Of our 50 objects, this may be the most familiar; the one that's instantly recognisable; the one whose shape names the product, names the company that makes the product and even names the subject that we're about to explain.
When Andy Warhol began working in the pop art style in the 1960s he went through a phase of painting the people and the things that epitomised America. He chose Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe; he chose Marlon Brando and a can of Campbell's Soup (how about that for a juxtaposition?). But, most iconic of all, he chose a bottle of Coca-Cola.
With Coke - that abbreviation was trademarked by the company in 1941 - you don't need to see the name of the product. You just see that curved outline to know what the product is. Arguably, you don't even need to see the bottle. When it was designed - in 1915 by Earl R Dean, who worked for a bottle maker that supplied Coca-Cola - the idea of the slim-waisted bottle was that consumers could recognise its contours even in the dark. True, the original design had to be modified because the shape meant that bottles kept falling over as they trundled along the production lines. A little slimming solved that problem and what remains is the shape that defines not just the Coca-Cola brand, but - thanks to Coke's incredible success - defines what it is to be a brand.
Coca-Cola also symbolises all that is mysterious about brands. Why is it that a combination of fizzy, heavily sweetened water and some generic flavourings could conquer the world? At the last count, Coke was legally sold in every country of the world bar two - Cuba and North Korea. Clearly official reintroduction into Cuba will happen any day, while it's well known that the exploitative elite of Kim Jong Un's gangster regime in downtown Pyongyang are enthusiastic gluggers of Coke. In the process, The Coca-Cola Company (US:KO) generates annual revenues of approaching $50bn by supplying 'syrup' - the concentrate - to a global network of suppliers. Thanks to the profitability of just supplying syrup - it's a sort of franchise operation - Coca-Cola is especially profitable for a soft-drinks company. Hence the $200bn market value of its equity.
True, that is no longer enough to make Coke the world's most valuable brand. According to Interbrand, a consultancy, Coca-Cola now stands at number three behind Apple and Google. Still there is no doubting that Coca-Cola - first bottled in 1891 - easily beats those two for longevity and, given the simplicity of its product and the challenges that will confront those technology twins, there is every chance that Coke's brand will long outlive those two.
So what's so special about Coca-Cola and, by extension, what does it take to create - and sustain - a brand? First, no organisation can build a brand without having so-called 'identifiers'. Obviously, you need a name - 'Coca-Cola' rather than 'flavoured fizzy water', although in its early days the owners did try 'Yum Yum'. Then there's the logo - Coca-Cola's dates back to 1885 and was 'created' by the company's book-keeper. After that, distinctive shapes to the product are nice, whether it's Coca-Cola's bottle, the kidney-shaped radiator grill of BMW cars, or Polo, the mint with the hole. Distinctive colours are also good - red and white for Coke; that orange arrow for Amazon. Then comes a catchphrase - 'I'd like to buy the world a Coke'; 'Coke is it'; and now 'Share a Coke'.
These are the essential building blocks. But by no means do they guarantee success. To shift from being a would-be brand to being, as it were, the finished article, a firm will need supply deals with customers - most likely the retailers who will sell to end users. Getting those takes luck and perseverance in equal measure. Then - assuming the product is good and that it does what it claims - at some stage sales will build up and then they will snowball. The magical self-reinforcing mechanism will crank up whereby success brings success and a major brand is created.
It is at that point that a product has 'brand awareness' and 'brand trust'. These are not to be taken for granted, but encouraged tenderly and defended furiously. Do that and there will be opportunities for brand extension - not just Coke, but Diet Coke or Cherry Coke (Warren Buffett's favourite). Yet there is also the danger of brand dilution. It's fine that Nestlé should take its Kit Kat countline into many forms and flavours; not so good when Dunlop extends its brands from tyres into so many products - sports shoes, tennis balls, sports equipment - that it ceases to be clear what its brand stood for.
Still, get it right and a brand can be a marvellously long-lived moneymaking machine. The longevity of the world's leading brands stretches through the generations. In 1885, the year that John Pemberton registered his prototype Coca-Cola as 'French Wine Cola' tonic in Atlanta, in Britain Lyle's Golden Syrup was launched and its green-and-gold lion logo has remained unchanged since. And by that year Guinness was well established - Arthur Guinness was exporting beer from his Dublin brewery by 1769.
And the proof of that moneymaking capability is the ratings at which shares in brand-name companies trade on the world's stock markets. Based on recent prices, shares in New York-listed Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble (US:PG) were both rated on 26 times their latest earnings. In London, shares in Unilever (ULVR) were trading on 23 times earnings and in Zurich shares in Nestlé (SIX:NESN) were on 24 times.
These are high ratings - well above the average rating for these stock exchanges. Yet these companies - and other well-established brand name companies like them - are not growing that fast. However, what they do offer - and what investors love, especially during uncertainty - is reliability and cash profits. So what merits the high ratings is the near-certainty that - year in, year out - sales will grow by a few percentage points and that will feed through to faster growth in profits and earnings per share. Meanwhile, dividend growth is even more reliable. Nestlé has not cut its dividend since it created bearer shares in 1959. Coca-Cola has paid a quarterly dividend since 1920 and the payout has risen every year since 1962. For investors who care about dividends - that's the real thing.
