Coca-Cola's headquarters to get major makeover

It was 1985. "I Want to Know What Love Is" was a hit song and "Back to the Future" was the biggest movie release.

Now, Coca-Cola is planning a construction and redesign project to update a campus that has sprung up piecemeal, and some of which is looking dated.

One of the first steps will be creating a first-floor Main Street corridor throughout the campus. The ground level will show off the company's brands and history and contain amenities such as a technology store and a personal shipping center.

It's a major commercial real estate project at a time when that sector is slow in Atlanta. Coca-Cola estimates that 350-400 construction jobs will be created in the project's first phase, which is expected to take about two years. Coca-Cola wouldn’t disclose the project’s likely total cost.

Demolition and construction are scheduled to start in the late spring and early summer of next year. Designs are not finalized yet, and Coca-Cola is asking employees for ideas.

Coca-Cola's workforce is changing, with newly hired 20-something millennials mixing with Generation X and baby boomers. The new generation of workers expects to move about campus, collaborate more regularly and be outfitted with technology at least as sophisticated as the stuff they have at home.

"Times are changing," said Julie Seitz, director of Workplace 2020 at Coca-Cola. "Expectations are going to be different. We need to contemporize."

Employee surveys showed that, for a company that wants its trademark brand to stand for "happiness," the office space left a lot to be desired. Sunlight and great views of metro Atlanta are blocked by walls on the higher floors of the 26-story tower, for example.

Meanwhile, executives are acutely aware they need to attract the best talent over the next decade and help those workers be more productive if Coca-Cola is to double its system-wide revenue by 2020. That's the goal laid out in its 10-year plan.

Coca-Cola's Atlanta campus is spread across more than 30 acres and 2 million square feet of building space. About 5,000 people work there, and it gets about 9,000 visits a month from suppliers, customers and family members of employees.

Largely hidden from the public's view, the complex has one of the largest repositories of green space in downtown Atlanta after Centennial Olympic Park.

A major goal of the renovation project is to make better use of the company's lawns, lobbies, cafeterias, auditoriums and conference rooms.

What Is A Trade-Mark?

This can be further broken down into three different types of trade-marks.

Trade-marks are powerful because they prevent someone from trying to profit off an established brand. If I was to make my own cola drink and try to call it Coca-Cola, the Coca-Cola Company would have the right take me to court to defend their trademark. This protection is very valuable because it prevents counterfeit goods of dubious quality from flooding the marketplace and weakening an established brand.

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