Have you been unfooled by Coca-Cola? We have been followers and fans of the way Coca-Cola runs its business. Even thought of them and their good social responsibilities as very socially responsible. Now we are not so sure. How about you?
You can’t fool people all the time, not even most of the time. And people once unfooled, talk about the experience.
Seth Godin
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for advertising design in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Our readers and we would greatly appreciate it.
The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.
Here is the thing that has us rethinking our position. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group because the company’s Vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims.
The simple fact is that the product is sugar-water, to which about a penny’s worth of synthetic vitamins has been added. And the amount of sugar is not trivial. A bottle of vitamin water contains 33 grams of sugar, making it more akin to a soft drink than to a healthy beverage.
We don’t like that, but we certainly can live with it. It doesn’t make Coca-Cola any less socially responsible in our minds. And calling the product Vitaminwater, while moving closer to the ethical, legal line, is OK in our minds.
This wasn’t the first time a lawsuit was filed on this issue. It was first filed in 2009 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), and a group of Vitaminwater customers in New York and California.
It alleged that Coca-Cola took part in deceptive labeling and marketing for the soft drink, which included claims that the drink could reduce the risk for eye disease, promote healthy joints and support optimal immune function.
Coke has chosen to endure multiple public slaps on the wrist because its marketing has succeeded in insulating Vitaminwater from the negative health aura that’s engulfed soda and other forms of sugar water.
The beverage industry’s school beverage guidelines, for instance, allow for sales of Vitaminwater in high schools because they have less sugar than soda. By comparison, a 20-ounce bottle of Coke contains 65 grams of sugar or 15 teaspoons.
So where does consumer protection law stand on this issue?
Social responsibilities … what makes an ad deceptive?
It is ruled deceptive if it contains information that:
Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances
Is material to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product
It certainly looks like the series of Vitaminwater ads could be ruled deceptive, doesn’t it?
Social responsibilities … so what is Coca-Cola’s response to this lawsuit?
This part is the most difficult to swallow. They are defending their advertising and not backing down or changing their ads. Their argument? In surprising logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the product by asserting that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.” Amazing. Pushes them over the social responsibility line in our minds. No question.
Does this mean that you’d have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named “vitamin water,” a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits?
And most important, does it mean that it’s okay for a corporation to lie about its products, as long as they can then turn around and claim that no one believes their lies?
Forced to defend themselves in court, they are acknowledging that Vitaminwater isn’t a healthy product. But they are arguing that advertising it as such isn’t false advertising because no could believe such a ridiculous claim.
Here is what the Coca-Cola Enterprise has to say about their Social Responsibility vision and commitment:
Energy conservation/climate change – reduce the overall carbon footprint of our business operations by 15% by 2020, as compared to the 2007 baseline.
Sustainable packaging/recycling – reduce the impact of our packaging; maximize our use of renewable, reusable, and recyclable resources to recover the equivalent of 100 percent of our packaging.
Water stewardship – establish a water sustainable operation in which we minimize our water use and have neutral water impact on the local communities in which we operate. We’ll safely return the amount of water equivalent to that used in our beverages and their production to these communities and their environment.
Product portfolio/wellbeing – provide refreshing beverages for every lifestyle and occasion, while helping consumers make informed beverage choices.
Diverse and inclusive culture – create a culture where diversity is valued, every employee is a respected member of the team, and our workforce is a reflection of the communities in which we operate.
It seems like good words to live by, doesn’t it? What we would expect from a solid, socially responsible business.
Does helping consumers make informed choices? It seems like a big discrepancy versus their Vitaminwater advertising, doesn’t it?
So what good are a socially responsible vision and commitments if they are not followed?
The worst case of deceptive advertising out there? Absolutely not. But we would expect more honesty and social responsibility from Coca-Cola. Don’t you agree?
The bottom line
I am a marketer and in many aspects, I know a lot about online and social media marketing. But I do follow a lot of other online businesses. I am subscribed to their blogs and email lists. Why do I do that?
Because I can still learn from them: I can see what they do and how I react to it. I also get a ton of information and can easily select which of this information I want to read or watch and what to ignore.
All in all, being subscribed to my other businesses makes me a better marketer and a more knowledgeable person. That is how I learned and began my research on Coca-Cola’s deceptive advertising.
Did you learn something from this article? Please join the conversation and tell us your thoughts on Coke’s actions here.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your innovation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
What to Expect from a Creative Advertising Strategy
Creative Secrets from Budweiser Advertising Examples
Prudential Ad Makes Visualization Design Central to Story
Projecting a consistent brand image across social media is vital to the success of your business venture. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter are home to millions of users, and each of them provides a variety of tools and mechanisms for increasing brand awareness. Each is an effective platform to implement great social media branding.
It is up to you to use these tools to present your brand in a positive light, and acquire additional followers, customers, and brand advocates as a result.
This all sounds simple in theory, but in practice, there is a lot of nuances involved in managing a brand on social media.
