How Do the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) 
Campaigns of Big Food Compare With Those of Big Tobacco?
By Travis Saunders, MSc, CEP
PLoS Blogs
June 20, 2012
http://blogs.plos.org/obesitypanacea/2012/06/20/how-do-the-corporate-social-responsibility-csr-campaigns-of-big-food-compare-with-those-of-big-tobacco/#more-3589

This week on Obesity Panacea we're looking at the new
series on "Big Food" published by PLoS Medicine (the
same PLoS that publishes PLoS Blogs, the host of Obesity
Panacea).  Yesterday we looked at the evidence linking
sugar sweetened beverages with the rise in obesity rates
in North America.

Today we'll be looking at the corporate social
responsibility (CSR) programs of Big Food, and compare
them to those of Big Tobacco.  For those new to the
term, here is a brief description of CSRs from
wikipedia:

   [corporate social responsibility] is a form of
   corporate self-regulation integrated into a business
   model.

   The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the
   company's actions and encourage a positive impact
   through its activities on the environment, consumers,
   employees, communities, stakeholders and all other
   members of the public sphere who may also be
   considered as stakeholders.

In their new paper, Lori Dorfman and colleagues look at
the public outreach of Big Food (mainly Coca Cola and
PepsiCo) and compare it with previous programs run by
tobacco companies such as Philip Morris.

For example:

   During the 1950s, landmark scientific studies linked
   smoking and disease, and popular media disseminated
   the research [34]. The tobacco industry and its
   products began to suffer from reduced social
   acceptability and were targeted for tighter state and
   federal regulation [35,36]. By the late 1990s,
   tobacco companies faced a series of challenges,
   including disclosures from industry whistleblowers
   and formerly secret internal documents, congressional
   hearings, a civil racketeering lawsuit by the U.S.
   Department of Justice, and the Master Settlement
   Agreement (MSA) with 46 state attorneys general
   compensating the states for Medicaid payments
   resulting from smoking-related illnesses.

   Reacting to these pressures, the tobacco companies
   all began to implement CSR programs to improve their
   corporate and product images and to prevent legal and
   regulatory action [37,38,39].

   In 1999, industry leader Philip Morris (PM) launched
   the industry's most ambitious and visible CSR
   program, which it internally labeled ``PM21'' [40].
   In confidential documents, PM described the program
   as ``a multifaceted, cross functional effort to
   change the public's perception of Philip Morris and
   to improve the public's attitudes toward the company
   and the people who work for it'' [41]. Using paid
   advertisements and a dedicated website, PM21
   highlighted the company's charitable contributions to
   causes including homelessness, domestic abuse, and
   the arts [42,43,44]. This continued a previous
   strategy to co-opt interest groups that might oppose
   tobacco industry programs [45,46,47,48,49,50]. While
   the PM21 campaign improved outlooks among the small
   segment of the public that had no preexisting
   opinions about the company, the campaign hardened the
   opinions of the large majority who already held
   negative views of PM and the tobacco industry
   [42,51].

How does Big Food compare with Big Tobacco?

1. Big Food and Big Tobacco both aim to shift the focus
from corporate to personal responsibility [emphasis
mine]:

   By highlighting the importance of consumers making
   healthy choices instead of the companies' roles in
   creating an unhealthy environment, soda company and
   tobacco industry CSR campaigns emphasize personal,
   instead of corporate, responsibility. For instance,
   the tobacco industry's ``youth smoking prevention''
   programs appeared to combat youth smoking, but
   instead placed responsibility on parents and children
   for the decision to smoke [55,56].

   Similarly, in its ``Balanced Living'' message on Live
   Positively, Coca-Cola suggests that the company is
   responsible only for providing health information to
   consumers, such as through the ``Clear on Calories''
   labels that show calorie counts on the front of
   bottles or cans. The company suggests that health is
   ultimately up to consumers, because with new labels,
   ``you'll know exactly how many calories are in a
   beverage before making a purchase-whether at a store,
   one of our vending machines or fountain machines-
   making it easier for you to make informed choices and
   live a healthy, active lifestyle'' [83]. PepsiCo's
   advertisement for the UK's Change4Life campaign
   likewise insists that ``active parents make active
   kids'' [84].

