If you’re just joining me, you’ve hit week 3 of my family playing tourists in our hometown, Atlanta. You can read about our tour of Oakland Cemetery Here and our fiasco on Bolton Road Here.
All caught up? Good!
Now you’re ready to read about the most touristy thing anyone in Atlanta can do….
Visit the World of Coke
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| My sister’s three kids with my son. Behind them are four giant coke bottles donated from New York, China, New Zealand, and Argentina for the 1996 Olympic games. |
We’re very excited that my sister and her family have moved back to Georgia after 11 years of wandering in the wilderness of Pennsylvania and Florida. We are still coming to terms with the reality that two of her children were born up North. But we will forgive them and introduce them to their new hometown, Atlanta, in an attempt to undo any possible damage that 11 years away have wrought. 😉
The World of Coke is essentially a giant homage to the history of one company’s brilliant marketing strategies and is itself a brilliant marketing strategy. It says little about the company’s founding story, which I find so fascinating, and focuses instead on its global reach, attempting to create a narrative that coke=happiness. The museum does this successfully.
Coke was born out of the final (arguably) battle of the civil war. It took place in Columbus, Georgia after Appomattox (they hadn’t gotten the message yet). A pharmacist named John Pemberton was injured in the battle and subsequently became hooked on morphine to ease the pain.
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| A restored soda fountain from Tombsboro, Georgia, ca. 1880. |
He began searching for an alternative to morphine and invented French Wine Coca as a result. We all know, after all, that wine and cocaine are better for us than morphine, right? The product became popular, he sold the formula, it evolved over the years, and the rest is history.
At the museum, we learned about Coke’s advertising history and how the product is bottled. We watched a 4-D film in which the seats moved and water was sprayed on us. We got to see the vault that holds Coca-Cola’s secret hand-written formula.
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| Coke owes its successful marketing to showing people having fun together with the product rather than simply describing it. |
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| “Seeing the sausage made” |
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| Top secret formula. What are those “natural flavors?” |
But the most fun was the tasting room. There are Coke drinks from all over the world, and you can sample as much as you’d like. This was a big hit with the kids, who were on a sugar high the rest of the day.
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| My husband and son sampling coke from Asia |
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| Coke from Africa |
We were very happy to have made it this time. I successfully used the Google Maps App for the first time, and it only steered us wrong once.
Leave a comment below to share your summer adventures, and check back next Monday for more of mine.
