The Inadvertent Triple Bottom Line
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 11:47PM
It used to be that large corporations cared solely about one thing: profit. All that mattered was the bottom line, the stock price. Did we meet our projected earnings? Did we continue to outpace the growth of the economy? Business used to be a lot more one-dimensional. Marketing was simpler. Place a beautiful woman, smoking a cigarette, in any printed publication and that was it. Television advertising was non-existent, let alone digital media that is becoming increasingly more important to the advertising industry with every passing second.
Fast-forward to today, and we, quite obviously, find ourselves in a much more complex corporate world. At the heart of the corporation there still is a drive for profit, but the ways in which companies arrive at these financial gains have started to become a bit more disguised.
At last week’s Wonderful Wednesday, Coca Cola had a table with their new Plantbottle, which is “designed to change the way the world thinks of plastic bottles” (The Coca Cola Company). Coca Cola is just one example of how companies are rethinking their branding and marketing techniques in order to sell their products. To the consumer, we see new packaging that not only is pleasing to our eyes, but is also supposed to help save our planet. Have Coca Cola’s motives changed? No, not really. Coke still wants to post profits and expand its business globally, but in doing so, the company is supposedly giving back to the environment.