Coca Cola Cares

http://www.livepositively.com/#/home

If you follow the link above, you will enter livepositively.com, a website owned and operated by the Coca Cola Company. By creating a profile, you are able to give the Coca Cola Company feedback about their products, become involved in community improvement projects, volunteer as a helper for youth and medical charities, and enter My Coke Reward points (a reward system for drinking Coca Cola products) to benefit local schools. By maintaining a website like this, the Coca Cola Company is able to support its image as a caring, environment-oriented company that is striving to be green despite the difficult economic times.
The image of a caring business is an example of a social myth. Though they may be willing to partake in charity events or donate resources towards worthwhile causes, the Coca Cola Company remains a business. Their main goal is to make money and move product however they can. Coca Cola appears to be going the extra mile with this website; browsing around, you can see a plethora of Coke-sponsored activities ranging from recycling to civic action. With society moving more and more rapidly towards green technology and business practices, however, this is revealed as nothing more than a clever way to maximize profits by meeting the popular expectation. With college campus boycotts of Coca Cola products becoming more and more prevalent, the company needs every bit of popular praise it can get.
If you follow the “planet” heading on the aforementioned website and click on the section labeled “water conservation,” you will find an overview of the Coca Cola Company’s efforts to maintain local water tables around its bottling plants. With an average consumption of over three liters of water for ever liter of Coca Cola produced, it makes sense that the company would be concerned for this resource.
Despite water’s necessity to the company and their claims of sustainability, many local communities in proximity to Coca Cola bottling plants have protested the company’s presence, claiming that the plants negatively impact local water tables. The Coca Cola Company was ejected from India in 1977, and all plants in that nation were shut down. During this period without the company’s presence, water levels were kept at a relatively steady level. The company was able to negotiate its return, however, after which the water levels suffered once again. A plant in the village of Kaladera, located in the semi-arid desert state of Rajasthan, began functioning in 2000, and by 2005 the local water tables had dropped by over ten meters. Why would a company that claims to be so committed to sustainable water practices open a plant in a desert state, let alone accept such a dramatic decline in water supply?
Information on the Coca Cola’s practices in Indian is not nearly prevalent enough to compete with the company’s “feel good” advertising campaign, and the myth of Coca Cola as a caring company remains. With protest groups unable to match the Coca Cola Company’s annual advertising budget of two billion dollars, it is likely to remain for a very long time, until enough proof of their actions overseas is presented and the general public is made aware of the unseen costs tied to their bottled drink.


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