an international crisis. The Coca-Cola tainting crisis occurred in Western Europe
during the summer of 1999 when school children in Belgium reported feeling ill
after drinking Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola’s response was to deny responsibility and
doubt the claims of additional illnesses. This case study sought to understand why
some nations in Western Europe, Belgium, France, and Spain, banned the sale of
Coca-Cola and its related products while other Northwestern European nations,
Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, did not suspend sales of the product. This article
shows that although Coca-Cola’s crisis communication strategies, based on the
cultural norms of an American multinational organization, could meet the needs of
Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish publics, these strategies fell short for French,
Belgian, and Spanish publics. Why did Coca-Cola’s communication efforts fail in
half of the nations affected during this crisis? Two cultural variables, uncertainty
avoidance and power distance, are important cultural frameworks that help explain
the disconnect between Coca-Cola’s communication before, during, and after the
crisis and the international publics’ response to this crisis.
The first section of the article examines the cultural dimensions—
uncertainty avoidance and power distance—that can help us better understand the
dynamics of organization–public relationships in international contexts. For Geert
Hofstede, a psychologist from the Netherlands, uncertainty avoidance is the way
that humans cope with ambiguity.7 Power distance explains how members of a
culture deal with inequality and conflict. As psychological constructs these variables
offer insight into a culture’s response to risk and crisis. Uncertainty avoidance
and power distance have been studied in public relations; however, they have been
examined only in the ways in which they affect practitioners who work in international
contexts. An extension of this research applies these dimensions to how
international publics perceive and respond to crisis.
To understand how these cultural variables affect Western European attitudes
to crisis, the second section analyzes a case study of the Coca-Cola scare in
1999. This section examines cultural variance in six European nations and shows
how this variance influenced public response to the Coca-Cola tainting scare.
Coca-Cola’s communication strategy, based on American cultural norms
rather than the norms of the host nations, failed to meet the needs of its international
publics. The article concludes with a discussion of how Coca-Cola is changing
its business strategies to better adapt to the cultural complexities of the global
market place. Coca-Cola now has a new CEO and marketing strategy that may
help the organization avoid future crises.