Coke Was It

 

“It all started when...”

It’s one of those bullshit Hero’s Journey beginnings. There’s a Call to Adventure that leads the protagonist across the Threshold and into an experience that not only changes their life, but saves the community / society / country / world in some resounding way. 

For comfort's sake, let’s begin this story with a Hero who is about to receive their Call to Adventure. After all, every marketer knows that you’ve got to mix the familiar with the novel when engaging your audience.

Our ‘Hero’, Kowhai, visited Lagos in Nigeria. She asked her Uber driver, Azi, to show her the real Lagos. “Not the usual touristy crap,” she burred in her New Zealand accent. Only happy to oblige, Azi drove her to the edge of Makoko. 

To Kowhai’s untrained eyes, it looked like a settlement floating on the sea. Thousands of shacks on poles. Streets of water. A makeshift Venice. Then she ventured closer. It took a good hour of being paddled through the ‘streets’ by Azi’s cousin, Daraja, of being serenaded by floating hawkers selling hand-crafted plastic jewelry, of breathing in the pungent funk of chemical decay, to comprehend the unsettling reality. Makoko’s foundations were a load of rubbish, literally, a compounded sediment of millions, perhaps billions, of plastic bottles, soft plastic packaging, and every other imaginable piece of modern human detritus. This shanty town was a small city clinging to the midden of its megacity, Lagos, population 16 million and rising fast. 

Near the City of Trash, Azi showed Kowhai the Midden Mountains, prominent ridges compiled of thousands of metric tons of refuse. This could have all washed over Kowhai, a Communications Officer from Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), organizer of the city’s annual Christmas in the Park, self-satisfied driver of a Nissan Leaf, religious recycler, purchaser of organic produce in brown paper bags. Some things are just too vast for human comprehension. But to Kowhai, who spent her sixty-hour working weeks with a certain bright red logo staining her laptop screen, one brand glared brighter than the rest. One image stuck like Santa Claus to a cortex primed from birth.

Even through the grime, through the grubby haze of toxic methane, a swirling symbol stared, glared at her like hungry, blood-shoot eyes from the gathering dusk of a monster-infested forest. 

Coca-Cola. 

 

Kowhai crunched the numbers with a brain honed to calculate percentages of clicks and open rates, of profit, of revenue shares on licensing deals, of goods and services and income tax. 50% of the rubbish appeared to be plastic bottles. 10% of those bore the proud red banners of Coke and Diet Coke. Another 50% bore the Coca-Cola Company tattoo somewhere on their cadaverous remains. A final 20% of the bottles were from water and drinks brands she knew Coca-Cola owned but didn’t brand. All up, an estimated 80% of the bottles, 40% of the total dump had been sold to the people of Lagos by the Coca-Cola Corporation. 

Coca-Cola: Taste That Feeling. 

Kowhai tasted bile and threw up on a half-empty bottle of Fanta. 

Of course, Kowhai wasn’t the first visitor to be shocked by Makoko and the Midden Mountains. There’d been documentaries, journalists, anthropologists, environmentalists and even a few Coca-Cola Community Outreach Representatives. The latter is why Coca-Cola gave the Nigerian government three million dollars to invest in plastic recycling projects and heralded a “100% recyclable future” by 2030. Seemed pretty generous to Kowhai until she compared it to the 4 billion dollars Coca-Cola spent on marketing that year, her “Coca-Cola Christmas in the Park” included. Thoughts like that rather took the shine off the three-day safari in the Yankari Game Reserve that followed. She half expected a lion to tear open her tent, eat her alive and then shit across some African plain as jungle justice from Mother Nature. 

Upon her return to Lagos, Kowhai canceled the rest of her trip and flew home to Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her daughter, Tui, picked her up from the airport and the conversation they had in the car on the way to Kowhai’s house in Titirangi would change their lives and a whole lot of others too. 

Rest assured, this really isn’t a Hero’s Journey. Kowhai isn’t the hero of this story. Neither is her daughter, Tui, although as an experienced social media influencer and community manager, she may, at times, have seemed like she was playing the hero. But hey, sometimes charismatic individuals are good for rarking up the crowd. And that’s just what Tui did. Normally, her efforts would’ve been a flash in the pan. A viral video soon cured by the audience’s insatiable boredom. A bunch of appreciation without a single action. 

