Corporations that Give Back: Coca-Cola

Decking the halls is not just for the home.  Some businesses are decorating their products for the holidays too!

For the past several years, the Coca-Cola corporation, has done an adorable polar bear-themed campaign for the holidays.  This year, the campaign extends to specially designed cans and boxes.  The designs are wonderful and worthy of an Andy Warhol-like display in a museum.

Not only did they create some cool looking cans, Coca-Cola is also pledging to match up to $1 million in donations to the World Wildlife Fund through March 15, 2012 to support research and conservation efforts benefitting the polar bear.  You can learn more at coke.com/arctichome.

We love polar bears in this house (and certain of us also love Coke) so we plan to donate to this worthy cause.  However, we want Coke to kick in their share and we unfortunately discarded the tear-off portion of the multi-pack box that has the Coke product code on it.  Surprisingly, the donation match code is printed only on the small tear-off piece of cardboard you need to remove to dispense the cans.  The code is not printed anywhere else on the cans or the rest of the box!   Perhaps a Coke stocking stuffer is in our future. To date, this Coca-Cola charitable initiative has raised $92,982 but here’s hoping more people will text $1 along with a Coke  product code so that Coke has to pay up the full million!

Now the sad, “no good deed goes unpunished” side to this wonderful story is that Coca-Cola suffered a little business hiccup due to the new can designs.  Since the Coca-Cola polar bear cans are primarily white and silver, most people mistook them for Diet Coke instead of regular Coke. From the picture below, you can see why.  Coke apparently has redesigned them to put a red background in for the white one to eliminate the confusion.

What do you think of Coke’s polar bear charitable initiative?  Do you love the can designs as much as I do?  Please share in the comments.

*Note: I am not affiliated in any way with Coca-Cola.  I just thought this was a neat campaign and wanted to share it with you.

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