immanence

A journalist asked me to say something about the use of animal mascots for commercial purposes. In an email, she wrote:

“What does a brand owe an animal mascot, especially one at risk? For instance, polar bears face rapid habitat loss, yet Coke has only donated $2 million to the WWF for conservation efforts. There’s also Kellogg’s Tiger, or Tony the Tiger, yet there are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild.”

Here are my thoughts.

1) Branding is about commerce. Corporations choose animals as mascots in order to “brand” themselves with the qualities connoted by the given animal. In the case of Coca-Cola’s polar bears, this might be strength, grace, cuddliness, cuteness, innocence, playfulness, a kind of spiritual otherworldliness, or all of these combined. Coke hopes the image will not only sell its products, but turn its buyers into reliable customers, fans, addicts. It’s about market share, which means ownership of our minds, that is, of the mental space that keeps production and consumption going.

2) When brands, or mascots, depict identifiable cultural groups — particularly minority or disenfranchised groups — they can be offensive. Does the same go for nonhuman groups? Clearly, not in the same way. If Coca-Cola’s polar bears offend, they do so not by directly affecting the feelings of real polar bears, but by harm to the interests of polar bears. How might Coca-Cola do this?

3) Most directly, the Coca-Cola Company’s activities contribute to climate change, which will likely be devastating for polar bears. But its contribution is not different in nature from that of other companies in the same businesses (soft drinks, refined sugars and artificial sweeteners, plastics, etc.). It is larger to the extent that Coca-Cola leads the world in soft drink profits — with Coca-Cola Classic being the most popular soft drink in the world, and Diet Coke being second — but it is not different in kind. So it should be treated as part of a larger phenomenon; more on this below.

4) To speak of other harms to the interests of polar bears, however, we need more sophisticated forms of representation. To put it in Dr. Suess’s (the Lorax’s) words, who speaks for the polar bears? The answer is: those who defend the interests of polar bears and/or their habitats. In other words, environmentalists.

Partnering with the WWF is thus a strategically very smart move for Coca-Cola, as it provides the company with a veneer of innocence by which they can deflect environmental criticisms. While the company’s use of the polar bear mascot predates public awareness of real polar bears’ threatened habitat, the company today “greenwashes” itself by promoting its relatively small donation to the cause of Arctic wildlife conservation. The company has raised over $3 million from consumers, and as every penny helps, this is good. It has also pledged $2 million of its own money over four years. But for a $47 billion (in the U.S.) company, that’s a drop in the bucket — a small price to pay for an effective advertising campaign.

5) There are, however, more indirect harms that the polar bear mascot might be party to. One kind of harm would be that of misinformation. Seeing polar bears behaving in a way that is clearly unrealistic could mislead viewers, and particularly young viewers, about the actual behavior of, or situation faced by, real polar bears. A related harm would be more subtle: this is the emotional or affective harm of creating the image of “happy polar bears” and associating this image with the consumption of unhealthy products, plastics, and so on.

6) Then there is the harm done by what we might call Coca-Cola’s competition for “mediaspace” with environmentalists, for whom polar bears have become mascots not for Coca-Cola but for global warming action. From the environmentalist and climate activist point of view, Coca-Cola’s polar bears are “off message” — which means that they may distract or mute the message of urgency that climate change calls for. The effect, however, may be more complex than this. In being “off message,” they may also sound “off key,” and therefore come off as a reflection of how poorly equipped Coca-Cola really is — despite their own claims — to respond to the climate emergency. But to make Coke’s polar bears sound off key, alternative messages about Coke and about polar bears need to be available to viewers.

At the same time, the dissonance between Coca-Cola’s polar bears and environmentalists’ polar bears might simply result in heightening a general sense of cynicism, self-defeating irony, and inaction around climate change. We viewers can enjoy our Coke-drinking polar bears, just as we feel sad for the polar bears we see somewhere else in a WWF ad, and the two somehow cancel each other out, resulting in little change to the real-life threats facing real-life polar bears.

7) On the other hand, Coca-Cola’s Arctic Home campaign attempts to have it both ways. It is “on message,” but also about Coca-Cola. It is about Coca-Cola as an environmental activist.

More subtly (and generally), this campaign is one prong by which consumer capitalism as a system makes itself appear to be a “friend of the environment.” It is part of the business of making the environment a capitalist cause, which means defining environmental action as the paying-off of capitalism-friendly environmental organizations — a form of action that arguably makes it more and more difficult to question the system that makes Coca-Cola shareholders and executives rich, its drinkers obese and diabetic, and that fills the oceans with plastics and makes global climate change ever more certain and unstoppable.

It’s this tampering with the meanings of reality that, to my mind, makes Coke’s $2 million not really enough of a payment for the use of the polar bear as mascot. Using nonhuman species as mascots borrows from the meanings those species already carry, and it changes those meanings. This ought to carry obligations to the world of meanings  — in which polar bears are more than just cute animals, but in which they are, in fact, unique animals, key members of rather unique ecological systems, and indicators of a much broader ecological catastrophe that is unfolding. If meanings can be borrowed from a world that is inherently meaningful, then they can also be stolen, misappropriated, and damaged.

The question is: how do Coca-Cola’s polar bears affect the meanings of polar bears, in a world in which polar bears and their ecosystems are endangered by the activities of corporations like Coca-Cola and their many consumers?

Back to the original question: Should there be a higher price for using endangered species as mascots?

Animated polar bears are just animated polar bears, and Coca-Cola can easily claim that no polar bear was harmed in the making of any of Coca-Cola’s polar bear ads (at least the more recent ones).

But Coca-Cola’s polar bears traffic in meaning — and the meanings of real polar bears are not trivial today. From a perspective that sees meaning as central to what’s of value in the universe (I mean the Peircian-Whiteheadian perspective that I’ve been developing elsewhere on this blog for many months), this is the most important piece of the puzzle.

So, yes, I would say that the payment, or expectation of payment, for the use of endangered animals like polar bears as mascots should be higher because the stakes are higher. $2 million, by this standard, is not very much at all. How much is enough? I value the work of those ecological economists who try to quantify the value (and meaning) of things like polar bears, but I think we’re ultimately better not leaving this to the economists. It’s also very much a matter of politics, and this politics requires systemic change at a level that would render Coca-Cola unrecognizable.