But there were members of Tui’s audience who gave more than a passing shit, who could relate to this controversial topic even more than the eminently ‘relatable’ Tui. Veda, whose farming parents had sacrificed so much to pay for her Software Engineering degree, compared Tui’s photos (air-dropped from her mother’s phone the night of her return home), with Veda’s father’s 15km drive to fill up his little tanker truck with fresh water. He literally had to drive past the Coca-Cola bottling plant that was sucking up the groundwater like the fat leeches Veda sometimes had to knock off her skin after swimming in the local lake. That lake was gone now, leeches and all, just like the underground springs that once fed it. Now Sanjeev’s crops withered in the field while the bottling plant kept pumping out Coke, Sprite and Fanta by the container load. 

“I should just sprinkle Sprite on my maize,” Sanjeev joked one evening between sips of Kingfisher lager. “It’d be cheaper.” 

Always a bit literal, Veda asked Sanjeev if that would actually work. Sanjeev laughed and took some pleasure in informing his super smart daughter that the E202 additive, designed to inhibit molds and bacteria, would kill the natural biome that made his corn so tasty. He went for another Kingfisher, and when asked why he was drinking so much beer these days, Sanjeev simply answered, “Because I can’t drink the water.” 

Veda went to her local politician about it, only to be told that the bottling plant was a big employer and contributed much to the local economy. “More than the farmers?” she asked. He smiled and suggested she stick to things she knew, like computers. She did just that and found out about all the dinners and parties hosted by Coca-Cola's lobbyists for the government’s politicians, about the lavishly funded advisory ‘think tanks’ and the millions in contributions to the party’s campaign funds for the upcoming election. Veda couldn’t keep quiet about her findings, so in the absence of anyone local to talk to about it, Tui’s online community became her favourite venting place. 

If this was an Oceans 8 type story, a Hero’s Journey disguised as collective action, then Veda and Tui would have gathered some other “bright, young things” and hacked and influenced the mighty corporation to its knees. But honestly, if that were possible, it would have happened already. That’s why corporations have high paid cyber-security and public relations specialists. Tui would have been discredited, Veda arrested, and their team of wannabe cyberpunks hounded over social media into self-imposed exile. For now they just learned and talked, waiting for the time that would soon be right. 

Meanwhile, Kowhai had a counterpart in Germany. Clara and Kowhai had been remote colleagues for many years. They had met a few times at Coca-Cola sales and marketing conventions, and had always got on like the proverbial house of fire. Over a shared love of schnapps and urban fantasy novels, Kowhai and Clara had become confidantes, consoling each other after run-ins with executive “bossholes”, sound-boarding each other’s marketing ideas and sharing horror stories from raising teenage daughters. Over several encrypted Whatsapp chats, it turned out that they shared another important thing; the growing realization that they’d been seduced by the company narrative into just “giving the people what they want”. Neither drank any of the toxic swill they sold. Neither were under any illusions that they were working for a ‘good’ company, especially not Kowhai after her Makoko experience. In fact, she was actively dreading the organization of this year’s Christmas in the Park, something she’d been enjoying for years. Kowhai confided in Clara that she felt like one of those lobbyists Tui talked about, schmoozing politicians with golden corporate handshakes. Hell, she’d even lunched with some of those lobbyists in Wellington. Alone, Kowhai felt helpless. Wasn’t this just the way the world worked? Hadn’t she worked hard for this well-paid marketing job? Hadn’t she earned it? Clara was asking exactly the same questions, and together they came up with the only answer that made any rational sense. 

No. It didn’t have to be that way. 

What do two women do when they no longer give a flying fuck about their jobs, when they’re actually repulsed by what they do for a living, when they simply can’t face themselves in the mirror? No, not a bloody suicide pact. We’ve come a long way since Juliet. And not some Heavenly Creatures murder plot either. Clara and Kowhai did what they did best; they communicated. 

At this point in our ensemble Hero’s Journey, we’d have The Montage. Months of meticulous planning and preparation would be edited into a minute of ‘hard work’ snippets overlayed with a jaunty, energizing track from [Insert famous Hollywood film composer or affordable Eastern European equivalent here]. Apologies in advance, but this is the best I can manage on a lone writer’s budget. 

