Experience the Real Thing

You are inside the largest Coca-Cola bottle in the world, a four-story structure, illuminated by neon and incandescent light, that serves as a shaft for two glass elevators. As you begin to ascend, you hear the crack of a soda bottle being opened. The compartment is filled with the fizzing sound of carbonation, followed by a wet slurp, a satisfied "ahhh," and the brand's "lyric logo" -- a persistent tune that will play in your head for the next day and a half: "Do-do-do-do-do, always Coca-Cola."

Then the doors slide open, and a straw-hatted barker who looks like he's just stepped out of the 19th century greets you and ushers you into a Coca-Cola fantasyland. There, you'll hear testimony to the significance of Coca-Cola in people's lives. And at the end of your visit, you may want to purchase a knickknack or two as a souvenir of this new Coca-Cola memory.

No, this is not the museum in Coca-Cola's hometown of Atlanta. This is the World of Coca-Cola Las Vegas -- an attraction that, although about half the size of the Atlanta museum, draws the same number of visitors: about 1 million each year. Here, visitors are led through 28,000 square feet of lore and labeling, and end up in a shop that is the largest and most heavily trafficked of Coca-Cola's five U.S. retail stores. (It also has the highest volume in sales.) Billed as a walk through Coca-Cola's history, the attraction is ultimately a tour through branding magic. More than anything, the attraction lets you the experience the "real thing."

Coke Is Personal

Deborah MacCarthy, now the manager of Coca-Cola's College Channel, was head of attractions when the Las Vegas exhibit was developed. "We wanted to bring the brand to life, to tell the stories of Coca-Cola, and to express Coca-Cola's core values: fun, refreshment, and specialness in people's lives," she says. "Think about it: Is there any other brand that is so special to so many people worldwide?"

What the Las Vegas attraction makes clear is one source of Coke's appeal: Great brands are personal. They become an integral part of people's lives by forging emotional connections. Coca-Cola Las Vegas uses the interpretive techniques of museum design, "living history," and digital storytelling to evoke emotions and personal memories, repeatedly asking one of Coca-Cola's core marketing questions: "What does Coca-Cola mean to you?"

"We positioned the Las Vegas attraction for consumers," says Barbara Charles, an exhibition designer with Staples & Charles, an Alexandria, Virginia design firm. "We wanted them both to remember and to tell their Coca-Cola stories."

Coke Is Nostalgia

Strictly speaking, what you're experiencing isn't history -- at least not history in the raw. Rather, it's history seen through a Coke bottle: a highly carbonated look at the past. First stop: the late 1880s. Asa Candler has recently bought the company, and a bottle of Coca-Cola costs a mere five cents. "And over here," the barker announces, leading you through mahogany-colored doors to a steel vault, "is a replica of where the secret formula is kept in the Trust Bank, in Atlanta. And here," he says, gesturing to three oval-framed paintings, "are our founders. Coca-Cola was invented by Dr. John Stith Pemberton, as a tonic for stomach upset."

Up the road from the vault is a "genuine" 1930s Atlanta soda fountain that has been retroactively desegregated. A friendly soda jerk guides visitors through the alchemy of making Coca-Cola the old-fashioned way: one ounce of syrup; five ounces of soda water; and four swirls of a spoon -- no more, no less.

Coke Is IT

Next, visitors descend an escalator. Nostalgia evaporates, and the room pulses with color, water, and song. Along a 25-foot-long video wall filled with five screens, an elephant does a lumbering dog paddle through topaz water to retrieve a Coca-Cola from a raft; Indian boys play cricket; an Asian girl walks through a field of red pinwheels. The installation is dynamic and indigenous -- a montage of Coca-Cola television commercials from around the world, set to the music of each locale.

There's also a fountain, consisting of 1,000 mock Coca-Cola bottles arranged in rows on curved risers. From the mouths of the bottles, big drops of water pop up in time to a complex, computer-controlled, choreographed program. Place a cup under one of seven cafeteria-style Coca-Cola dispensers that line the fountain, and, from somewhere across the rows of bottles, a perfect rope of water shoots into the air, travels in a clean arc, and nose-dives into a receptacle on top of the dispenser without making a splash. Coca-Cola then streams into your cup as if from the fountain itself.