Coca-Cola: The World Brand Ascendant

There are few brands whose image and products have no national borders. They are world brands, as welcome in Delhi as they are in Detroit, and in this century, achieving that status has been every marketer's dream.

If Walt Disney was a tad, uh, aggressive, in protecting the use and image of his name, he was pretty smart to have been so. Owning a world brand such as Disney, Xerox, Sony, Gillette, Chanel or Nike is a status that can be worth billions in extra sales. By many measures the world's best-known brand is Coca-Cola. The company has been selling on foreign shores since 1900, and it got a huge boost during World War II when 64 plants were set up to supply the troops. By 1960 Coke's muscular distribution and ubiquitous advertising, signaled by the hobble-skirt bottle and the bell-shaped fountain glass, had brought its bottlers to 88 countries. Today Coke sells 1 billion servings a day in nearly 200 countries and closely tracks its market penetration in each country, measured in servings per capita. Highest: Luxembourg, at 453 servings a year. Lowest: Turkmenistan, at 1 serving a year. Coke's challenger for world brand supremacy is McDonald's, but that's not a bad thing, either. McDonald's sells just one brand of cola: Coke.

TIME art critic Robert Hughes is the author of The Fatal Shore and American Visions

Walt Disney

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