De Beers and Coca-Cola: CSR, Stakeholders, and Ethics
This paper examines two major global corporations — De Beers and Coca-Cola — through the lens of corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management, and ethical conduct. Part One explores De Beers' structure, key stakeholders (including the Kimberley Process and Diamond Development Initiative), the controversial issue of conflict diamonds, and coalition-building strategies. Part Two investigates Coca-Cola's code of conduct, compares it with PepsiCo's sustainability commitments, and analyzes how Coca-Cola addresses water stewardship, environmental management, technological innovation, lobbying, and global corporate citizenship programs such as its Active and Healthy Lifestyle initiative in Israel.
- De Beers: Company Overview and External Environment: De Beers structure, operations, and diamond market context
- De Beers Stakeholders and Their Roles: Kimberley Process, Business Action for Africa, DDI roles
- Primary Stakeholder Influence on Financial Performance: Diamond marketing, emotional value, and demand creation
- Conflict Diamonds and Corporate Social Responsibility: Conflict diamond controversy and UN sanctions on De Beers
- Coalition Building and Overcoming Stakeholder Challenges: De Beers monopoly history and coalition challenge strategies
- Coca-Cola: Code of Conduct, Sustainability, and Industry Comparison: Coca-Cola vs. PepsiCo sustainability goals and conduct codes
- Coca-Cola's Environmental Management, Technology, and Global Citizenship: Water stewardship, lobbying, recycling, and Israel CSR programs
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds each analytical section in specific organizational examples — De Beers' Kimberley Process involvement and Coca-Cola's water-neutral 2020 Vision — giving concrete substance to broad CSR concepts.
- It makes useful cross-industry comparisons, notably contrasting Coca-Cola's and PepsiCo's sustainability targets (e.g., recycled material percentages, water efficiency goals), which demonstrates analytical rather than purely descriptive engagement.
- Historical context is used effectively, tracing De Beers from Cecil Rhodes' 1887 consolidation through the conflict-diamond crisis of the 1990s to modern rebranding efforts, showing how corporate reputation evolves over time.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates stakeholder analysis as an academic technique, systematically identifying each stakeholder group (Kimberley Process, Business Action for Africa, Diamond Development Initiative), defining their roles, and then connecting stakeholder behavior to measurable financial and reputational outcomes. This moves beyond description to causal reasoning about organizational performance.
Structure breakdown
The paper is divided into two parts. Part One (six sections) focuses exclusively on De Beers, progressing from company overview → stakeholder roles → financial influence → CSR controversy → coalition planning → coalition challenges. Part Two (six sections) shifts to Coca-Cola, following a parallel logic: company overview and code of conduct → industry comparison → outcome hypotheses → environmental methods → technology challenges → lobbying and global citizenship. Each section builds on the previous, maintaining a consistent question-and-response scaffolding throughout.
De Beers: Company Overview and External Environment
De Beers is the world's most recognized diamond company, established in 1888, with expertise in the exploration, mining, and marketing of diamonds. More than 20,000 employees contribute to the communities in which the company operates. De Beers carries out profitable business activities that help governments achieve their aims of converting natural resources into lasting national wealth, and the company is committed to providing positive long-term development for Africa. Anglo American and the Government of the Republic of Botswana are the two shareholders of De Beers, holding 85% and 15% respectively. The company is made up of wholly owned partnerships, investments, and subsidiaries, and is involved in most segments of the diamond value chain — including exploration across four continents; mining in Namibia, Canada, South Africa, and Botswana; valuation, sorting, and sale of rough diamonds to sightholders; sale and marketing of polished diamonds and jewelry to consumer markets; and development of synthetic materials for industrial applications (De Beers Group, 2012a).
The external environment of the organization involves the discovery and mining of diamond deposits — stages that are typically carried out by governments, sometimes in joint ventures with companies such as De Beers. When a reserve is discovered, it is considered worth exploiting because the market value of producing the raw material is very high, leading to significant financial rewards (De Beers Group, 2012a).
