all the billboards, the signs, the point of sale merchandise, et cetera.”
36 / belief
“I think the idea is like, come on. We got to fight this. We can’t just be giving up our trademarks.”
37 / belief
“In our opinion, Coca-Cola could be classified as one of the essential morale building products for the boys in the service.”
38 / belief
“I would say Goizueta, at least as it comes across in the book Secret Formula, did a very good job of managing up and making sure that Woodruff felt taken care of and informed.”
39 / belief
“Don’s first job out of college, he worked for I believe a coffee company that ended up getting acquired by Coca-Cola, and that’s how he came into Coca-Cola.”
40 / commitment
“You can import the coca leaves, do this, create a giant pile of cocaine, and then we will watch you destroy it.”
41 / belief
“The last one I would add is that other than software and technology products, this is the first real physical product I think we’ve ever studied on Acquired, where you can have both a low-selling price and high margins.”
42 / belief
“We have a new type of plastic that we have engineered—polyethylene terephthalate or PET—that we think would be great for this application.”
43 / belief
“I think Coca-Cola would be worse off today if they didn’t go through the New Coke moment, which is crazy to say—I guess we don’t have the counterfactual—but if you just look at the data on the resurgence in Coke afterwards, you couldn’t have come up with a better marketing stunt.”
44 / belief
“Now, there have been great, incredible CEOs in Coca-Cola’s history—Candler, Woodruff, Goizueta. All of them have added on to what the Coca-Cola company is, I think.”
45 / preference
“I’ve accidentally started doing that anyway because whenever I travel now, I use those PATH Water bottles that they sell in airports and you can just refill them.”
46 / evaluation
“Not only was this radical for any brand at the time, it was especially radical for the soft drink industry because Coke was not doing anything close to this.”
47 / evaluation
“Because in 1931, Lee, Woodruff and the Coca-Cola crew create what I think is unquestionably the greatest lifestyle advertising success in human history, where they manage to associate Santa Claus with Coca-Cola.”
48 / evaluation
“They sue Pepsi for trademark infringement. Pepsi-Cola, you can’t use the word cola.”
49 / evaluation
“Lee had already created a hit slogan for Coca-Cola in Christmas of 1922 with his ‘thirst knows no season’ campaign, which is a great phrase with a great ring to it, but was particularly good because Coke had a legacy of primarily being enjoyed in the summer.”
50 / prediction
“For a token contract price of $1, which Candler never collects, the Coca-Cola company will sell syrup to Thomas and Whitehead at a volume discount price of $1 per gallon, so even less than they are selling to the individual soda fountains out there because (I think) this is going to be a higher volume business.”
51 / evaluation
“The way in which this giant mass produced thing is created, it’s only stored (I believe) in two people’s head at any given time. They deliberately kept this a trade secret and didn’t patent it, because if you patent something, eventually it does become the property of the public and anyone can use it to further innovate.”
52 / evaluation
“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.”
53 / preference
“People insist that I prefer to swing by McDonald’s to get a Coke versus getting it somewhere else.”
54 / evaluation
“I would swear up and down too, but yes, this is the best example ever though of someone electing to use a trade secret instead of a patent, and then creating all this lore, secrecy, and myth around it.”