Coca-Cola under Olympic fire

The soda giant has been running a "Share-A-Coke" promotion where people can swap their names over the "Coca-Cola" logo.
If you go to the website you’ll be able to customize your virtual can just like this and send it to someone:

Very nice promotion...however it triggered protests, both online and offline, against Coke in many countries where people are boycotting the fizzy drink.
On the website people are able to write pretty much whatever they want except a very few rude words of course. A word users cannot write is "gay" or "gays". In fact, when writing gay this message comes up: "Oops. Let's pretend you didn't just type that. Please try another name."
While on a global level Coke is a strong supporter of the LGBT community and have advocated for inclusion and diversity through both its policies and practices it seems the beverage company doesn't follow the same policy in Russia when recently defending the arrest of the gay rights advocate for waving a rainbow flag during the Olympic flame relay Russia (FYI; Coke is a major sponsor of the Sochi Olympic Winter Games and is trying to get a large share of the Russian market).
And let's not forget that Gay is a common first name and even a more common surname.
Coca-Cola released a statement saying that the company experienced "exceptional growth" with their local Share-a-Coke campaign but at the same time is being boycott. 
Certainly Coke should have been a little more tactful. Win or fail?

2 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Your post is really interesting to read and your idea is so awesome. Keep doing like this. Godaddy Coupon Code

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.