Coke Needs Corporate Responsibility Image Refreshed After Battles Over Labor and Obesity

(MoneyWatch)  Coca-Cola is looking for help advertising its corporate social responsibility efforts in the U.K. and Europe. The soda company is considering pitches from WCRS, Publicis and Coke U.K. roster agency VCCP.

Coke is highly sensitive on issues such as obesity, environment, child labor and poverty. One reason is if you Google "Coca-Cola corporate responsibility" the second item that pops up is Killer Coke, the web sites that details the murders, torture and kidnapping of Coke employees who have been involved in labor unions at Coke's Colombian bottling plants. There's trouble in China, too.

On the environment, the central problem for Coke is that it is impossible for the company to become envonmentally sound no mater how green it becomes. At its most basic, Coke's raison d'etre is to sell purified water, plus chemicals, in metal cans and plastic bottles. Only by doing less of that can Coke ultimately become green -- and shareholders will never let that happen.

In the meantime, Coke has been trying to shave off some of its more egregious environmental edges. It's looking at making bottles out of plant-based material. It added hybrid trucks to its distribution fleet. It has pledged to return all groundwater it uses in India back to the earth by the end of this year. More frivolously, it commissioned Patricia Field to create a re-usable shopping bag.

In the U.S., Coke's brand has become synonymous with obesity. The company has already seen its vending machines forced out of many school systems. More recently, it introduced smaller, portion-control cans that deliver the consumer only 90 calories. Coke CEO Muhtar Kent recently wrote in the WSJ that obesity wasn't his fault because other companies sell high-calorie junk food as well, and besides, Americans are lazy.

As you can see by the responses here and here, a lot of people just don't believe Coke when it says it's trying to clean up its act. The portion-control cans come in packs of eight instead of six -- a crucial error that advertises a notion, intended or not, that Coke doesn't believe people will actually drink less soda simply because it's in smaller cans.

The other agenda here is that Coke has become the target of a soda tax that politicians think will fill their unbalanced budgets and make kids thinner at the same time.

Bottom line: The winning agency will have a lot of work to do.