Abstract This research considers The Coca-Cola Company from an ...

Coca-Cola 9
successful new product launch in 25 years, which coincidentally, was the introduction of Diet
Coke. With both its diet bases covered, the company devised what it calls the “three-cola
strategy” for its trademark brands, with Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke and Coke Zero each
hitting a specific target audience (Theodore, 2008).
Water “the real thing”
Along an industrial stretch of North Cobb Parkway in Marietta sits a bottling
facility, owned and operated by Coca-Cola Enterprises. It was built in 1968, a sprawling plateau
of blond brick and siding. On the front, facing the parkway, a weathered Coca-Cola logo hangs
next to a long tinted window. Inside, bottles wind down a gleaming silver production line,
watched over by some of the facility's 112 workers. Unseen by passersby, however, are the
millions of gallons of municipal water being pumped into the building, water which since 2001
has been used to fill bottle after bottle of Dasani (Kwon, 2009).
The Marietta facility is one of roughly thirty Dasani bottling plants around the United
States, each of them using water from local municipalities. The company pays for the raw
material, of course; in Marietta, Coca-Cola Enterprises buys water from Marietta Power &
Water, which gets its supply from the Cobb County-Marietta Water Authority, which itself
draws the water from the Chattahoochee and Lake Allatoona. For every thousand gallons above
the 2,000-gallon mark, the Marietta utility charges $2.88. So in January, for example, when the
plant that bottles Dasani (along with other beverages. such as Diet Coke) consumed 9.6 million
gallons, its water bill was likely around $27,000 (Kwon, 2009).
That may look like a hefty bill, but considering the profitability of bottled water, it is
more like a drop in the bucket. For example, a bottle of Coca-Cola and a bottle of Dasani may
retail for relatively the same, but a can of Coke requires syrups and flavorings, additives not