Tui continued posting about Coca-Cola, covering everything from its extractive and ruthless business tactics to shocking reveals and reaction videos about the numerous health detriments of Coca-Cola’s soft drinks. She garnered quite a following on YouTube and saw a crowd of conscientiousness flood into her Discord server. There were a few conspiracy theorists and trolls too, but Tui and her moderators kicked them out whenever they reared their ugly heads. 

Veda created a techie corner within Tui’s community (with Tui’s permission) and connected with a talented community of fellow IT workers. Together they studied the Coca-Cola Corporation’s systems and collaborated on applications that might exploit the weaknesses they identified. 

Kowhai and Clara worked together to identify and shoulder tap individuals throughout the corporation they thought might feel the same way they did. An early win for them was Denise in HR who was able to not only parse the human resources files to find disgruntled and troubled employees but also past employees who have been fired because they “weren’t a good fit for the company culture”. Person by person, they contacted and communicated, forming a clandestine network of subversives. Did they meet in the basements of dive bars to bond over beating the shit out of each other? No, this wasn’t Fight Club. There was no brewing of explosives in the kitchen or macho pain tests with caustic chemicals. It was all very convivial, involving quiet conversations over Fairtrade coffee or encrypted calls over Whatsapp. 

The people they talked to then talked to other people, because that’s how movements are made. Word of mouth. Relationships. Meetings of minds, many times over. 

Were people anxious? Of course. Did some not want to hear about it? Indeed. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair. Did others go to their superiors and blab about being approached by malcontents? Not as often as you might think. It’s all about timing, but we’ll get to that in a little bit. For now, we have a montage to finish. 

Denise talked to Jin in accounting. Jin connected Clara to an Instagram Influencer, Tobias, who had built their platform on satirical memes and Clara used her growing network of insiders across Europe to feed Tobias juicy titbits of Coca-Cola’s misdoings for memeing and streaming. A crowd favourite was the resurrection of Max Headroom from the late 80s and the simple tweaking of his catchphrase to “Coke is shit!” Copycats soon caught on, creating a tidal wave of negativity for Coca-Cola’s social media team to try to mitigate and counteract. Of course, social media being an inexact science, and some of the international team having been touched by the ripple effects created by Kowhai and Clara, the disconcerted effort only proved to most that Coca-Cola was clumsily trying to cover things up. 

Not wanting to miss out on the fun, a few folks in distribution and manufacturing started to scrutinize the contracts Coca-Cola held with its shipping companies, forming a list of unethical and sometimes illegal strong-arming tactics that the corporation had used to screw its contractors into barely sustainable deals which in turn forced those contractors to shortcut safety procedures and overwork drivers and crews to dangerous extents. Although not the worst in terms of loss of life and collateral damage, the most tragically iconic incident was that of a red and white emblazoned Kenworth rig plowing through a yellow school bus in Wisconsin after the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The list was released to a number of NGOs, and for a couple of days “Coke kills Kids” headlined a hundred news e-rags and casts across the world. Worse yet, phone footage emerged of the accident, and a particularly dark YouTube edit played the sound of a Coke can being opened as the rig tore the bus apart in slow motion, followed by Taylor Swift singing, “It feels like a perfect night.” Of course, it was taken down from YouTube pretty smartly for copyright infringement, but the video still went viral across bit-torrent platforms. 

We’ll end our montage on that particularly brutal satire and consider for a moment if these subversive antics had any effect on Coca-Cola’s sales. Alas, not yet. Those already abstaining for ethical or health reasons felt further vindicated. The majority? Habits are hard to break, and it’s an even tougher choice when you can’t drink out of the taps and two litres of Sprite is cheaper than two litres of bottled water. Bigger things needed to happen for those who wouldn’t or couldn’t. 

But as mentioned earlier, the time was ripe. It’s probably a good time to explain why. 

These days, the world is too complex for a single factor to make too much of a difference to everyday life, unless, of course, you’re COVD-19. So let’s lay out our three most ripening factors for impending change. 

