SUSTAINABILITY MARKETING CHALLENGE COCA
SUSTAINABILITY MARKETING CHALLENGE COCA-COLA: REFRAMING AN
ICON OF GLOBAL CONSUMER CULTURE
The sustainability agenda has been a challenging one for global drinks giant CocaCola. As one of the world’s biggest brands, and an icon of American consumer culture, it has naturally attracted criticism from those concerned about the homogenization of global culture and the loss of local brands and diversity. Socially, sweetened carbonated drinks have attracted criticism for their perceived contribution to obesity worldwide. Environmentally, soft drinks are waterintensive to produce, and Coke uses some 350 billion litres of water a year, leading to accusations in some parts of the world of damaging the environment and lowering water tables. In 2002, for example, one of the company’s Indian bottling plants in the
Palakkad district of Kerala was faced with a sustained activist protest claiming that the plant’s extraction of groundwater had adversely affected agricultural yields in the surrounding farmland and reduced the quality of water available to local villages.61
The company’s drinks also rely on the use of refrigerated cabinets for their marketing, which made them carbon-intensive to distribute and sell. This has led to criticism of Coca-Cola from a range of campaigns using a variety of media over the years. This situation reached a low point for the company in the run-up to the 2000
Olympic Games in Sydney, hailed as the first ‘Green Games’, for which Coca-Cola was a major sponsor. Greenpeace and Adbusters combined to launch the
Cokespotlight campaign, highlighting the company’s continuing use of HCFCs
(hydrochlorofluorocarbons) as coolants in Coke vending machines. These HCFCs do not destroy ozone like the CFCs they replaced but are a powerful greenhouse gas.
The spotlight campaign subverted the words and images of Coca-Cola’s own advertising campaigns by featuring a family of polar bears on a melting ice floe with the slogan ‘Enjoy Climate Change’. Downloadable
ICON OF GLOBAL CONSUMER CULTURE
The sustainability agenda has been a challenging one for global drinks giant CocaCola. As one of the world’s biggest brands, and an icon of American consumer culture, it has naturally attracted criticism from those concerned about the homogenization of global culture and the loss of local brands and diversity. Socially, sweetened carbonated drinks have attracted criticism for their perceived contribution to obesity worldwide. Environmentally, soft drinks are waterintensive to produce, and Coke uses some 350 billion litres of water a year, leading to accusations in some parts of the world of damaging the environment and lowering water tables. In 2002, for example, one of the company’s Indian bottling plants in the
Palakkad district of Kerala was faced with a sustained activist protest claiming that the plant’s extraction of groundwater had adversely affected agricultural yields in the surrounding farmland and reduced the quality of water available to local villages.61
The company’s drinks also rely on the use of refrigerated cabinets for their marketing, which made them carbon-intensive to distribute and sell. This has led to criticism of Coca-Cola from a range of campaigns using a variety of media over the years. This situation reached a low point for the company in the run-up to the 2000
Olympic Games in Sydney, hailed as the first ‘Green Games’, for which Coca-Cola was a major sponsor. Greenpeace and Adbusters combined to launch the
Cokespotlight campaign, highlighting the company’s continuing use of HCFCs
(hydrochlorofluorocarbons) as coolants in Coke vending machines. These HCFCs do not destroy ozone like the CFCs they replaced but are a powerful greenhouse gas.
The spotlight campaign subverted the words and images of Coca-Cola’s own advertising campaigns by featuring a family of polar bears on a melting ice floe with the slogan ‘Enjoy Climate Change’. Downloadable