In 1980, a small art theatre film, The Gods Must Be Crazy took the world by storm. It is a simple story. A pilot, flying over a country we presume is Africa, finishes off a bottle of pop, a bottle which has no name on it, but is green and has a recognizable shape. The bottle hits a native on the head, and all the natives of the tribe immediately look on it as an amazing icon sent from the Gods to bless the village. But the bottle, instead, causes jealousy, anger and possessiveness. And so the native decides to return the thing back to where it came from, to the land of the Gods (Shickel, 1985 83).
At no time does the movie mention the name "Coca Cola," nor is the name ever apparent on the bottle. But such is the power of the Coca-Cola Company that not only is the brand name recognized around the world, but also the actual shape of the brand's original bottle is recognized enough so that every reviewer who wrote about the film said the bottle was a Coke bottle. That is a brand marketer's dream. The reason, as a footnote, why the Coca Cola name does not appear is that the filmmaker, working on a small, small budget could not afford the licensing fees and so only kept the "shape" of the bottle.
The film maker was not aware that in 1977, the U.S. Patent Office granted Coke a trademark for the package design, a very rare distinction granted to only a handful of products. Actually, the strategy behind the development of the bottle, designed in 1915, suggests a corporate attitude and dedication toward planning that remains today.
In the early 1900s, customers were confusing the straight-up Coca-Cola bottles with "wannabes." Thus, the company set out to develop a bottle that a "a person could recognize in the dark, so shaped that, even if broken, a person could tell at a glance what it was." On top of that, it had to fit existing bottling equipment (Watters, 1978, 34).
In 1915, the Root Glass Company of Terre Haute,...