Salaries and wages – Static or falling in the Western world (where most of Coca-Cola’s office workers still lived and slaved away at their cubicles, or occasionally open plan offices with coffee machines and bean bags that most wished were cubicles so that could have some damned privacy and not have to wear headphones just pretend to be uninterruptible). Those maintaining and lubricating the great administrative machine were working harder for less money than their parents before them. 

Property prices – Driven by Boomer investors with property portfolios expanding even faster than their waistlines, the commodification of ‘home’ had relegated that aspiration to the slums of Pipe Dream. Might as well wish upon a fucking star. When you’re hopes of home and family deflate like the balloons after your painfully forced office birthday party, your willingness to believe in the “work hard, raise your family, retire comfy” narrative takes a rupturing punch in the spleen. When it looks like the “Coca-Cola Family” is the only family you’ll ever be able to afford, your employee contract starts looking like a ticket for a train trip straight to Hell. 

Artificial Intelligence – Your colleagues are dropping like flies after someone has emptied a can of Raid into the office. At an all-hands meeting at the Head Office in Atlanta, Georgia, a hyped-up executive infamously announced that “AI isn’t going to replace ten people, it’s going to enable one person to do the work of ten people!” He seemed utterly convinced that those two things were different somehow. Whether you’re in Atlanta or one of the 107 other Coca-Cola offices around the world, you look around at the numerous empty desks and do the arithmetic. The company’s most optimistic business growth rate of 20% roughly correlates to a 20% increase in emails to be sent, accounts to be done, analyses to perform, employee files to process, marketing copy to right, applications code to write, cyber security systems to monitor... Pre-AI, that would have meant two more hires for every existing 10 people. But with AI enabling one person to do the work of ten then guess what? You only need 1.2 workers to keep up with growth. Unless AI can somehow get one customer to drink the Coke of ten customers without going broke and dying of diabetes? There might still be 6 people left from your original team of ten, but you know the writing’s on the wall and it was generated by ChatGPT. 

Although not the first sign of trouble, one of the more poignant signs occurred at Christmas in the Park, Auckland, New Zealand. Instead of Coca-Cola's customary Santa ad (hope there’s no kids reading this but the red, white and jolly depiction of Santa Claus was invented by the Coca-Cola advertising department in the 1920s), the biggest screen in town showed a 30 second clip that opened with Coke bottles bobbing amongst the floating detritus of Makoko and ended with the rig vs school bus video. Kowhai was to be hauled over the naughty children’s coals for that faux pas until Tāne, one of Kowhai’s assistants, confessed it was him and him alone who made the clip and switched it with the Santa ad. He was summarily fired from Coca-Cola, yet was quietly hired (with a pay rise) the very next day by the locally owned company that held the audio-visual contract for Christmas in the Park, a contract which had been recently updated (by Kowhai) with an ‘above industry standard’ compensation package. 

The embarrassing incident was only the first in a long and stressful Christmas ‘Horrorday’ period for Coca-Cola's executive class. From sabotaged promotions to mishaps in communication, labour strikes within shipping companies, grassroots protests at bottling factories across the world, the corporation’s decision-makers spent a full southern hemisphere summer putting out fires. A task made even more difficult by the IT-disrupting app that was somehow uploaded to the Coca-Cola system by a ‘cowardly group of miscreant hackers’. People were laid off. Contracts were cancelled. Yet as they tried to frighten their employees and contractors back into line, the execs and their trouble-shooting teams started to notice something strange and unsettling. No-one seemed to care.  

They fired someone, telling them they would “never work in this industry again’, only to hear that the person in question had a new and better job the following week. Daraja of Nigeria, fired from a Coca-Cola distribution warehouse for inciting industrial action was immediately hired by RecyclePoints at a higher pay rate. Ravi, Sanjeev’s younger brother who had quit the farm to ironically work at the bottling plant so he could help to support the farm, was fired for leading a Slowdown and was hired only a few days later by the Jal Jeevan (Water for life) Mission. 

Coca-Cola's negotiators canceled contracts, expecting the affected companies to come back to the table begging for their business at any costs, only to find their former vassals busy with other contracts. After a Mainfreight trucker drivers’ strike in New Zealand, Coca-Cola suspended its Mainfreight contract until the transport company “cleaned up its act”. Mainfreight responded by tearing up its contract with Coca-Cola in favour of an offer from the rapidly growing New Zealand soft drink company, Phoenix Organics.  

