The campaign we’ve long been waiting for

I’m not in the habit of praising ad campaigns by major brands, but the new one from Coca-Cola – which graces the cover of this month’s issue – is a little special and deserves some column inches.

If you’ve seen it, it’s the ‘Bosses’ one that follows six local retailers across GB, including our very own Sophie Williams in Edinburgh, and digs a little deeper into their lives to show they’re more than just shopkeepers. On the face of it, it’s just another community engagement campaign. But from a different angle, it’s actually the first major campaign I’m aware of that does something that badly needs doing: it humanises the people who work behind shop counters. It shows they have lives outside of work – they have families, kids, hobbies, hopes, fears and dreams, just like everyone else.

Why does that matter? Because over the last five or six years, shopkeepers have been dehumanised. And what do I mean by that? Well, any crime survey will show you that an increasingly large number of people in our society don’t really feel like they’re doing anything wrong when they steal from a shop or abuse a shopworker. Shopworkers aren’t ‘real’ people, after all – they’re just the faces of ‘a business’. It’s the classic and deeply flawed ‘victimless crime’ mentality. If you work in this sector, you know this sort of behaviour is anything but victimless.

For as long as I’ve been writing SLR (nearly 25 years), we’ve been reporting on the plague of retail crime – yet the way the Government and the police tackle it hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. Expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over is a classic definition of insanity.

One potential solution is to talk directly to the society that appears to be losing its way. Communicate directly with consumers to nudge them towards behaving a little more humanely towards their fellow human beings. That’s why the new Coca-Cola campaign matters. It’s a first step in a positive direction, and it might just prompt a few conversations among consumers – encouraging them to see the people behind the till as real people, just like everyone else, and maybe be a little kinder next time they visit a store.

This may, of course, be the triumph of optimism over experience on my part – but if you don’t have hope, what do you have?

That consumer-facing comms job should, of course, be done by the Scottish Government, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening any time soon. So fair play to a global and hugely influential brand like Coca-Cola for sticking its neck out and starting what I hope will become a trend. And who knows – maybe we can learn to look after each other a little better in future.

Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR