A journalist\u00a0asked me to say something about the use of animal mascots for commercial purposes. In an email, she wrote:<\/p>\n
“What does a brand owe an animal mascot, especially one at risk?\u00a0For 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.”<\/p>\n
Here\u00a0are my thoughts.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
1) Branding is about commerce. Corporations choose animals as mascots\u00a0in order to “brand” themselves with the qualities\u00a0connoted by the\u00a0given animal. In the case of Coca-Cola’s polar bears<\/a>, this might be strength, grace, cuddliness, cuteness,\u00a0innocence, playfulness, a kind of spiritual otherworldliness, or all of these combined. Coke\u00a0hopes the image will not only sell\u00a0its\u00a0products, but turn\u00a0its\u00a0buyers into reliable customers, fans, addicts. It’s about market share, which means ownership\u00a0of our minds, that is, of the mental space that keeps production and consumption going.<\/p>\n 2) When brands, or mascots, depict identifiable cultural groups — particularly minority or disenfranchised groups — they can be\u00a0offensive. Does the same go for nonhuman groups? Clearly, not in the same way. If Coca-Cola’s polar bears\u00a0offend, they do so not by directly affecting the feelings<\/em> of real polar bears, but by harm to the interests<\/em> of polar bears. How might Coca-Cola do this?<\/p>\n 3) Most directly, the Coca-Cola Company’s activities contribute to climate change, which will likely be devastating\u00a0for 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,\u00a0etc.). 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<\/a> — but it is not different in kind. So it should be treated as part of a larger phenomenon; more on this below.<\/p>\n 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?<\/em> The answer is: those who\u00a0defend\u00a0the interests of polar bears and\/or their habitats. In other words, environmentalists.<\/p>\n Partnering with the WWF is thus a strategically very\u00a0smart\u00a0move for Coca-Cola, as it provides the company with a veneer of innocence by which they can deflect environmental criticisms. While\u00a0the company’s use of the polar bear\u00a0mascot predates public awareness of real polar bears’ threatened habitat, the company today “greenwashes” itself by promoting its\u00a0relatively small donation\u00a0to the cause of Arctic wildlife\u00a0conservation. The company has raised over $3 million from consumers, and as every penny helps, this is good. It has also pledged\u00a0$2 million<\/a>\u00a0of its own money over four years. But for a $47 billion<\/a>\u00a0(in the U.S.) company<\/a>, that’s a drop in the bucket — a small price to pay for an effective advertising campaign.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. 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\u00a0polar bears. A related\u00a0harm would be more subtle: this is the emotional<\/em> or\u00a0affective<\/em> harm of creating the image of “happy polar bears”\u00a0and associating this image with the consumption of unhealthy products, plastics, and so on.<\/p>\n 6) Then\u00a0there 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\u00a0that climate change calls for. The effect, however, may be more complex than this. In being “off message,” they may also\u00a0sound\u00a0“off key,” and therefore come off as\u00a0a 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<\/em> about polar bears need to be available to viewers.<\/p>\n At the same time, the dissonance between Coca-Cola’s polar bears and\u00a0environmentalists’\u00a0polar bears\u00a0might 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\u00a0the two somehow cancel each other out, resulting in little change to the real-life threats facing real-life polar bears.<\/p>\n 7) On the other hand, Coca-Cola’s Arctic Home campaign<\/a>\u00a0attempts to have it both ways. It is “on<\/em> message,” but also about Coca-Cola. It is about Coca-Cola as<\/em> an environmental activist.<\/p>\n