2: Big Food and Big Tobacco CSRs both seek to prevent
regulation:

   As CSR campaigns can improve a firm's standing with
   the public and policymakers, they are potentially a
   powerful mechanism to forestall regulation [47].
   British American Tobacco, for example, used CSR to
   reestablish political influence with the UK
   Department of Health, with which its relationship had
   deteriorated [85].

   While the Refresh Project and Live Positively have
   not stated such goals outright-and we have no cache
   of internal soda industry documents to investigate
   for such explicit rationales-the campaigns employ the
   very tactics that companies use to influence the
   public and policymakers [23]. For instance, the
   tobacco industry used donations to cultural
   organizations to help enlist their support against a
   proposed public smoking ban in New York City [86].
   From that perspective, PepsiCo's Refresh Project
   represents $20 million in donations to community
   groups who publicly praise the company [73], and may
   be recruited to help oppose future regulatory
   initiatives. Moreover, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are
   members of the American Beverage Association (ABA),
   an industry trade group that has aggressively lobbied
   against taxes on SSBs [87].

   Following a trademark tobacco industry tactic, the
   soda companies and the ABA are members of the front
   group ``Americans Against Food Taxes,'' which,
   despite its name, is primarily composed of food and
   beverage companies. The group has aired a $10 million
   TV campaign against taxing beverages and promoting
   individual responsibility as the remedy for obesity
   [88].

3. One big difference - tobacco CSRs never explicitly
tried to increase the bottom line by attracting young
consumers

   In contrast to the actions of Big Tobacco, soda
   industry CSR initiatives are explicitly and
   aggressively profit-seeking. Soda companies use CSR
   to tout their concern for the health and well-being
   of youth while simultaneously cultivating brand
   loyalty. The stated goal of PepsiCo's flagship
   Refresh Project is to increase longterm sales [73,89]
   by engaging youth in the initiatives [69] and to
   build loyalty by associating PepsiCo with benevolent,
   worthwhile ventures. According to PepsiCo, after just
   nine months, the Refresh Project is an overwhelming
   success: ``With over 2.8 billion (with a ``B''!)
   earned media impressions, the project exceeded our
   internal benchmarks early in the year and we've seen
   an improvement in key brand health metrics. Crucial
   to PepsiCo's bottom line, when Millennials, the
   campaign's key demographic target, know about the
   Project their purchase intent goes up'' [90]. Such
   soda CSR programs focus strategically on this cohort
   of 11- to 31-year-olds [71] to build brand
   preferences from an early age and create a climate in
   which drinking soda is viewed as a natural, frequent
   activity.

   Soda companies also benefit from sponsorship of
   youth-oriented community organizations in ways that
   are unavailable to tobacco companies, which must
   avoid appearing to attract young people as a
   condition of the MSA [91]. Soda companies' marketing
   to youth is not similarly constrained, and soda CSR
   campaigns target youth in schools or community
   centers. The use of cause marketing and new media
   facilitates the companies' connection to youth. For
   instance, Coke uses its Spark Your Park program, with
   heavy emphasis on Facebook and Twitter engagements
   online, to promote its Sprite product while donating
   funds to neglected recreation facilities [92].
   Moreover, these CSR campaigns provide a mechanism for
   soda companies to circumvent pledges not to market in
   schools [93,94,95]. While soda companies agreed to
   remove full calorie drinks from U.S. schools, CSR
   programs like the Refresh Project keep the brand in
   front of young people with promises of grants for
   children's schools, parks, or other programs.

To recap the posts from yesterday and today:

1. The products of Big Food (especially sugar sweetened
beverages) are very likely contributing to increasing
obesity rates.

2. Big Food is actively working to reposition themselves
within the public sphere, and explicitly trying to avoid
regulation that might hurt their bottom line, using
tactics similar to those employed by the tobacco
industry.

In light of these issues, come back tomorrow for a
discussion of this paper, which looks at various
approaches to engaging with Big Food in order to reduce
the negative health impact of their products.

Travis

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