Barrett Kalellis
Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002

Imagine yourself at a Pepsi-Cola marketing managers meeting. The director of marketing leads off:

"We've got to get some more celebrity endorsers for Pepsi. We don't want all those thirsty young people drinking Coke. Who's out there that can bring in the next generation of Pepsi drinkers?"

A junior manager raises his hand. "Well, what about this rapper who calls himself Ludacris. We ran some focus groups on him, spent big bucks on demographic research, looked at the Q numbers and found that he's now topping the charts. He can deliver."

Another manager speaks up. "But have you ever seen this guy's act? He's vile. He talks like a longshoreman on the wharf, and the sex in his rap videos is only a step away from pornographic movies."

"So what?" the other manager says. "The teens buy his albums by the thousands and his concerts are always sold out."

"But what about the image that Pepsi will be endorsing?" the other manager argues. "Do we want to associate Pepsi with that?"

"Who cares? There won't be any of that stuff in our ads. That's between Ludacris and his record label."

The marketing director steps in. "I agree. As long as he behaves himself in our ads, he can do what he wants to in his act. Besides, we're here to sell Pepsi. If this cretin can get a sizable following to drink our product and not Coke, he'll be a big success, as far as we're concerned. Let's go with him."

Something close to this scenario must have taken place at PepsiCo, because it hired Ludacris as a product "endorser," alongside Britney Spears, Shakira and other children's music notables, and filmed him in a number of TV commercials.

This fact was not lost on Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who castigated the company and its mealy-mouthed spokesman in a recent program for its seeming endorsement of immorality. O'Reilly must have struck a nerve, for at least 3,000 of his 1.8 million viewers sent angry e-mails and calls to PepsiCo the very next day. Under the glare of this negative publicity, PepsiCo backed down and pulled the plug on the entertainer.

One of Pepsi's current product taglines is "Think Young. Drink Young." Perhaps it should be changed to "Think Young. Drink Young. Do What You Want. We Don't Care. Just Buy Pepsi."

PepsiCo is just one more in a long list of companies that have made the Faustian bargain to "look the other way," pretending not to notice that they've gotten their hands soiled as they sell their products any way possible in a decadent, meretricious popular culture. Their actions raise the murky issue of the social responsibility of corporations.

With many large companies like PepsiCo, the only meaning of "social responsibility" begins and ends with managing positive public perceptions. After all, as Milton Friedman once noted, "If businessmen do have a social responsibility other than making a maximum profit for stockholders, how do they know what it is?"

On its Web site, PepsiCo brays loudly about its "commitment to diversity," a cheap and easy way to meet media-sanctioned, politically correct social concerns in hiring and advertising. But when it comes to having a deeper understanding and commitment to supporting positive images to young people, the company is missing in action – until it is caught and publicly embarrassed, that is.

In an historical context, there is a significant difference between a company's behavior if it is controlled by the founder or his descendents, as opposed to the impersonality of operations directed by professional managers who were not around when the company was started or grew to its present size.

Ford Motor Company, for example, is still viewed as a "family business," and Ford's success is rightfully seen as an extension of the character and acumen of CEO and Chairman Bill Ford.

One can compile a long list of corporate businessmen whose personal character has determined the image of their companies for decades to come: Milton Hershey, W.K. Kellogg, J.C. Penney, Conrad Hilton, Adolph Coors, J. Willard Marriott and many others. The success of the large corporations that these entrepreneurs founded depended not only on their flair for business, but also on their personal character.

They viewed their companies as reflections of themselves.

J.C. Penney put it as well as anyone: "A business organization should be a group of successful men possessing character, ability and high ideals, and whose purpose is a worthy one …, interested in something more than the acquisition of material things, [interested in] the welfare of society and in humanity in general."

With its now-battered public image, PepsiCo has perhaps learned that the thought of using "Ludacris" as a product endorser was indeed ludicrous.

Barrett Kalellis is a writer, columnist and adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich.

You may reach Mr. Kalellis at kalellis@newsmax.com

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