They've Got a Secret

MARKETING & SELLING

"That extra something" is an advertising cliche that tirelessly makes the rounds of the earth. But for dozens of worldwide businesses, the phrase has a very real and highly profitable meaning. They are the companies that have made their reputations and their fortunes with secret formulas that give their products their peculiar identity and make them difficult or impossible to reproduce. Concentrated largely in the beverage and perfume fields, they range from West Germany's original 4711 cologne, still mixed by a closely guarded, 171-year-old formula, to France's Benedictine and Chartreuse liqueurs, first distilled by monks who passed on their formulas to only one man at a time.

Among the top "formula" products:

>The U.S.'s Coca-Cola, whose secret ingredient, called 7-X, is shipped to Coke bottlers all over the world; its exact proportions defy successful analysis by such modern techniques as chromatography and infra-red spectrum analysis.

>France's Chanel No. 5, a sexy blend of musk, Bulgarian rosebuds and 100 other essences that has become the world's bestknown perfume on the basis of the secret discovered in 1920 by French Chemist Ernest Beaux.

>Trinidad's Angostura Bitters, brewed originally at the Orinoco River town of Angostura (now Ciudad Bolivar) by an ex-Prussian army surgeon named J.G.B. Siegert, and now shipped around the world from Port of Spain in millions of bottles containing a sauce whose secret, boasts the company, is "as hard to fathom as Mona Lisa's smile."*

>Lea & Perrins' Worcestershire Sauce, first concocted in 1837 from a recipe brought out of India by the third Baron Sandys, and for years the world's best-known meat sauce.

Many of the secret formulas evolved by accident or were intended for other uses than they are put to today. Angostura Bitters were first brewed as a remedy for tropical stomach disorders and an antidote for scurvy. Coca-Cola began as a headache remedy. Biotherm, a popular European secret beauty preparation that is now spreading to U.S. cosmetic counters, was born when a French physician discovered plankton on the water of his sulphur bath at Aix-les-Bains. The first four-gallon barrel of Worcestershire sauce brewed up in Lea & Perrins' chemist shop tasted so bad that it was relegated to the cellar; only later was it retasted and found appealing (the length of time it sat is part of Lea & Perrins' secret).

Whatever its origin, each product has found such popular appeal that shrewd owners take elaborate pains to maintain and exploit their secrecy. The Angostura formula is brewed twice weekly in 10,000 gallon hatches in a labyrinthine "secret room." Employees at Pimm's Ltd., the makers of a secret gin sling (Pimm's Cup) whipped up in the 1850s by a London chophouse bartender, are forced to take a company loyalty oath. Only four Carthuisan monks know the formula for Chartreuse, and travel between monasteries to make it. The ingredients for Coke's basic 7-X formula are ordered from separate suppliers in undisclosed quantities, and the formula is kept in a bank vault and in the heads of Chief Chemist Orville May and one assistant. Competing Dr. Pepper, also made from a secret formula, never allows the four executives who know it to fly on the same airplane. At Italy's Campari distillery, where Campari bitters are made for export to 97 countries, only one chemist knows how much of each ingredient is weighed out.

Such security measures seem ridiculous to some, but the formula companies have the facts and figures to prove that they pay off. Coca-Cola values its secret formula (along with trademarks) at $43 million, and many other companies feel that the worth of their secret is greater than the net value of their companies. Sales of such products are sizable, while near-miss competitors fail. At the Angostura office in Port of Spain, the Siegert family has an elaborate display making that point. It shows more than 100 brands of bitters that over the years tried to match the real Angostura in taste and bottle, and in each case failed and faded away.

*A smile that 37,000 people lined up to see at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum on a cold day last week as bitter as Angostura.

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