19: Ford Model T: Transformative technology
It says much about the enduring quality of the Model T Ford that so many of these iconic cars are available for sale today and still - when occasion demands - happily tootling along the highways and byways or, more likely, lining up in gatherings of Model T enthusiasts.
We picked one out that isn't unusual - a 1916 Model T Tourer, which was being offered for sale for £14,250 by Tuckett Brothers, a Buckinghamshire-based specialist. It's an "older restoration", says the seller. "Paintwork well aged, but plenty of character."
True, this particular car has left-hand drive, but lots of Model Ts were built in right-hand drive form at Ford's Trafford Park assembly line in Manchester. Come to that, such was the success of the Model T that cars were built all over the world. As well as in the UK, there were plants in Argentina, France, Germany and Japan - and more besides.
Chiefly, however, there was the plant at Highland Park, which is where this 1916 car was almost certainly built. Highland Park was a village just a few miles from Detroit when Henry Ford arrived in 1907. In 1910 Ford moved production of his Model T to the new factory he had built there and that was the start of the transformation that turned the Model T from being just another car to the product that brought motoring to the middle classes.
As such, the Ford Model T epitomises what's labelled 'transformative technology' - the process that takes a hitherto exclusive product or service and changes it into one for the mass market. While it does that it changes society. It changes the way people work, rest and play and it often brings investors the opportunity to make big profits as enthusiasm for what's new and has endless potential spills over into mania.
In Ford's case, the transformative technology was not the car itself, but the way that it was built - the introduction of the production line. The Model T began life in 1907 being built like any other car of that time - by hand. But when Ford opened its Highland Park plant, with its state-of-the-art assembly line, production time for a car fell from 12-and-a-half hours down to 93 minutes. A combination of the fixed costs of assembly and the volume of cars that Ford was able to build meant that by the mid-1920s the price of a Model T was just $260 (about £3,500 in today's money). Thus the Model T was able to do what Henry Ford had promised: "It will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one."
Transformative technology - or something very like it - can apply to services, too. When Herb Kelleher founded Air Southwest in 1967, he reckoned that he could avoid federal regulations if his planes only flew in Texas. By 1970 that aim had got off the ground and - slowly, slowly - the company, which became Southwest Airlines in 1971, extended its reach to other southern states of the US.
But always its aims and its style were the same - to offer passengers no-frills travel as cheaply as possible, while trying to take the humdrum out of air travel. In the politically incorrect 1970s, that meant hiring only long-legged stewardesses and dressing them in hot pants. That practice has long gone. It stopped in 1982 when Southwest found itself on the losing end of a lawsuit for hiring only female flight attendants. What persists is the budget approach that undercuts full-service airlines. It has made Southwest Airlines the biggest domestic carrier in the US, operating about 3,900 flights a day using almost 700 aircraft flying to 97 destinations, almost all in the US, and in the process carrying about 10m passengers a month. In addition, Southwest's approach has found imitators across the globe - cut-price operators that have helped to make air travel almost as routine as taking a train.
After the plane journey comes the taxi ride - the final leg of the journey. And if Air Southwest 'democratised' air travel, then the likes of Uber and Lyft are doing something similar to the taxi industry. These two San Francisco-based firms have combined the idea of 'ride sharing' with smartphone technology to undermine established taxi services by providing flexible and - usually - cheap rides.
Looking at the bigger picture, however, Uber and Lyft are just two more examples of business innovation riding on the back of three interlinked technologies, each of which has been transformative in its own right. These are: the computer industry, the internet and mobile phones. Today these three blur into one, which is largely why peer-to-peer businesses, such as Uber, can operate. However, each had its own genesis and each offered investors opportunities to make fat returns in various ways.
Computers came first. They were investment's hottest scene in the 1950s and 1960s when IBM evolved from making tabulating machines to making mainframe computers - especially its 360 series of mainframes - and, in the process, earned itself the enduring nick name 'Big Blue'. By the late 1970s computers were getting smaller and cheaper and PCs had arrived.
But before the relentless application of Moore's Law put enough computing power into devices that were sufficiently small that smartphones could be created, first of all there was a need for mobile phones of any sort. These arrived in the 1980s via military technology. Essentially the technology behind battlefield 'walkie-talkies' came to the high street in the form of mobile phones that looked much like a brick with a cheese straw sticking out of the top for an aerial. No matter. Via companies such as Racal Electronics in the UK - out of which came Vodafone (VOD) - mobile phones transformed and disrupted telecommunications and made a packet for investors. And then there was the internet, which arrived in the early 1990s and by the end of that decade had created an investment mania all of its own.
Combine these three technologies and there is the capability to transform via the likes of Uber. It won't end there. For instance, the internet and computing power may yet democratise money and destroy central banks as we know them via the technology that gives us bitcoin. Car ownership may also come full circle. On the one hand, internet-enabled car sharing may make car ownership look like a thing of the past. On the other, motor travel will be revolutionised by the driverless car. Whether that will be built by Ford or outsourced by Apple or Google remains to be seen. But it will certainly make driving different.