De Beers Stakeholders and Their Roles
De Beers has three key stakeholders. The first is the Kimberley Process, which is a joint government, industry, and civil society initiative designed to stop the flow of rough diamonds used by rebel movements to finance wars against legitimate governments (De Beers Group, 2012b).
The second stakeholder is Business Action for Africa, an international business organization that supports three core objectives: positively influencing policies needed for growth and poverty reduction, showcasing good business practice, and promoting a balanced view of Africa. De Beers encourages ongoing business engagement to ensure long-term development for Africa, and this commitment is reflected through its substantial social investment activities in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana (De Beers Group, 2012b).
The third stakeholder is the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI), a program that seeks to alleviate poverty among more than one million African informal or artisanal small-scale diamond diggers and their families by formalizing the economies surrounding artisanal diamond mines (De Beers Group, 2012b). A meaningful proportion of proceeds is returned to the African continent every year by De Beers. Their approach to sustainable development is built around five critical focus areas: Environment, Communities, Ethics, Employees, and Economics. The DDI was co-founded by De Beers alongside prominent NGOs, the British Government, and the World Bank, inspired by the cross-sector cooperation model of the Kimberley Process. It brings together governments, NGOs, and the private sector to make diamonds an engine for development (De Beers Group, 2012b).
Primary Stakeholder Influence on Financial Performance
Successful marketing has positioned diamonds as the singular way to express heartfelt, enduring devotion — gifts given to celebrate weddings, births, and anniversaries. Diamonds hold a unique place in the hierarchy of jewelry, and no true substitute exists. To a limited degree, jewelry made of platinum, silver, and gold may serve as alternatives, but these are integral products in their own right; diamonds are frequently mounted on gold or silver in their final consumer form (Durnovich, 2014). Synthetic diamonds are produced on a large scale — approximately three billion carats — but the vast majority are used for industrial purposes. Only a few thousand carats of gem-quality synthetic diamonds are produced annually, compared to 120 million carats of natural diamonds. Because very few non-clear natural diamonds are produced each year, synthetic diamonds manufactured for the jewelry industry are mostly colored to meet consumer demand for colored gems. Given their limited substitutes, diamonds remain a highly inelastic product (Durnovich, 2014).
De Beers has succeeded in attaching deep emotional value to diamond jewelry, effectively making it a necessity for marriage proposals as well as other significant occasions such as anniversaries and birthdays. Today, diamonds are perceived as the ultimate expression of enduring love and devotion, and consumers are both willing and expected to pay a substantial premium for such a gift (Bieri and Boli, 2011).
This emotional positioning drove a significant increase in demand for diamonds throughout the 20th century, even as prices rose steadily. Since the discovery of diamond fields in South Africa in the 1870s, production has risen consistently; an estimated total of 4.5 billion carats have been mined since then, with 20% of that amount extracted in the last five years alone. The increased global demand for diamonds owes much to the marketing enterprise of the De Beers Group. From the 1930s onward, De Beers managed rising consumer demand by presenting diamonds as the only true symbol of love and commitment, making the diamond ring an essential element of marriage proposals. The company also introduced the famous slogan "A Diamond is Forever" to invest stones with sentimental value. This campaign resulted in very few diamonds being resold privately — the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, more than fifty times annual production — yet demand for new diamonds from jewelry retailers has not declined as a result (Bieri and Boli, 2011).
Globalizing consumer markets for diamonds is another achievement credited to De Beers. The company successfully grew demand for diamond jewelry in countries such as Japan, Brazil, and Germany. When Russia began producing large quantities of small rough diamonds in the 1960s, De Beers adapted its marketing campaigns to build consumer desire for jewelry featuring numerous small diamonds on a single piece, rather than one large stone. This created demand that matched the new supply. De Beers has long maintained substantial control over the market and has been able to preserve premium prices, reinforcing diamonds' association with exclusivity and luxury (Claasen and Roloff, 2012).
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