Even massive brands such as McDonald’s and Uber have been known to make blunders on social media, and rebuilding consumer goodwill takes a lot of work.
If you’re still a novice social media in social media branding, the best thing you can do is to try and mimic what other successful brands are doing.
So in order to facilitate this, we have assembled a list of social media branding success stories which you can use as a model when coming up with your own ideas.
General Electric is a powerhouse.
General Electric
If we examine General Electrics’ most recent social media stunt, we will find a good example of how companies can utilize the work they do for creating share-worthy content on topics such as science, engineering, and technology.
General Electric has teamed up with Sam Cossman, a filmmaker whose latest project involved descending into the mouth of the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua.
The whole ordeal was streamed live on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and the diver was equipped with a whole range of sensors for collecting data about the volcano.
The takeaway: publishing relevant content on your social media profile is an excellent way to build brand authority online.
Domino’s
Domino’s Pizza is leading the pack when it comes to social media branding in the fast food industry. Domino’s has given its customers on social media the option to order items by tweeting, a novelty to be sure, but one that portrays Domino’s as an innovator when it comes to using modern technology.
Another recent addition to their social media branding portfolio is Dom The Pizza Bot, a chatbot that allows customers to order their favorite pizzas through a messenger app.
The Takeaway: experimenting with social media is not necessarily practical, but it will portray your brand as always willing to try new things, which is what quality consumers expect from a forward-looking brand.
Nike
Follow Nike.
Nike is a company that has always been at the forefront of branding, and their recent social media marketing campaigns are a great example of why this is the case.
Since Nike is already an acknowledged industry leader when it comes to the quality of their apparel, their branding efforts are focused more on the impact their products have on people’s lives.
Nike’s Instagram profile is always delivering content that involves people talking about their passion to succeed, which is line with their famous motto “Just do it”.
The Takeaway: to create a successful brand on social media, the tone of your content should match the values and ideas your brand represents.
Airbnb
If there is one company that deserves a mention on our list for its Instagram profile, it is Airbnb. Aside selfies, cat pictures, and food porn travel photography are one of the main things people use Instagram, making it a natural fit for Airbnb.
Airbnb regularly posts content that is in line with their philosophy which focuses on living, rather than visiting. This gives their posts an authentic quality that is hard to match by other players in the hospitality industry, such as hotel chains.
The Takeaway: your branding on social efforts on social media should highlight your commitment to a particular ideal.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola has demonstrated its competence in social media branding by launching a YouTube channel called Coke TV. The channel features a variety of YouTube influencers, each of them with a sizeable following of their own.
This allows Coca-Cola to attract new followers without having to explicitly promote themselves on social media – they can simply hire people that will do the work for them.
The best part about this approach is that influencers don’t have to talk about Coca-Cola products to have people tune in to the channel.
The Takeaway: branding is not just about telling the world about your brand, it is also allowing others to speak in your stead, which can be even more effective.
Dove
In an age of ostentatious social media marketing, Dove’s commitment to meaningful narratives and social justice is portraying the company in a positive light.
Dove’s Self Esteem Project was created for the purpose of using social media to draw attention to prevailing social attitudes towards appearance, beauty, and identity. The latest campaign launched under this banner, dubbed #mybeautymysay, consists of screen captured comments which contain mean-spirited, sexist remarks about female athletes.
As the comments start to appear, the images will start to vanish, and those watching are then invited to take a stand on the issue.
The Takeaway: championing a cause through branding is one of the more direct ways to inspire loyalty in consumers.
L’Oreal
Branding is a means by which companies present themselves to consumers. Some brands choose to do this by talking about their products and services, others by creating content related to their industry niche.
Brands like L’Oreal take a slightly different approach – their branding efforts are focused on showing the day-to-day life at their company, in an effort to showcase the people behind the brand.
This kind of organizational transparency is crucial for building consumer trust, as well as employee recruitment and retention. This is accomplished by encouraging employees to use the #lifeatloreal hashtag when posting on social media.
The Takeaway: consumers are more likely to trust a brand that has a human face, so it is always advisable to provide one.
KLM
KLM is a brand with a keen understanding of what its customers want. For starters, they know that each of their customers has their own preferred communication channel, which means don’t like getting redirected to other ones in order to get what they want from the company.
As a result, KLM is spreading their branding efforts across all available channels, while maintaining a consistent visual design, in accordance with what logo and branding agencies have been recommending for ages.
The Takeaway: online branding is all about going where the people are, and by targeting multiple social networks, companies can be certain that they are reaching the widest possible audience.
The Guardian
The publisher is in a unique position when it comes to social media branding because their business model depends on distributing content on these networks. Among publishers, The Guardian stands out thanks to their commitment to branding through Twitter.
The Guardian has a separate Twitter account for each of its sections (from sports to weather, to film, etc.), which totals to more than 30 active accounts.
Each account has its own content calendar, and all of them are busy posting updates throughout the day, allowing readers to pick and choose the kind of news they want to follow.
