“If your brand doesn’t already conjure up the images and associations you want consumers to get when they think of your brand, then you’ll need to borrow those qualities from someone or something that already has them.” –Sergio Zyman from “The End of Advertising as We Know It”

Ahh, revenge of the body snatching account planners: enter Martha 4 Kmart, Fergie, re-animated John Waynes and Fred Astaires. Zyman maybe a master of the drill-down, but as you note, he was a wolf among sheep posing as wolves–nary a bricoleur in the room (‘cept Grant and the incense and mystery person). I’m sure it was quite a show, and the brutal ‘nope, nexts?’ from Zyman have the ring of Andy Pearson, ex of another carbonated kingdom: PepsiCo, and then Tricon/Yum Brands.

Oddly enough, Pearson found fault late in his career with the ream ‘em and let god sort em out method, thanks to Yum successor, David Novak. Novak, like you Grant, realized that command and control obsessiveness and rampant pariochialism (hah!) was the death knell for a new age (man, I’m a spiritual drive-by shooter today.)

That room, like 90% of similar but anonymous rooms, was simply culturally unequipped and even professionally unaware of the importance of what business needs most: More McGuyvers and Levi-Strauss’s, fewer Sergios and Andys.

… Whereas an alternative hypothesis is…

” …We need ‘local’ solutions because we live, consume, and sin, and sin we must, locally [... except if you go to Las Vegas to sin anonymously, and keep clean the home nest -- 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas' syndrome ...]”

In the end, Martin Luther didn’t have Coca Cola, but he rejected the under thumb pressure of universal Catholic authority from afar — and lusted after local universal authority — all men (local communities) are islands unto themselves (oxymoronic in extremis).

So too Joseph Smith and Brigham Young rejected the thumb pressure of universal authority from afar and lusted after local universal authority (until they found they needed to adopt expansionist empire strategies with top-down spiritual and economic controls). [Just imagine if the Mormons had invented Coke instead of Doctor John Pembert... yup, they wouldn't have revelations for drinking Pepsi ;>]

So too Coca Cola. Sic transit gloria mundi.

So too Ms Earthmother Gaia (which today exhibits emergent orthodoxy and top-down controls in the making).

The complaint against Catholic Coca Cola is it’s discount of the glocal-universal conundri, which ultimately leaves people humming those old Righteous Brothers’ lyrics:

You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips.
And there’s no tenderness like before in your fingertips.
You’re trying hard not to show it, (baby).
But baby, baby I know it…

You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling,
Whoa, that lovin’ feeling,
You’ve lost that lovin’ feeling,
Now it’s gone…gone…gone…wooooooh.

Kurt, I agree with you. Your comment on the priest are exactly on point and yes there was plenty of room to play this another way. But again, this is an imperial style that is (or was) so usual that I don’t think it stung that much. Thanks, Grant

mapping the above ideas to the experience of coke might have been a useful exercise for the roundtable, unfortunately this was not permitted.