Soda Companies Called Out for Misleading Campaigns

Childhood obe­sity has been called “one of the most seri­ous pub­lic health chal­lenges of the 21st cen­tury,” and drink­ing sugar-sweetened bev­er­age “has helped fuel this cri­sis,” Andrew Cheyne of the Berkeley Media Studies Group in California and his co-authors wrote.

Corporate social respon­si­bil­ity (CSR) includes com­pa­nies’ legal, eth­i­cal, and phil­an­thropic respon­si­bil­i­ties to soci­ety on top of their finan­cial respon­si­bil­i­ties to share­hold­ers, they said.

“These cam­paigns echo the tobacco industry’s use of cor­po­rate social respon­si­bil­ity as a means to focus respon­si­bil­ity on con­sumers rather than on the cor­po­ra­tion, bol­ster the com­pa­nies’ and their prod­ucts’ pop­u­lar­ity, and to pre­vent reg­u­la­tion,” the authors wrote.

“Unlike tobacco CSR cam­paigns, soda com­pany CSR cam­paigns explic­itly aim to increase sales, includ­ing among young people.”

Pepsi’s Refresh project took adver­tis­ing dol­lars away from the Superbowl, the sin­gle largest adver­tis­ing event in the U.S., and put the money toward a social media cam­paign encour­ag­ing com­mu­nity groups to “refresh” park lands, Cheyne said.

The com­pany hired a mar­ket­ing firm to have pop­u­lar musi­cians per­form and inform youth about the project, suc­cess­fully tar­get­ing those aged 11 to 31, the researchers said.

The cam­paigns serve to dis­tract from the soda indus­tries’ core busi­ness, Cheyne said.

Strong mar­ket­ing forces

Soft drinks have become a cul­tural phe­nom­e­non, said nutri­tion pro­fes­sor Susan Whiting of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

Having a bot­tle of pop once a month used to be a big deal, but now it is accepted with meals, Whiting said.

“We are con­sum­ing a huge amount of sugar and not know­ing it,” Whiting said.

Public health depart­ments and reg­u­la­tors worked to expose how the tobacco industry’s prod­ucts are dan­ger­ous and even deadly. That infor­ma­tion gal­va­nized pub­lic sup­port, Cheyne said.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Huffington Post Canada.