Why? Was the economy suddenly booming? Did consumers have more cash to spend? No, the global recession continued. What the frantically distracted execs failed to notice was that the Coca-Cola Corporation had started paying its ‘taxes’, with interest.  

For years the company had saved billions in tax by undercharging affiliates for the right to use Coca-Cola's intangible property, thereby funneling profits to more ‘tax friendly’ countries like Ireland and Brazil. With so many accountants and lawyers facing AI replacement, Jin and his fellow money-handlers decided it was high time that Coca-Cola ‘gave a little back’. With those ‘above their pay grade’ unable to apply their usual levels of micromanagement to the financials, those with the knowledge and the appropriate electronic signatures made a myriad of donations to targeted charities and ‘no strings attached’ VC investments in conscientious companies across the world. 

When the execs returned on their private jets from their far-flung damage control expeditions, they found their coffers empty and their desks stacked with resignation letters. Their jobs pretty much done, Clara and Kowhai added their own resignations to the top of the pile, the former becoming the primary Press Liaison for Unicef Europe and the latter taking over as Head of Marketing for Phoenix Organics and chief organizer of Phoenix Christmas in the Park. 

With no reserves to deploy their usual value-boosting tactic of share buy-backs, Coca-Cola's leader watched in dismay as their valuations went into freefall. With their manufacturing and distribution networks blasted full of holes, shelves across the world emptied of Coca-Cola products and couldn’t be restocked. Supermarkets and convenience stores can’t abide gaps in their shelves, so they were soon filled by healthier products from more conscientious drinks companies, many of which had recently received ‘funding wind falls’ from Coca-Cola's own tax avoidance accounts. 

Coca-Cola screamed at its pet politicians to help them find the perpetrators and recover their funds. But the government regulations that had been the ‘laws of the kingdom’ for the Coca-Cola monarchy were left to gather dust, unenforced and overlooked. Why? Puppets only dance when there are strings attached. Without the expensive parties and generous campaign donations, the politicians went looking for the high life elsewhere. The think tanks folded for lack of funds, the unpaid lobbyists went looking for new jobs, and the mighty soft drink corporation was left without a political friend in the world. 

Did the consumers complain? Did they riot in the streets, demanding their Fanta Lite, their Mother and their Powerade? Well, some did. There’s always a few. Still, it only takes between 18 and 254 days to break a habit, and with healthier and tastier alternatives available, most had moved on within a few months. Apart from the diehards who sustained a lucrative black market in collectables, the grand Coca-Cola story ended well shy of its 150th birthday. 

Back in India, Sanjeev watched with satisfaction as the gates of the now abandoned Coca-Cola bottling plant were chained and padlocked. Veda joined him on the farm as, with the glee of a child about to open his birthday presents, Sanjeev turned on his sprinklers. They spent the rest of the day watching the thirsty crops drink their fill, a glass of clean, chilled water never far from Sanjeev’s hand. 

Tui, having vlogged it all from start to finish, Tui flew to Cannes to accept her WIBA (World Influencers International Award), the first kiwi girl ever to do so. Tobias received an Honourable Mention for their satirical Coca-Cola memes. 

And over in Nigeria, Azi gave up his Uber-driving job to join his cousin at the fully-funded and newly built Recycle Point Makoko. 

I only highlight these few ‘heroes’ because we humans like to put a face to effort. We like to put up a poster child to front a movement. By personifying something huge we can make it small enough to fit in our fist-sized hearts. But really, there was no Hero’s Journey, no single David who brought down Goliath. There were thousands of Kowhais and Claras, Tuis and Tobiases, Vedas and Jins and Tānes and Darajas. There were hundreds of thousands of collective actions, risks and sacrifices. Coca-Cola was a complicated bug that required an equally complicated fix, a systemic problem needing a systemic solution. 

Was the world a much better place after Coca-Cola fell off its map? No, it was a slight improvement to a world riddled with dire issues. But it did leave our besieged civilization with one vital difference. Now there existed another moment of collective triumph, of the ‘little people’ rising up to remind the powerful that they’re not untouchable, not unassailable.  

Where the Coca-Cola story ended, another story had only just begun.