No news is indeed good news for Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in India at this moment. If you don’t believe me just do a search in Google News with the keyword India and then you will understand what I mean. Some of the headlines are:
From seeing the above headlines, you can easily touch that Coke and Pepsi are suffering the biggest crisis in history. However, I feel that Coke and Pepsi had some serious mistakes in India and I am stating here few of them.
1. The accusation of containing pesticide came against Coke and Pepsi on 2003 and since that time, the two companies have hardly taken any measure to address this concern. All they did was to hire some more celebrities for their ads.
2. After CSE published the report accusing Coke and Pepsi that the soft drinks contained pesticide, the two cola giants were at first on an offensive mood and wanted to dismiss the accusations altogether.
3. Many people including me have the feeling that Coke and Pepsi are playing a game of hide and seek. They are saying that their products are safe and that's it. Normally, when this kind of accusations arises, the companies try to portray themselves as transparent as possible and provide a lot of scientific evidence in details about their products.
4. It seems that in India, Coke and Pepsi only care for one thing- spending money after advertisements. They did the same thing during the recent crisis. They published huge ads in the newspapers.
5. Some of the supporters of Coke and Pepsi wanted to argue that in India milk, fruit and ground water contain pesticide and that is why it is not unnatural to have pesticide in soft drinks. This only added fuel to the burning fire to many people.
6. The cola giants are still not making it clear: if their products contain pesticide and if so then in which level.
7. Against Coca-Cola, there has been accusation 'of creating severe water shortages affecting over twenty villages, polluting agricultural land and groundwater, illegally occupying land, evading taxes and treating workers unfairly.' Coke bosses in India did little to address this.
8. For the last one decade, Coke and Pepsi bosses in India have been too much consumed with PR spin, advertisement war and price war. Everything else was insignificant to them.
9. Pepsi star, Sharukh Khan in an attempt to stand by his sponsor only weakened the position of Pepsi. A person commented in IndianPad, "Let me see him give one to his child and then I will drink it as well…"
I am still not in favor of banning Coke and Pepsi in India as it would really send a wrong signal to the foreign investors. However, on the other hand, Coke and Pepsi should behave in a much better fashion in India. Instead of playing hide and seek, they should totally cooperate with the Indian government and try to come out clean. I can only see that the situation is getting more complicated and Coke and Pepsi are losing support in India.
Do you agree with me?
Your latest post has brought out the complexities of the raging controversy in India over banning of Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Unfortunately, the earlier two posts namely 'If Pepsi is banned...' and 'Americans consume 100 times...' trivialised the whole issue and were written apparently in haste. You seem to be shifting your stand too much too soon.
Posted by: Anonymous | August 11, 2006 7:37 PM | Permalink to Comment