The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [43]
The report was catnip to the media, which ran story after story about the findings—singling out Coke more often than Pepsi as a harmful substance fed to youth. The Coca-Cola Company sat back silently, even as its surrogate, the National Soft Drink Association, aggressively contradicted CSPI’s claims. “Soft drinks make no nutritious [sic] claims,” said a spokesperson for the trade group. “We are simply one of the nice little refreshments people can enjoy as part of a balanced diet.” Furthermore, the group said, there was no conclusive evidence that soda caused obesity any more than any other added calories to the diet. The NSDA went on to dismiss CSPI’s attack as a histrionic overreaction to a food that the vast number of people enjoy—akin to its previous attacks against theater popcorn and fast-food hamburgers.
If there was a corporate playbook to respond to public-interest group attacks, the soda companies had taken a page directly from it. The classic response had been established several decades before by the makers of an even more obviously harmful product—cigarettes. When studies first started casting aspersions on smoking in the 1950s, the tobacco companies hired the industry consulting group Hill & Knowlton, which in turn established the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later the Center for Tobacco Research) in order to respond to the claims.
Rather than face them head-on, however, the group pulled a rope-a-dope, calling scientific studies into question all the while it stalled by holding out for more evidence, which eventually took decades to emerge. “Industry has learned that debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy,” writes David Michaels in his recent book Doubt Is Their Product, a title taken directly from a statement in an actual memo from a tobacco company exec. Knowing that it is nearly impossible to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt in science, industry execs—whether from tobacco companies speaking on secondhand smoke or from oil companies addressing global warming—have very effectively changed the terms of the debate by encouraging further research as a way of holding off any government action—or as another tobacco executive wrote in a memo, “creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it . . . encouraging objective scientific research as the only way to resolve the question of health hazard.”
Cardello admits that Coke and its competitors followed a similar tactic of stalling on scientific evidence in dealing with early health concerns. “Clearly that is the playbook, and I think most companies whether it’s sugar or salt or whatever the demon du jour is, follow that playbook,” he says. “I’m not even making a moral judgment on it.” But he also insists there are limits to the kind of stall tactics that a company will employ. “If someone finds salmonella in a product, I get that off in five seconds,” he says. But Coke and other soft drink companies were taken aback by the way they were singled out for obesity—after all, many marketing executives in the industry had made a conscious decision not to apply for positions in liquor or tobacco companies because they didn’t want to push harmful products on the populace. Now suddenly, they were the problem. “Without a crisis you don’t change your core business model,” says Cardello. “It took the crisis of obesity to make a change.”
That assessment gives Coke too much credit, perhaps, ignoring the fact that even as it was adjusting its business model in the face of the obesity epidemic, it was continuing to use advertising and public relations efforts to deflect attention from its role in that crisis. When that didn’t work, it followed a dual strategy of simultaneously denying its role and positioning itself as a partner in developing solutions to the problem. At no point did Coke seriously disavow its strategy of pushing more and bigger sizes of sugary soft drinks—in fact, after drawing back temporarily in the face of public opposition, it has redoubled its efforts