The Takeaway: by using a social media platform to its full extent, brands can ensure their dominance in a particular niche on said platform.
The bottom line
There are many approaches to branding on social media, each with its own set of advantages and downsides. When deciding on which approach is right for your own brand, it would be wise to learn from the success of others and then try to adapt their strategies for your own purposes.
Angelina is a content creator with a background in digital marketing. She could also be tagged as someone who enjoys reading, vending machines and camping. She is positive and hard-working, but can also be very geeky.
You can’t fool people all the time, not even most of the time. And people once unfooled, talk about the experience. That certainly is the case, Seth Godin. Have you been unfooled by Coca-Cola? We have been followers and fans of the way Coca-Cola runs its business. Even thought of them as a very socially responsible business. Now we are not so sure about their social responsibility. How about you?
This is the thing that has us rethinking our position. Coca-Cola is being sued by a non-profit public interest group. This suit is based on the grounds that the company’s Vitaminwater products make unwarranted health claims. Here is a short viveo on the meaning of social
The simple fact is that the product is basically sugar-water, to which about a penny’s worth of synthetic vitamins has been added. And the amount of sugar is not trivial.
A bottle of Vitaminwater contains 33 grams of sugar, making it more akin to a soft drink than to a healthy beverage. We don’t like that, but we certainly can live with it.
Doesn’t make Coca-Cola any less socially responsible in our minds. And calling the product Vitaminwater, while moving closer to the ethical, legal line, is OK in our minds.
This wasn’t the first time a lawsuit was filed on this issue. It was first filed in 2009 by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). CSPI is a group of Vitaminwater customers in New York and California.
It alleged that Coca-Cola took part in deceptive labeling and marketing for the soft drink. This included claims that the drink could reduce eye disease, promote healthy joints and support optimal immune function.
Coke has chosen to endure multiple public slaps on the wrist because its marketing has succeeded in insulating Vitaminwater. Insulated from the negative health aura that’s engulfed soda and other forms of sugar water.
The beverage industry’s school beverage guidelines, for instance, allow for sales of Vitaminwater in high schools. Why? Because they have less sugar than soda. By comparison, a 20-ounce bottle of Coke contains 65 grams of sugar or 15 teaspoons.
So where does consumer protection law stand on this issue?
Socially responsible business … What makes an ad deceptive?
It is ruled deceptive if it contains information that:
Is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances
Is material to a consumer’s decision to buy or use the product
Certainly looks like the series of Vitaminwater ads could be ruled deceptive, doesn’t it? I think so.
So what is Coca-Cola’s response to this lawsuit?
This part is the most difficult to swallow. They are defending their advertising and not backing down or changing their ads.
Their argument? In surprising logic, lawyers for Coca-Cola are defending the product by asserting that:
“no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.“
Truly amazing. Pushes them over the social responsibility line in our minds. No question.
Does this mean that you’d have to be an unreasonable person to think that a product named “Vitaminwater,” had health benefits?
Believe that a product that has been heavily and aggressively marketed as a healthy beverage, actually had health benefits?
And most important, does it mean that it’s okay for a corporation to lie about its products? Lie, as long as they can then claim that no one actually believes their lies?
Forced to defend themselves in court, they are acknowledging that Vitaminwater isn’t a healthy product. But they are arguing that advertising it isn’t false advertising.
Why? Because no could possibly believe such a ridiculous claim.
Here is what the Coca-Cola Enterprise has to say about their Social Responsibility vision and commitment:
Energy conservation/climate change – reduce the overall carbon footprint of our business operations by 15% by 2020, as compared to the 2007 baseline.
Sustainable packaging/recycling – reduce the impact of our packaging. They maximize their use of renewable, reusable, and recyclable resources to recover the equivalent of 100 percent of packaging.
Water stewardship – establish a water sustainable operation in which we minimize our water use and have water neutral impact on the local communities in which we operate. We’ll safely return the amount of water equivalent to that used in our beverages. And used in their production to these communities and their environment.
Product portfolio/wellbeing – provide refreshing beverages for every lifestyle and occasion. Helping consumers make informed beverage choices.
Diverse and inclusive culture – create a culture where diversity is valued. Every employee is a respected member of the team. Our workforce is a reflection of the communities in which we operate.
Seems like good words to live by, doesn’t it? What we would expect from a solid, socially responsible business.
Helping consumers make informed choices? Seems like a big discrepancy versus their Vitaminwater advertising doesn’t it?
So what good are a socially responsible vision and commitments if they are not followed?
The worst case of deceptive advertising out there? Absolutely not. But we would expect more honesty and social responsibility from Coca-Cola. Don’t you agree?
What are some of your experiences with advertising as a component of an integrated marketing campaign?
Do you have an advertising experience to share with this community?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing or advertising campaigns? Looking for creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enthusiasm?
Do you have a lesson about making your motivation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on brands and branding from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on, and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
