The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [69]
The “social branding” was working. One survey found that, all things being equal, 84 percent of people would switch brands to a company that supported a good cause. While some financial purists such as Milton Friedman declared CSR “evil” for perverting the free market, most financial analysts saw it for what it was: “a cool appraisal of various costs,” in the words of one Financial Times columnist, since “companies less exposed to social, environmental, and ethical risks are more highly valued by the market.”
No one could argue, after all, that CSR was fundamentally changing the character of business—in an era when the United States saw some of the worst examples of corporate wrongdoing in history in WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and other companies that cooked their books to shovel record profits into the pockets of executives and investors at the expense of their own customers and employees. As the real threat of global warming emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, companies rushed to tout their environmental consciousness. The most notorious example is British Petroleum, which rebranded itself BP and vowed to move “Beyond Petroleum” to alternative energy. After years of positive publicity, however, alternative fuels have never amounted to more than 5 percent of company spending; in 2009, a new CEO announced he’d be scaling back on even that commitment in an effort to improve profitability. The following year, of course, BP was responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history when one of its deep-sea oil rigs exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, discharging thousands of barrels of oil a day. After the incident, it was revealed, BP had lobbied against a simple safety measure that could have prevented the accident.
Even when the environmental branding isn’t such obvious “greenwashing,” it obscures one simple fact: Most of the initiatives companies have taken to increase efficiency and drive down their carbon footprints are also just good business. That’s certainly the case with Coke, whose efforts to reduce emissions, water use, and electricity, after all, also mean reducing costs. Asked to name anything the company is doing that is actually costing it money, Roselli hesitates. “Well, the hybrid trucks cost more,” he says. “It will take three years to recoup the money we spend on those.” Asked if any of the projects will cost the company money in the long run, he responds, “Well, the bottom line is the bottom line,” he says. “I think big corporations want to be able to do that, but we’re trying to figure out which projects to prioritize.”
The danger of CSR initiatives is that they have become such a branding tool that they make it seem like the opposite is true—that companies are somehow investing in causes out of a motive of self-sacrifice, rather than partnering with causes for mutual benefit. And as branding has become the primary reason for CSR, the appearance of doing something can overshadow the benefits of doing it. That’s certainly the case with Coke’s biggest environmental advertising initiative, touting its recycling efforts at the same time that the bottled water backlash has been drawing attention to all of that wasted plastic in Dasani bottles.
Just as the criticism against bottled water was going mainstream, in late 2007, Coke announced a new partnership between the Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Enterprises to create Coca-Cola Recycling, with the stated goal of eventually recycling 100 percent of its PET plastic bottles. The cornerstone of the effort was a new $50 million facility in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that it