Branding & The Genocide Olympics

When a publisher and brand consultant came by to the PSFK offices the other day, he compared the Olympics in China with the 1936 ‘Nazi’ Olympics in Berlin and that brands that associate themselves with the Olympics may get seriously stung.

It’s a theme we explored when we criticized a blog’s coverage of Nike Olympic footwear and it’s one that the Economist looks at in details in its April 26 issue. In the article, the magazine wonders if the development of the image of the event as the “genocide Olympics” by human-rights activists threatens to lay waste to the $1 billion of sponsorship:

By branding the Beijing games the “genocide Olympics”, after the Chinese government turned a blind eye to the Sudanese government’s atrocities in Darfur, human-rights activists are threatening to lay waste to the $1 billion or so that sponsors have paid—and turn what they hoped would be an association with a joyous celebration of sport into a tricky exercise in reputational damage limitation…

To be fair, Coca-Cola is doing some good things in Darfur, from providing immediate relief on the ground to meeting other “stakeholders” to try to figure out solutions to the crisis. But is this enough to buy Coca-Cola the right to remain silent in public about China?… According to Arvind Ganesan, director of HRW’s business and human rights programme, the Olympic sponsors’ “silence on abuses in the run-up to the Beijing games makes their claims to support human rights especially disingenuous.”

It is tempting to dismiss this as yet another example of the old divide between political activists who favour protest and business realists who favour “constructive engagement”, which has cropped up dozens of times—not least during the debate over sanctions against apartheid South Africa…

Yet in many ways the battle over the Olympics paints a false picture of the current relationship between business and human-rights activists. What is striking today is how often activists, big firms and governments are now in agreement about the importance of human rights, and are working together to advance them.

Economist